[HN Gopher] When irate product support customers demand to speak...
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When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates
Author : magnat
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-12-23 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
| malfist wrote:
| This thing isn't uncommon. You email a CEO and get put into
| "executive escalation" if you don't seem like a crackpot. I've
| done that once before and it was useful to cut through the armies
| of outsourced CSRs that read from a script and refuse to deviate
| and send you in circles.
|
| It does help if you start your email with your value to the
| company (i.e., I spent $X over $Y time period at your company)
| dooglius wrote:
| I think the post is about the ones who _do_ seem like crackpots
| gist wrote:
| Could be crackpots or could be regular people who are so
| frustrated they express themselves that way.
|
| And the truth is if the 'Bill Gates' had to deal with this
| frustration himself (most likely let's say he doesn't he has
| people who deal with it for him when he needs something from
| another company or his own) he'd implement changes to keep
| users happier. Noting of course that you are always going to
| have a segment of people that will both get angry and have
| edge problems.
|
| Did or does 'Bill Gates' ever actually try to be a regular
| user of Microsoft support actually waiting in the call queue
| on hold for 10 minutes to an hour and even getting
| disconnected?
|
| Does anyone at the company (in a position to order
| improvements) ever do this?
|
| (This applies to many companies obviously 'bill gates' and
| 'microsoft' are just placeholders.)
|
| I think it's underestimated the amount of psychological pain
| that some of the software (of Microsoft and other companies)
| has caused people over the years.
| breppp wrote:
| the blog is full of other ways to trick your support cases while
| not showing at all you deem yourself superior
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| When I worked for an IBM helpdesk looking after point-of-sale
| systems, we used to ask them to check if the power cable had a
| black or a blue bit of plastic surrounding the pins.
|
| "It's black? Okay, it's not that then, I was hoping it would be
| easy. Right, plug it back in again and... oh it's working now?
| Cool, ring me back if there's anything else then!"
| zahlman wrote:
| > Corollary: Instead of asking "Are you sure it's turned on?",
| ask them to turn it off and back on.
|
| This is a two-for-one: sometimes it _is_ turned on, and
| sometimes restarting it actually does resolve the problem (at
| least temporarily) anyway.
| em-bee wrote:
| https://youtu.be/5UT8RkSmN4k
| DerArzt wrote:
| Dang that way of helping folks fix their problems without
| loosing face is such a cool approach!
| jacinabox wrote:
| They let them speak with Gill Bates instead
| moioci wrote:
| Flip side is the well-known story of when billg actually answered
| a customer service call:
| https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/that-time-bill-gates...
| gist wrote:
| That is such utter bs it's amazing that Microsoft PR thought
| that somehow that shows anything of benefit to the suffering
| users.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I was involved in that particular incident, and wrote about it
| on HN when the story was making headlines.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957936#958365
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Making a big spectacle of doing regular people work, and then
| normal employees having to go in and _actually_ do it is very
| in line with my picture of a certain kind of manager. (Your
| story did not actually come off like this, I just found this
| a funny interpretation)
| spudlyo wrote:
| Yeah, it was certainly performative rather than actually
| serving the customer. My hope at the time was that the
| STARS knowledgebase would show itself to be slow and
| overloaded and Bill would realize that it was necessary to
| invest in upgrading it. Strangely it was faster than I had
| ever seen it, and it just happened to immediately come up
| with a plausible answer to Bill's query -- almost like it
| knew its master's hands were on the keyboard.
| em-bee wrote:
| that comment should be added to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights except, since the
| hightlights are sorted by the time of the comment it's not
| going to be seen by anyone unless they read all comments to
| the end...
| jeffwask wrote:
| LOL, I worked for a Microsoft outsourcer in the late 90's doing
| Word and then VBA support. I would get this a lot! My stock
| answer was, " I'll tell him the next time we have lunch, but you
| know the cheap bastard always makes me pay."
| blell wrote:
| Don't they have phone service in Little Saint James?
| gr wrote:
| > Of course, the information was never actually passed along to
| Bill.
|
| HOW DARE YOU!!!
| jsiepkes wrote:
| What I did once is lookup the financial report of the company,
| find all the board members and C level execs l, figured out what
| their email structure looks like (pete.whatever@company.com) and
| just walked them through my support experience. Then I asked if
| replacing the HEPA filter in my 5 year old vacuum cleaner should
| cost 250 Euro, which was more expensive than the vacuum cleaner
| at the time.
| ilamont wrote:
| What was the response?
| Xiol wrote:
| Sometimes we're just after the catharsis.
| pegasus wrote:
| Nobody likes to be left hanging.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| Currently looking up emails for jsiepkes' board to walk
| them through my frustrating experience with their
| comment.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I did something similar after sitting two days on the phone
| trying to get support for backup exec. this was a million years
| ago and I ended up looping through everyone there. they
| offshored support and no one could help me but not because they
| didn't try.
|
| I documented everything and my frustrations with their software
| not working or supporting modern operating systems and sent it
| over to people who seemed high up - email, twitter or reddit.
|
| later got a call asking if they could show it to the board
| because as employees they had the same frustrations and I said
| sure. next day they announced that their president was fired...
|
| Good ol backup exec - if it errored it was working and no
| errors meant nothing ran.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Why must we lie to customers?
| seshagiric wrote:
| One can only think if all the customer complaints really went to
| Bill Gates, how much different Microsoft would be today. They
| still operate in a world where they think once they build
| something, people would just use it. CoPilot is the latest
| example.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Now they can just put them through to BillGPT.
| textlapse wrote:
| On the contrary, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were very customer
| focused - they listened to customers more so than other big tech
| companies. You could actually have emailed them and gotten a
| response (in the case of Bezos a legendary '?' forward to the
| team).
|
| Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes
| to how customer obsessed these companies were.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| Jobs responded to email back when he ran a tiny company in an
| overall much smaller industry with far fewer customers. I'm not
| sure he was responding so much by the time he had resurrected
| Apple and the iPhone launched.
| sgt wrote:
| I once emailed Tim Cook and sure enough, he responded. Seemed
| like it was him, too.
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