That's an awful reason to do that. It shouldn't matter who files a bug report, it should be handled the same way as all others. In this case, they broke convention to please Gates, probably against the wishes of the people actually working on the software. It doesn't matter if it was a regular user, Gates or the pope, a bug report carries equal value.
It's still better than the reason why modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome adopted the absolutely terrible backspace-for-back shortcut: because someone on the IE team decided to do it 20 years ago, probably because it was a shortcut in Windows' file Explorer as well.
This shortcut has cost me so much over the years. Heaven forbid you're typing out a long comment and accidental hit it when the focus is off the text box. Now you hit forward and your text is gone. It wasn't until fairly recently that the browsers kept text box content under these circumstances. In the past you'd just lose it all. Hell, maybe IE still does, but I know Chrome keeps it. So many long winded Metafilter and Slashdot posts lost to the bit bucket...
Other times, focus detection breaks randomly and you're in a text box but something happens and, whoops, off you go to the previous page. I don't know how often these early web guys thought we'd be going back, but mapping it to one of the largest and most frequently used keys is asinine.
Andreeson recently said that his team always thought of the front and back buttons as half-assed solutions until they could figure out something better. Guess that's probably never going to change.
I feel your pain. For me it was losing many hours worth of written and rewritten letters to girlfriends and friends. Kids these days have no idea how hard we had it with their state captured forms.
Yes, that's one terrible shortcut. For those on Firefox: in about:config, set browser.backspace_action to 2 to disable it. Made my life better, though it also made me realize I used to use it to go back sometimes.
That person often has contradictory wishes. In this case, for example, it's likely that the person paying them to do the work wished for ^F to move to the next message and for them to build the best product for their customers.
Good management involves prioritizing these things in order to sort out the contradictions, and good employees help with this process by pushing back against directives that contradict what appear to be more important goals.
Good PO/PM's care about the integrity of the product enough to argue with a CEO, but developers intrinsically have extra motivation beyond just "product integrity is valued!": every additional iota of product crappiness is painful, every time they touch it.
It would professional to strongly argue if their opinion is not for the best of the company. By strongly, I would see an argument like "You're the boss, but what you're saying doesn't make any sense because X and Y and Z."
That's irrelevant. The customer pays business (the owner). If the owner does something against his customer's interests, then the customer has the right to shop elsewhere.
Many times conventions are broken by some upper level person who isnt in touch with the reality around him. Projects I have been on have suffered because people dont understand technology or the conventions users have become accustomed to.
Absolutely, but if anyone understands technology, it's Bill Gates. I'm guessing the blame for this case resides with the middle management that forced the programmers to follow the wishes of the boss.
