Bill Gates upset with Windows usability? Meh.

The blog-o-topic of the moment is a 2003 email from Bill Gates complaining about Windows usability. I waited to post on this until I had something unique to contribute, and now I've decided my contribution is: who cares? We don't need Bill Gates' attention to validate the importance of usability. And sadly, we don't need his email to realize that Windows usability is a) poor for no good reason, and b) clearly not an overall business priority.

I'm not impressed because it takes a lot more than one-off emails to inculcate the cultural and corporate values needed to ship products with superior usability. There are certainly people in the Microsoft hierarchy that know this. In the end, if Windows usability is poor, it's because of decisions at high levels that other things are more important.

It's been five years since Bill's email, and it's not clear to me that Microsoft's values have changed. I switched to Mac at home this year because I learned that irritating pop-ups can make Windows Vista nearly unusable. Those issues didn't "pop up" out of nowhere -- they've probably been around since version 1 of Windows (pictured).