Bill Gates, a bug, and a late-night fix: A classic tech support tale

Get the boss involved: A tech support employee recently shared a story from 1996, when he allegedly sent an angry message about an Office bug directly to Bill Gates. The problem was resolved within days, suggesting that the employee may have indeed sent his software rant to the correct email inbox.

In the early days of Windows and Office, you might have been lucky enough to directly contact Bill Gates and have Microsoft work overnight to fix a bug in the productivity suite.

In a “classic” tech support story shared with The Register, a man known as “Brad” recounted his first IT support job at an unnamed retailer in a major US city. Brad sent an angry email to a Microsoft inbox, and the Redmond corporation resolved his issue in record time.

Brad was responsible for managing and upgrading over a hundred PCs in different offices. In 1996, companies were still selling software on floppy disks, and “updating” something meant driving to a location to physically execute the installation process. Brad was tasked by his boss with replacing Office 95 (7.0) with Office 97 (8.0) since the old release struggled with large spreadsheets.

The “IT guy” tested both the PC version and, a few weeks later, the Mac edition of Office 8.0, arranging the update process over the weekend to avoid service disruptions or complaints. Brad spent the next two days installing the new software on the company’s machines, and on Monday morning, returned to his desk expecting to be praised for a job well done.

But the job wasn’t quite done, as employees were, in fact, complaining about corrupted Excel files. After running more tests, Brad identified the bug as an unreported compatibility issue between the Windows and Mac versions of Office 8. Once an Excel spreadsheet created on a PC was opened on a Mac, the file could no longer be correctly read back on the PC.

Frustrated, Brad sent what he describes as a “quite angry email” to the “billg@microsoft.com” address, hoping it might reach the Microsoft co-founder. The address is known as a legitimate internal Microsoft mailbox, though it’s unclear if Bill Gates himself was reading (or still reads) emails sent there.

Long story short, the email was successful in getting Microsoft directly involved with the Office issue Brad was experiencing. A Microsoft employee contacted him the next morning, spending an hour discussing the bug and how it had been discovered. The following day, Brad received floppies containing a new Mac version of Office (8.01), with Microsoft explaining that they had isolated and fixed the issue.

There were only a few Mac systems at Brad’s company at the time, so the update was quickly deployed by lunchtime. The newer version resolved the issue, allowing Brad to update the PC edition of Office over the following week as well. “In the end,” Brad said, “I was pretty sure I’d hit the email address I was aiming for, and that Bill Gates had likely expressed his frustration too.”