Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours
- Reference: 1723188730
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/08/09/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Brad" who told us about his first tech support job, for a grocery retailer based in a major US city.
Brad spent most of his time at the company's biggest store, but a few times a week was despatched to other outposts.
[1]
"My boss gave me a lot of leeway so long as I kept the PCs running," Brad told On Call – perhaps because that worthy had a degree in Psychology, not tech.
[2]
[3]
Brad was therefore not able to turn to his boss for help on the finer points of things like testing software before major deployments.
Yet Brad was asked to do the latter: the story he sent On Call dates back to 1996 when he was asked to move the retailer from Microsoft Office 95/7.0 which was proving unstable when running large spreadsheets.
[4]
See? Excel hell is eternal! But we digress …
A move to Office 97/8.0 was on the agenda, and one day a package containing eight floppy disks arrived.
Brad got to work using those floppies to install Microsoft's latest suite and test it as thoroughly as he could. A few weeks later, the Mac version of the suite arrived, and he tested that too.
[5]
Satisfied that both versions worked, he procured appropriate licenses, arranged things so users would not be at their desks on a Friday afternoon, and started the upgrade.
For the next 48 hours, Brad wore out the carpet carrying those floppies as he installed Office on over a hundred PCs in different offices.
On Monday morning, he arrived at work and prepared to bask in praise for a job well done.
And that's when the complaints about corrupted Excel files started to arrive.
Brad frantically conducted more tests and found the cause: a spreadsheet created on a PC could be read on a Mac, but once the Mac opened it, Windows users would see only gobbledygook.
"I could see my job flashing before my eyes if I didn't find a solution quickly," Brad told On Call.
His first action was an all-hands email advising colleagues to avoid shifting spreadsheets between OSes. But he couldn't find an actual fix, other than returning to Office 7.
So frustrating was that prospect that Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com – assuming that was the best way to contact Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "I expressed how upset I was at this obvious bug and essentially accused Bill of beta testing his software on the public," Brad told On Call.
When Brad arrived at work the next morning, on the stroke of 09:00 his phone rang. He answered, and was greeted by a Microsoft developer who wanted to help.
The Microsoftie spent an hour conversing with Brad to learn how the problem manifested, his attempts at remediation, and anything else that might help.
"To this day I have never met a person so desperate to understand and help with a problem," Brad told On Call.
The Microsoft techie signed off with a pledge to offer a solution – soon.
[6]Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project
[7]Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it
[8]Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation
[9]Stop installing that software – you may have just died
Brad showed up again the next day and found a package on his desk: disks containing Microsoft Office 8.01 along with a letter "assuring me they had been able to isolate the issue and that this version would resolve the problem once it was installed on the Macs."
Macs were in the minority at the retailer where Brad worked, so he had the upgrade sorted by lunchtime. Over the next week he got around to installing the update on the company's Windows boxes, too.
"In the end, I was sure I'd probably hit the email address I'd been hoping for on the head and Bill Gates had likely made clear his frustration as well," Brad mused.
Thankful for the rapid help, Brad decided to send a thank you note to the same address.
He now regrets that mail.
"I realized that instead of just sending the thank you, I should have followed it up with a question: 'Do you need anyone in your QA department?'"
And in his message to On Call, he suggested others might like to make the same offer in their correspondence with CrowdStrike.
Has an industry luminary helped you to support their faulty products? Go on, spill your celebrity goss by [10]clicking here to send On Call an email . ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/02/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/26/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/19/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/12/on_call/
[10] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Only accounting receives invoices. This one was for 16*48 hours of consultancy, debugging and change management charged at $150,- per hour. The disks for version 8.01 were invoiced separately. A third invoice was sent to cover the new licenses for the new version.
But 640 should be enough for anyone...
You do realize that Gates&Co. had nothing to do with the 640K "limit", right?
That so-called "limit" was part of the IBM hardware spec, and was already set in stone long before Microsoft had even heard of the project.
It actually goes back to limits of the 8086 architecture that weren't resolved until the x86_64 chips were developed is one of the main reasons why x86 chips are considered inefficient in comparison with other architectures.. Why IBM chose Intel's at the time inferior chips over Motorola or others is just one of those things, but, at the time, the decision makers were not engineers but probably keen golfers!
i8088
"Why IBM chose Intel's at the time inferior chips over Motorola or others is just one of those things, but, at the time, the decision makers were not engineers but probably keen golfers!"
According to this [1]article by a chap who was there at the time, it wasn't a bunch of "keen golfers" doing the decisions.
So why aren’t we all using 68K-based computers today?
The answer comes back to being first to market. Intel’s 8088 may have been imperfect but at least it was ready, whereas the Motorola 68K was not. And IBM’s thorough component qualification process required that a manufacturer offer up thousands of “production released” samples of any new part so that IBM could perform life tests and other characterizations. IBM had hundreds of engineers doing quality assurance, but component qualifications take time. In the first half of 1978, Intel already had production-released samples of the 8088. By the end of 1978, Motorola’s 68K was still not quite ready for production release.
