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Much of Apple's design aesthetic appeal is in its hardware. Microsoft has no control over the design of most of the hardware people use with its OS. The same
by apotheon 19y ago
Much of Apple's design aesthetic appeal is in its hardware. Microsoft has no control over the design of most of the hardware people use with its OS. The same goes for other OSes like Debian and FreeBSD. So, while I agree that MS Windows isn't the best-looking OS around, a significant chunk of Apple's advantage in the design arena has nothing to do with any mistakes on Microsoft's part -- unless you think it's a mistake to let one's OS run on other people's hardware. For a closed source shop like Microsoft (or Apple), that might be a reasonable argument, but it doesn't mean bad things about Microsoft's design choices -- just its business choices.
- alex_c 19y agoI agree about the hardware design (Microsoft actually made(?) some pretty good peripherals). I was referring more to software design. I have never encountered so many plain boneheaded interface decisions as in Microsoft products, from roughly Win95 up to and including WinXP. I'm not even talking about ugly (which I can forgive), I'm talking about simply unusable - tiny text areas without scrollbars in which you sometimes have to input a large amount of text, or worse, text inputs instead of text areas. Tabs being used where they really shouldn't, resulting in dialogs with up to 5 rows of tabs, and with extra "Advanced" buttons on some of the tabs that bring up another pop-up. That kind of stuff. Vista and the new Office have been really pleasant surprises so far in this respect.