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?

177 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

84 comments sorted by

View all comments

222

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.

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.

4

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.

4

u/TwinSong Jun 13 '25

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

6

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.