Since when people start caring about drive letters?? Sounds silly to me.

Strangely enough, the convoluted X:\Documents and Settings\ hierarchy got radically better and radically worse under Vista. From the simplest end-user view, it's so much better. X:\Users\Username\, and most of the non-user data got hidden. Unfortunately, if you pull back the bedcovers you'll find that the new solution is a horrible monstrosity of soft and hard links, run-time redirectors and buttloads of hidden dirs/links/etc.

The actual Windows directory is likewise mangled in the 64 versions. XP64 actually had far better 16/32/64 management than Vista64 does.

Windows is moving backwards and BillG knows it. That rat is very sharp and always has been. He knows when to get off the ship. His 'friend' Steve 'CHAIRCANNON' Ballmer didn't get the memo, so he's been elected captain, since SOMEONE has to go down with the ship.

It may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, but Windows is positively begging just about anyone to come by and put two in it's head. Maybe Ubuntu will save us, maybe OSX, or maybe we'll all have to wait and sink for a while longer, but I think Windows' glory days are all behind us.

Which i am sure MS will not let this happen. I hope Linux or Mac OSX does not become the replacement of windows otherwise pc gaming will go down with the ship. So this cannot happen.

The NT5 kernel series (Win2k->Win2k3) was "poor" when it came to the design of the "user" data location. Vista is nice (and somewhat more logical), but when can we remove the "C:" reference altogether?

YES, lots of people are familiar with "C:". Hell, I've used PC98 machines that used "A:", etc. Can we just get together and have MS ban the "drive letter" reference altogether? Just hide it the lettering away (like *nix does it), so it's even more transparent to the end user.

I'd be pretty alarmed if Bill's emails were along the lines of:

"Everything is perfect guys and gals! I don't see any issues."

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all

The number of times I've experienced this exact same scenario is frightening. And to think this was five years ago, and even BillG himself couldn't kick their asses into gear to fix this stuff. The bureaucracy must be horribly bad there. I can only hope someone over at MS figures out why (five years later) it STILL takes so long to install Windows updates, and why the hell it needs 100% of my CPU in order to do it.

You can read the replies to his email here:
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/7000/PX...

There's not denying that Vista adds steps to most tasks compared to previous Windows versions. It's more than just figuring out the new way to do things.

Not a big deal at all, but it's not moving in the right direction IMO. It's going in the direction of Linux. :) (Don't torch me plz)

In all fairness, this really is his job, and it would be a very bad thing if he did not send such e-mails.

The only reason that we don't see much worse e-mails about OSX from Steve Jobs is that he either (1) would kill anyone who would leak such an e-mail or (more likely) (2) never bothers sending an e-mail and instead walks over to someone's office and spends 45 minutes telling them that their work is sh!t.

It's the job of the boss to critique employees' work. It's just silly to take this as anything other than that.

Haha, even Bill Gates thinks Windows is crap.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

How much do you want to bet that some clever programmer put in a few lines to automatically kick out any Bill Gates in Redmond or Medina, Washington because they wanted to screen out obviously false data? :-P

Honestly, once I forced myself to accept the fact that certain (OLD) programs of mine would never work again (unless I built a Win98 machine), I have had no major problems at all with XP. That's why I'm still using it and will be for some time to come. My headaches with that OS have been extremely few in the last 4 or 5 years.

It is refreshing to see that Bill Gates, of all people, experiencing the same mess many of us have encountered.

I'm actually quite impressed with his candor yet surprised someone of his stature can experience these issues, yet not seem to impact the final product. I mean, Chief Software Architect? Never mind he's Chairman of the Board of Microsoft.. WOW.

"In fact [finding a download link for Movie Maker] is more like a puzzle that you get to solve," and "These . . . names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear."

Already hilarious, but to reach rofl status he should've added to that sentence:

"Screw this, I'm getting a Mac!"

In the long run, OS will finally become the commodity good that it should have been for a while.

Long run? Dude, OSes have been around for a long time and there's no market model in existence that would render them a mere commodity.

I think *nix crowd just needs to setup a group of authority for hard standards if software vendors want to take them seriously. It simply does that help that there several competing groups that want to do "x" in their own way.

Not sure if you're new to the game, but this has already been tried in the past and it failed miserably--OSF, COSE, OpenGroup, et al. Why? Different vendors wanted to implement different standards to maximize profits and they still do. Linux is no different in its current form.

This isn't news. If he were a completely content with anything kind of guy Microsoft wouldn't be the huge successful company that it is. He is critical of everything that happens on the inside, which is just the way it needs to be to have some level of fit and finish.

my favorite part is "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated."

After the first few paragraphs I realized that Bill Gates writes software complaints exactly the way I write software complaints, complete with sarcastic astonishments and embarassment emphasizers.

By the middle of the email I started trying to remember if I'd written it.

I'm way underpaid.

And he's right. His company has totally lost sight of what "use-case" means, if they ever knew.

He did make sense.