In January 2004 Jim Alchin was fed up with Windows Vista development. The development codenamed Longhorn that was to replace Windows XP was not going well, and this directive wrote to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to warn them that things were looking bad. Very bad.
In fact Alchin explained how “I would buy myself a Mac today if I weren’t working at Microsoft.” The manager went even further and stated that “LH (Longhorn) is a pig and I don’t see a solution to the problem.”
Even Steve Jobs ended up taking advantage of the phrase in a keynote
The email was made public as part of the court process Comes vs Microsoft in which a group of consumers accused the Redmond company of monopoly.
Jim Allchin to Bill Gates: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft”
January 7, 2004 pic.twitter.com/MryGmRSemZ
— Internal Tech Emails (@TechEmails) July 22, 2021
During the investigation, this unique e-mail that Jim Alchin addressed to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer was presented. In it he explained that in his opinion at Microsoft “we have lost our way”, something that according to him had not happened at Apple, where “they think about the stage [Nota del editor: lo que un usuario quiere hacer en un momento determinado]. They think simple. They think fast. “
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In fact he ended up saying that “if we want to face the challenge of Linux and Apple, we need to memorize the lessons of ‘scenario, simple, quick’ “.
Alchin’s theoretical intention to buy a Mac became so famous that even Steve Jobs joked about it in his inaugural keynote to the old MacWorld conference on January 9, 2007, but just before that Alchin himself wrote a post on the Windows Vista blog explaining that message.
“That message is almost three years old, and it was being deliberately dramatic in order to get one point across. The point is that we needed to change and change quickly. And we did: We drastically changed the development process that was being used and restarted the project. Windows Vista development in mid-2004, basically starting over. “
“Two and a half years later, Windows Vista has become a phenomenal product, better than any other operating system we’ve ever made and much, much better than any other software available today, in my opinion.”
The truth is that Vista was not as well received as Alchin anticipated, and in fact some call it the worst operating system in Microsoft’s history although we do not agree. We do not know if Alchin ended up buying a Mac, but what is clear is that you have to be careful with what is said even in work emails.
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