How Microsoft gave customers what they wanted: An audience with Bill Gates

Microsoft had a special way of dealing with customers demanding to speak to its CEO. One that kept the customer happy without necessarily bothering His Billness. According to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, there was a procedure followed by product support staff if a customer (presumably a prized customer) became irate enough during a call to demand to speak with Bill Gates. Chen recalled a colleague in product support explaining the process. First, there would be apologies for not resolving the issue to the customer's satisfaction. If that failed to smooth ruffled feathers and the demands to speak to The Boss continued, then the magic happened. Chen went on: "The customer was transferred to a special internal phone number, and when the operators saw a call on that line, they took the call and said, "Bill Gates's office." Of course, the operator wasn't actually in Bill Gates's office. Instead, they were pretending to be Gates's secretary. Their only job was to say that Bill Gates was unavailable and to pass on the customer's complaint and contact details. The information was then sent back to the tech support team with a note to ensure that whoever called the customer back opened with something like "Bill Gates asked me to contact you to follow up on an issue you had earlier." Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations To solve compatibility issues, Microsoft would quietly patch other people's code Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels' Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11 It all smacks of a different era at Microsoft, not least because (a) getting hold of a human in the company's support team and (b) having a query answered is enough of a challenge these days without demanding to talk to Satya Nadella as well. Gates handed over his role as CEO to Steve Ballmer in 2000. Ballmer was succeeded by Satya Nadella in 2014. While Chen could not confirm if Gates ever looked at the list of calls, we do know that someone certainly monitored his email account. How? A Register reader told us previously that, back in 1996, they fired off an irate email to billg@microsoft.com – after which they were quickly contacted by a Microsoft engineer who appeared exceedingly keen to solve their Excel issue. Sadly, unless a customer is very important to Microsoft's bottom line or has spent enough on getting the personal touch from the company's support team, they are unlikely to make much headway in similarly escalating their complaint in the modern era of AI and Copilot. ®