r/windows • u/TheCelestialDawn • Jun 12 '25

General Question What happened to Windows Movie Maker?

It's the only movie software program I needed. Now it's gone?

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221

u/Triabolical_ Jun 12 '25

I know the real story. I wrote the UI for DVD maker in Vista and was on the movie maker team.

DVD maker was a popular program, and the team planned a new product we named storyteller. Think of the Ken burns effect for photos but with videos, canned content, etc. A whole bunch of different themes.

Then a reorg happened and we got moved in with the picture folks under their management. Their second level manager said that the team could decide what to do, which was great, and specifically said we could proceed.

I wrote a prototype with still photos only, we tested it in the usability lab with customers, and they loved it.

Then four weeks later our manager changed his mind and told us we couldn't do storyteller and that we should do a rewrite of movie maker.

Of the ten or twelve people on the team, all but two left in a month.

46

u/GisseGisseGiss Jun 12 '25

Ahh the various impacts all those managers have had.. Thanks for sharing. Love these stories!

30

u/Triabolical_ Jun 12 '25

I almost go fired because of what I said to my second level, and he said I was insubordinate in his feedback about me that year.

Luckily, my new managers loved me and said "that doesn't sound like Triabolical_", so they just ignored it.

1

u/Contrantier Jun 15 '25

I hope he burst a few screws upon realising they shoved his complaint aside lmao

1

u/Triabolical_ Jun 15 '25

In a perfect world, yes, but the flow of information in the review system is - as far as I know, and I was in management part of the time - only one direction. In one case I got asked by a friend from years before for feedback on a guy who was my second level at one point and threw all the teams that reported to him under the bus for mistakes he made, and that was a nice opportunity.

I never heard back on that one, but I did notice that his next position did not have the same level of responsibility as the previous one, which is really all one can hope for in a big company.

24

u/TwinSong Jun 13 '25

Microsoft: "You know this application that people use? Let's redo it but worse."

Similar logic with Windows 11's Start menu and whatever mess Windows 8 was supposed to be.

6

u/Triabolical_ Jun 13 '25

I just set up a new machine for video editing and it replaced my Windows 10 machine. There are a few nice things on windows 11 that I really like but I have no idea why they messed up the start menu. I'm sure it tested horribly with usability but they went ahead with it anyway.

5

u/TwinSong Jun 13 '25

Sometimes I'm left with the feeling that they change things just to give the developers something to do

5

u/Triabolical_ Jun 13 '25

They do.

The problem is really at the management level.

If you're a lead or IC, you may welcome a chance to work on something new and more interesting. But if you are the 2nd or 3rd level manager, it's much harder to find a comparable job in another group as those tend to be more established, so your career can go off-track in situations like this. It's especially true for VPs.

So what you see is high level managers really motivated to hold onto as many people as possible because that is one of the thing you get rated (it's known as "span of control"). A manager who has worked in windows for 10 to even 20 years won't be very marketable elsewhere IMO.

So you see a lot of makework going on.

I worked on the early C# compiler team. Our first version was not complete, so we kept working on it, but once we hit version 5 there was really nothing useful to add. Everything since that has been features that make the language worse in my opinion, but there are managers who really want the team to stick around and so they do.

2

u/shindigdig Jun 13 '25

I actually really grew to like 8.1, but 10 was just so much faster under the hood in comparison.

1

u/pixelboots Jun 13 '25

And the new Outlook

13

u/VictoryMotel Jun 12 '25

Why did movie maker need a rewrite?

25

u/Triabolical_ Jun 12 '25

Absolutely no reason, and the resulting windows movie maker live was far less robust and feature-rich than the original.

But since almost everybody who understood the old codebase less and the pictures team though that video was just a series of pictures, they decided it would be simpler to just build a new version.

I heard through the grapevine a year later that the devs had revised their viewpoint on how hard video was.

1

u/TrustLeft Jun 13 '25 edited Jun 13 '25

I believe it was because they tried transferring it to "Movie Maker Live" which was cloud and people wanted no part of it. Still Don't. I transitioned to Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 11, Still use it and Magix Movie studio 2024 platinum which looks Chinese designed, Blocky lazily created, which the newer isn't as good and has a horrible layout, I like the older 1990-2005 based software, they are just more user friendly without relying on stupid cloud

3

u/Triabolical_ Jun 13 '25

I use davinci resolve. It's complex to learn but very robust.

1

u/StoneyCalzoney Jun 17 '25

I swear I remember using storyteller or a similar MS-branded software back in middle school/early high school, around the early-to-mid 2010s... It was retired by that point but I had found some copy online because I needed it for a school project parodying the Sarah McLachlan pet commercials.

1

u/Triabolical_ Jun 17 '25

Yes. The name escapes me, but it was written by somebody in Microsoft Research and did a really nice job.

The photos group just ignored it, for reasons, surely stupid ones.

1

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1

u/StoneyCalzoney Jun 17 '25

(Reposted without image link because automod hates google image links)

I found it. Photo Story

What a throwback... The screenshots in Google Images are all too familiar.

Hopefully IA has a copy, if not there needs to be one...

1

u/Triabolical_ Jun 17 '25

That's it.

Storyteller did that, but with different sorts of animations, high-quality surrounding graphics, and with photos or video.