An angry email to Bill Gates personally achieved its goal in 1996: The Microsoft boss addressed a problem in MS Office.
Microsoft founder and already millionaire Bill Gates worked as tech support? In a way, yes. At least, according to a report by a technician on the tech site The Register, the founder of Microsoft seems to have had a very short line to his customers at the time, namely via email. Yet Brad, an IT expert, still remembers very well a message he once wrote to the CEO on a whim – with astonishing consequences.
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The angry email to Bill Gates
Why did he email Bill Gates? Yet Brad was working as a young IT technician for a grocery store in a major US city. In this role, he was responsible for the company’s computers, which were primarily used to work with Microsoft Office. Until that one day in 1996, however, his colleagues had repeatedly struggled with an annoyance with Excel 7.0. It had problems with overly large tables.
That’s why the disks with the new version, Office 97/8.0 for Yet Brad, came at just the right time.
But when he updated, he discovered that there was a critical incompatibility between the Mac and Windows versions of Excel. As soon as a Mac with Excel 8.0 opened a spreadsheet, it was no longer usable on a Windows PC. A disaster that made him fear for his first job at the time.
So, with anger in his stomach, he wrote an extremely angry-sounding email out of the blue to [email protected]There were accusations that Bill Gates had his software tested by paying customers. “The bug was more than obvious,” says the technician, who cannot understand Microsoft’s slip-up even 28 years later.
48 hours later the phone rang
Did the email really reach Bill Gates? We don’t know for sure whether the Microsoft boss read it himself, but in any case, around 48 hours later, Yet Brad’s phone rang. It was one of the developers from the Office team. Together, they needed about an hour to reconstruct how the error came about. Yet Brad was apparently not the only one who was very relieved about this:
To this day, I have never met or even spoken to anyone who was so desperate to get to the bottom of a problem and solve it.
What was the solution? We don’t know exactly what went wrong with the Mac versions of Excel, which we consider to be ancient. But the next day he found a packet of floppy disks on his desk. There was a note with an apology assuring him that this new version (8.01) for Macs would fix the problem. And that’s exactly what happened.
Yet Brad is convinced that he reached Bill Gates or at least his close circle at the time and that the experienced CEO was just as annoyed about such an embarrassing bug in the final software as the young IT technician.
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