And unfortunately for Motorola, the Boca Raton group wanted to bring its new IBM PC to market as quickly as possible. So they had only two fully qualified 16-bit microprocessors to choose from. In a competition between two imperfect chips, Intel’s chip was less imperfect than TI’s.
The whole article is a delightful read.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-inside-story-of-texas-instruments-biggest-blunder-the-tms9900-microprocessor
> You do realize that Gates&Co. had nothing to do with the 640K "limit", right?
Yes, maybe I should have used the joke icon instead of the bad pun icon...
Icons
I think we need the Bill Gates angel and devil icons back for this one
I ran into an issue with a load balancer appliance a couple of years ago. The details escape me right now, but there was something weird happening with the packets for a new service that I was adding to the cluster - they were corrupted or inadvertently dropped or something similar. The vendor TAC engineer requested a call to troubleshoot the issue online, and the engineer was so intrigued that he went and got another colleague to help out while we were still on the call. They were talking amongst themselves - without muting themselves so that I could listen in to their reasoning, props for that - but couldn't find an immediate explanation. They eventually said that "Listen, this problem will most likely go away if we reboot the box. But we'd prefer NOT to do that, but instead dig a bit deeper into this. Are you OK with that?" I said sure, and they brought in a development engineer and another couple of friends of his - so at one point there were five or six people looking at my box at the same time.
After a couple of hours, they had developed a theory that there was some obscure race condition in their logic causing the issue. Within two days I had a patched version of the software in my account and we never saw the issue again after that. I've never seen that level of support from another vendor; before or since. And credit where credit is due: It was Radware.
Excel is still rubbish
See above.
Re: Excel is still rubbish
I'd agree with you in general, but it's much loved by millions of users, so it's not going anywhere fast. But, since the 2015 rewrite using .NET, it has got a lot more powerful, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's also pretty good for report generation: I happen to know that quite a few very large companies rely on it to produce the reports they send to customers. It's not without it's problems, but in this area, it's probably better than a custom solution.
Re: Excel is still rubbish
NHS ? Covid ?
Re: Excel is still rubbish
Yes and so. The replacements cannot compete in versatility, only in usability. (And some not even in usability, but that is less common :D )
Re: Excel is still rubbish
Excel isn't rubbish - however the uses that people put it to can very much be rubbish. That isn't the fault of the software though.
Can someone parse this sentence for me?
"My boss gave me a lot of leeway so long as I kept the PCs running," Brad told On Call – perhaps because that worthy had a degree in Psychology, not tech.
The Boss was a psychology major, not a techie, and so allowed Brad free reign as long as the computers kept running.
Brad was saying his boss was a psych major, and was therefore not qualified to help with Brad's actual job of tech support.
The boss had a degree in psychology rather than technology, and so was better at managing people than technical issues.
"worthy
noun [ C ] humorous
UK /ˈwɜː.ði/ US /ˈwɝː.ði/
a person who is important, especially in a small town:
The front row of chairs was reserved for local worthies."
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/worthy#google_vignette
To be fair, I've only ever heard it in the plural.
Ambiguous parse
"My boss gave me a lot of leeway so long as I kept the PCs running," Brad told On Call – perhaps because that worthy had a degree in Psychology, not tech.
I grok'd this as Brad's having the misfortune of psychology degree and that his manglement boss unusually cut Brad a fair bit of slack - the blind leading the vision impaired as it were. Brad probably worked cheaper too.
On reading the alternative parse, I admit that it is more probable.
I was wondering what the serfs in a retail chain would be using Excel for. I am guessing it was just to send a "machine readable" structured report to headquarters (and I presume before decent POS systems and integration with back office reporting.) I would have thought a custom screen form to xml application would be less prone to problems than using a spreadsheet.
"beta testing his software on the public"
I spent months a couple of years ago trying to implement a new system of "back end access" for a major NHS supplier a couple of years ago to the point where I felt I had been working for them the whole time in testing and development . They finally scrapped the whole thing, then went away and came back last month with a whole shiny new plug and play "it just works" system , the quality of which is yet to be verified.
First impressions are its a lot better though.
'Do you need anyone in your QA department?'
No, thank you. We've fired all of them.
Lucky guy. This coal-facing Microsoft engineer sent an email to the company's president, Brad Smith, a few days ago and is yet to receive a reply! (No, really...)
Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com
Well, we all know the email address now. Presumably, if you send an email saying "Windows 11 is rubbish", there'll be a package containg 3500 floppy disks arriving on your desk tomorrow morning containing Windows 11.1.
Re: Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com
I suspect you're being facetious, but that email address has been in the open for quite some time now :)
Re: Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com
While it is funny to read, you actually [1]CAN get the newest with quite some fixes included. Backside: Thing you may not want are in there too. The ultra-newest is reserved for MS-employees.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/blog/tag/windows-insider-program/
Re: Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com
I've used "billg@microsoft.com" on any site that asked for an email address but didn't bother verifying it, for probably decades at this point. So it must receive an absolute shitload of spam.
Sorry Bill, I always assumed it wasn't a real address.
Was this for free or did they send a Bill Gates?