Bill Gates: Customer Experience Advocate
Yesterday, by way of Engadget, I came across an article by Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about a leaked 2003 email from Bill Gates. In the email, the leader of Microsoft describes his own painful MS user experience and challenges his team to do better.
Gates’ email begins with “I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues” and winds up with “The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.”
The end of Bishop’s article concludes with some very recent comments from Gates about that email. Gates’ response was what really caught my attention. He didn’t sputter or make excuses or talk about how far they’ve come since then. He simply replied:
“There’s not a day that I don’t send a piece of e-mail … like that piece of e-mail. That’s my job.”
So the wealthiest and arguably most successful businessperson in the world describes his job as “Customer Experience Advocate.”
Ever since I read The Road Ahead many years ago, I’ve had a tremendous amount of respect for Gates (even with my misgivings about Microsoft’s ability to deliver an adequate customer experience). But this recent declaration on the eve of his retirement raised him up another couple notches in my estimation.