When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates(devblogs.microsoft.com)
44 pointsby magnat3 hours ago13 comments
  • jsiepkesan hour ago
    What I did once is lookup the financial report of the company, find all the board members and C level execs l, figured out what their email structure looks like (pete.whatever@company.com) and just walked them through my support experience. Then I asked if replacing the HEPA filter in my 5 year old vacuum cleaner should cost 250 Euro, which was more expensive than the vacuum cleaner at the time.
    • ilamontan hour ago
      What was the response?
      • Xiol38 minutes ago
        Sometimes we're just after the catharsis.
        • pegasus4 minutes ago
          Nobody likes to be left hanging.
  • moioci2 hours ago
    Flip side is the well-known story of when billg actually answered a customer service call: https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/that-time-bill-gates...
    • spudlyo2 hours ago
      I was involved in that particular incident, and wrote about it on HN when the story was making headlines.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957936#958365

      • Dilettante_26 minutes ago
        Making a big spectacle of doing regular people work, and then normal employees having to go in and actually do it is very in line with my picture of a certain kind of manager. (Your story did not actually come off like this, I just found this a funny interpretation)
        • spudlyo9 minutes ago
          Yeah, it was certainly performative rather than actually serving the customer. My hope at the time was that the STARS knowledgebase would show itself to be slow and overloaded and Bill would realize that it was necessary to invest in upgrading it. Strangely it was faster than I had ever seen it, and it just happened to immediately come up with a plausible answer to Bill's query -- almost like it knew its master's hands were on the keyboard.
    • gist2 hours ago
      That is such utter bs it's amazing that Microsoft PR thought that somehow that shows anything of benefit to the suffering users.
  • breppp2 hours ago
    the blog is full of other ways to trick your support cases while not showing at all you deem yourself superior

    https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...

    • ErroneousBosh2 hours ago
      When I worked for an IBM helpdesk looking after point-of-sale systems, we used to ask them to check if the power cable had a black or a blue bit of plastic surrounding the pins.

      "It's black? Okay, it's not that then, I was hoping it would be easy. Right, plug it back in again and... oh it's working now? Cool, ring me back if there's anything else then!"

  • textlapsean hour ago
    On the contrary, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were very customer focused - they listened to customers more so than other big tech companies. You could actually have emailed them and gotten a response (in the case of Bezos a legendary ‘?’ forward to the team).

    Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes to how customer obsessed these companies were.

    • hackingonempty40 minutes ago
      Jobs responded to email back when he ran a tiny company in an overall much smaller industry with far fewer customers. I'm not sure he was responding so much by the time he had resurrected Apple and the iPhone launched.
  • malfist2 hours ago
    This thing isn't uncommon. You email a CEO and get put into "executive escalation" if you don't seem like a crackpot. I've done that once before and it was useful to cut through the armies of outsourced CSRs that read from a script and refuse to deviate and send you in circles.

    It does help if you start your email with your value to the company (i.e., I spent $X over $Y time period at your company)

    • dooglius2 hours ago
      I think the post is about the ones who _do_ seem like crackpots
      • gist2 hours ago
        Could be crackpots or could be regular people who are so frustrated they express themselves that way.

        And the truth is if the 'Bill Gates' had to deal with this frustration himself (most likely let's say he doesn't he has people who deal with it for him when he needs something from another company or his own) he'd implement changes to keep users happier. Noting of course that you are always going to have a segment of people that will both get angry and have edge problems.

        Did or does 'Bill Gates' ever actually try to be a regular user of Microsoft support actually waiting in the call queue on hold for 10 minutes to an hour and even getting disconnected?

        Does anyone at the company (in a position to order improvements) ever do this?

        (This applies to many companies obviously 'bill gates' and 'microsoft' are just placeholders.)

        I think it's underestimated the amount of psychological pain that some of the software (of Microsoft and other companies) has caused people over the years.

  • jeffwask2 hours ago
    LOL, I worked for a Microsoft outsourcer in the late 90's doing Word and then VBA support. I would get this a lot! My stock answer was, " I'll tell him the next time we have lunch, but you know the cheap bastard always makes me pay."
  • seshagirican hour ago
    One can only think if all the customer complaints really went to Bill Gates, how much different Microsoft would be today. They still operate in a world where they think once they build something, people would just use it. CoPilot is the latest example.
  • jacinabox2 hours ago
    They let them speak with Gill Bates instead
  • blell2 hours ago
    Don’t they have phone service in Little Saint James?
  • 20 minutes ago
    undefined
  • stalfosknightan hour ago
    Why must we lie to customers?
  • RobotToasteran hour ago
    Now they can just put them through to BillGPT.
  • gr2 hours ago
    > Of course, the information was never actually passed along to Bill.

    HOW DARE YOU!!!