Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.
(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)
Most of the thread is lower level staff specifically trying to address the raised issues. We have no idea what conversations this triggered among the exec team about the broader strategic issues Bill raised.
It's actually funny that you're thinking they are 'lower level staff' because that's how it seems by their reaction, but those are literally top Execs.
That's really how these orgs often work.
'Dear Leader Is Angry' will set the whole org into a tizzy.
I've seen this countless times - 'XXX said it', and the littlest thing will get moved.
Often - this is good, it means the org is responsive to the direction of the founder, but it's 'abused' all the time. I think leaders forget their responsibility and truly believe that 'their whims' are essential.
25% of the US are looking at the insane things POTUS is putting out and believing there's some kind of 5D chess magic, when it's actually -5D - aka extraordinary bad leadership. That's the 'power of power'.
'Self Awareness' is probably the #1 superpower of a leader, because nobody is going to keep them in check.
Lower level than the former CEO And President of the board.
The point is this was not a round robin reply all buckpassing exercise with BillG and the senior corporate leaders still on the reply list. This is a specific downstream chain of email.
I’m not sure I understand what people here think the right thing to do is when the company founder emails a bunch of senior execs telling them they seem to have let things all go to crap.
Every single recipient on the thread was a Vice President, Corporate Vice President, or Senior/Group Vice President. Gates intentionally bypassed lower-level product managers and emailed the executive tier directly to demand accountability for platform-wide usability regressions.
If you think this is not missing the forest for the trees, please explain.
(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)