An email written in anger to Bill Gates personally reached its goal in 1996: The Microsoft CEO addressed a problem in MS Office.
Could someone from outside write an email to Bill Gates personally? In a way, yes. At least, according to a report from a technician on the tech site The Register, the founder of Microsoft seemingly had a very close connection to his customers back then. Yet Brad, an IT professional, still vividly remembers a message he sent to the company head on a whim, filled with plenty of anger – with astonishing consequences.
The Angry Email to Bill Gates
Why did he write an email to Bill Gates? Yet Brad was working at that time as a young IT technician for a grocery retailer in a large US city. In this role, he was responsible for the computers of the company, which primarily used Microsoft Office. Until that one day in 1996, however, his colleagues repeatedly struggled with an annoyance from Excel 7.0. It had issues with overly expansive tables.
Thus, the disks with the new version, Office 97/8.0, came at just the right time for Yet Brad.
However, during the update, he found that a critical incompatibility occurred between the Mac and Windows versions of Excel. Once a Mac with Excel 8.0 had opened a table, it was no longer usable for Windows PCs. A disaster that made him fear for his very first job at that time.
So he wrote an email filled with anger that sounded extremely annoyed to [email protected]. Allegations had been made that Bill Gates apparently let his software be tested by paying customers. “The bug was more than obvious,” the technician still cannot understand the Microsoft lapse even 28 years later.
48 Hours Later the Phone Rang
Did the email really reach Bill Gates? Whether the Microsoft CEO read it himself, we do not know for sure, but about 48 hours later, Yet Brad’s phone rang. One of the developers from the Office team was on the line. They spent about an hour together reconstructing how the error occurred. Apparently, not only was Yet Brad very relieved:
To this day, I have never met or even spoken to anyone who tried so desperately to get to the bottom of a problem and solve it.
What did the solution look like? What exactly went wrong with the Mac versions of that old Excel from our perspective is unknown. But the next day, he found a package with disks on his desk. There was a document that assured him apologetically that this new version (8.01) for the Macs should fix the error. And it did.
Yet Brad is convinced that he reached Bill Gates or at least his close environment at that time and that the experienced CEO was just as annoyed by such an embarrassing bug in final software as the young IT technician was.
A technician of a special kind, who broke out of his work environment but still remained true to it, is Chris Pyle. The auto mechanic quit his job in the workshop to help people repair their vehicles from home – with success: An auto mechanic quit his full-time job at Ford to work from home – now earns nearly €160,000 a year
