Bill Gates' 2003 Email: 'Windows Usability Is Going Backwards'

On January 15, 2003, Bill Gates sent Microsoft's senior managers an email titled "Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame". In it he described in detail how he lost more than an hour trying to download MovieMaker and buy the Digital Plus pack, and ended up with neither. The message was addressed to Jim Allchin and copied to Chris Jones, Bharat Shah, Joe Peterson, Will Poole, Brian Valentine and Anoop Gupta.

"This site is so slow it is unusable"

Gates went to Microsoft.com to find the download page, but the first five attempts timed out and the page appeared only after an eight-second delay. Searches for "moviemaker" and for "movie maker" returned nothing on the download page. After he asked colleagues for help, he was told to use the search field on the main page and type "movie maker" — not "moviemaker". That result took another six seconds to load.

The instructions then sent him to Windows Update. The service asked him to download additional controls, then to run a scan, and finally told him it was critical to download 17 megabytes of updates. The install took six minutes, during which the machine was too slow to be used for anything else.

A pointless reboot and a polluted program list

The system insisted on a reboot. Gates noted that he reboots every night anyway, so the request made little sense at that moment — and the restart wiped his Outlook state. Windows Media Series 9 then took seven minutes to install, yet MovieMaker never appeared in the Add/Remove Programs list. Instead, the list contained Microsoft Autoupdate test packages and opaque hotfix entries such as Q329048.

The Digital Plus pack went no better: the purchase form repeatedly cleared the information he had typed, and he had to enter it five times before giving up. In total, after more than an hour, he had neither MovieMaker nor the pack. "The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind," he wrote.

How the company reacted

Later that day Will Poole told colleagues that Gates's frustration was not unreasonable and that they should start a list of things to fix with named owners. Amir Majidimehr asked the teams to coordinate and said the issue should become a sign-off item for every release. Dave Fester took ownership of the website issues, while Mike Beckerman questioned what "owning website issues" actually meant in such a fragmented structure.

In the January 17 exchange John Martin argued the root cause was that marketing teams, not engineering, owned release to web. Ian Mercer listed concrete gaps: Windows Update offered no way to promote a download to users, "critical" updates were often not critical at all, and the release schedule was too inflexible. The document was made public in 2007 as part of the Comes v. Microsoft litigation.