← Back to context

Comment by moioci

1 day 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...

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

  • 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)

    • 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.

      2 replies →

That is such utter bs it's amazing that Microsoft PR thought that somehow that shows anything of benefit to the suffering users.