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Microsoft shouldn't even have MacBooks available unless specifically for the minority developing for Apple platforms. It's just a concession of defeat otherwise
by kcb 5y ago
Microsoft shouldn't even have MacBooks available unless specifically for the minority developing for Apple platforms. It's just a concession of defeat otherwise.
- lopatin 5y agoFor devs I think it matters less. But, yeah, for designers on the _Windows Desktop Experience Team_ to not be using their own product for day to day work is absurd to me. It sounds like a joke: "The people who designed this shitty feature don't even use it themselves", but alas, it appears to be the truth.
- Aerroon 5y agoWhy would you even hire designers that don't use Windows as their daily OS? It's not even a question of making designers use your software, but you could just hire people who do. Globally you probably have to go out of your way to hire a designer that wasn't Windows based.
- chelical 5y agoI'm not sure this is true. Anecdotally, across three Fortune 500 tech companies I've worked at, designers / web devs / program managers had Macbooks (or had the option of choosing Macbooks) even when the team was developing primarily in Windows.
- gabeio 5y ago> Globally you probably have to go out of your way to hire a designer that wasn't Windows based. That, likely, highly depends on your industry. Designers doing mobile application design, as well as web design from my limited experience tend to steer towards Macs. Even within my college the entire graphics design department was Macs. Of course if you are working on a Windows based product you'd in theory expect the designers to use or be familiar enough with Windows but you may be surprised. I'd be curious to know if there are regional (country) differences in this.
- zarzavat 5y agoThe key word is ‘globally’. MacBooks are expensive, and because they are hardware they cannot be pirated. I’ve worked with Eastern European designers who were excellent but could not afford Apple hardware. You only have to look outside North America and Western Europe. It’s tragic that because of elitism Microsoft does not hire those designers and instead hires designers who don’t care about their product.
- neoberg 5y agoWhich country is that you are referring as Eastern Europe? I live in Eastern Europe and every designer + most of the devs I know are using Macs. I am not originally from here and my home country currently is economically worse than most Eastern Europe countries. Even there majority of designers use Macs.
- zakius 5y agoI think having some people daily driving other systems may be beneficial, providing a fresh view but if majority of your lead designers never in their lives used the taskbar they are surprised when replacing it with a dock causes outcry
- numpad0 5y agoDesigners who could tolerate a Windows laptop in the Win7 era are probably not good designers. They were mostly inexcusably ugly, and Adobe software support was known to be not ideal until late Win8.
- zakius 5y agoanyone who tolerates laptops at all is not good at judging ergonomics and usability, they are only made so you can get the necessary minimum done when you can't access the main machine and it shows
- numpad0 5y agoThat is an expert's view which is not valued today which makes it untrue. I personally agree, I totally do, I mean my setup has triple display and plenty RAM, but sorry!
- newsbinator 5y agoI do all my work from the sofa or floor. Bad ergonomics but good usability.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoWell, I know we all have our kinks and perversions, but it's a bit unfair to push them onto unsuspecting joe
- zakius 5y agothe physical and mental pain related to the terrible "keyboards" and cooling systems and small, poorly positioned screens laptops offer makes the usability nearly non-existent
- newsbinator 5y agoYou haven't really coded until you've coded under a blanket. And I'm not an indestructible 20-year-old either :)
- andi999 5y agoYou could say, you dont want the designer who is supposed to design win8 to be comfortably working with win7. Instead you want them to be more inspired by different OSes.
- lionkor 5y agoReally, why though? Is there something inherently wrong with satisfying user expectations? If you want innovation, how about performance, accessibility, compatibility,...
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIt's one thing to be inspired, it's another to be completely ignorant of how you are breaking workflows for a billion people
- alpaca128 5y agoIf people wanted a fundamentally different UI than Windows has then they wouldn't use Windows in the first place. When we went from XP to Windows 7 that was a huge improvement. It was fundamentally still the same UI with the exact same workflows, just nicer in every way. When you have over a billion users worldwide there's an expectation that you don't treat your product like a startup's art project. I haven't met a single person who wasn't completely confused by Windows 8's UI or who liked the changes. I've seen lifelong Windows users spend 10+ minutes desperately looking for the shutdown button. There's "inspiration" by different products but in the end you need to know your own product in order to improve it.
- puchatek 5y ago"Dog food? No, thank you."
- gibolt 5y ago"Do you have any apples?"
- GeorgeWBasic 5y ago"You're fired. How do you like them apples?"
- grishka 5y agoI know way too many people who build Android apps but use an iPhone as their personal phone. And this is how you get things like the back button going back through tabs that you selected on the tab bar. Even some of Google's own apps are guilty of this.
- kristopolous 5y agoChasing after the Apple aesthetic doesn't work because they're not Apple. Design works holistically and you can't extricate it and expect success. To make this obvious, let me use an analogy. If a vegan restaurant found a very successful steakhouse and decided to copy their decor of say game animal heads and rifles on the wall, it would probably decrease their sales regardless of how faithfully they match the aesthetics. The context matters. Also the fact that both imaginary businesses are in the same industry of serving food isn't enough of a similarity. It's quite specific. And even if the contexts match, the pursuit just makes them seen as a knockoff; a laggard, an imitation. The goal isn't to meet the competition, it's either to beat it or be somewhere else. Intentionally making yourself a 2nd rate Apple isn't a positioning strategy; they could simply introduce a discount line and knock you out in a single blow. It's phenomenally stupid
- tssva 5y agoI and many others find the Apple UX experience to be awful. If I wanted to suffer through it I would just buy a MacBook. I purposely didn't get another MacBook when my last one died.
- chelical 5y agoI strongly disagree. Two of the major flaws of pre-Nadella Microsoft were arrogance and complacency.
- dleslie 5y agoDogfooding your own product isn't arrogance or complacency, it's common sense. If it's not good enough for you not to prefer a competitor, then it's not good enough to ship. Arrogance is not doing any or ongoing competitive analysis.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoI mean, dogfooding is good but not everyone has to make the pinnacle product? If someone is selling something that's out of reach, financially, for most people, then making a cheaper and worse product available can still be good. Doesn't mean you prefer it. I'm guessing Microsoft don't want to think of themselves as "the poor man's OS" however. And, they're not, it costs something like £120.
- CRConrad 5y ago> I'm guessing Microsoft don't want to think of themselves as "the poor man's OS" however. And, they're not, it costs something like £120. "Whereas MacOS is free, it's included with the machine and Apple doesn't charge for it separately"? But how much of the price you pay for that machine is because of the OS, that's an unknown. Maybe the actual development costs, distributed per device, are available somewhere deep in the bowels of Apple accounting, but that doesn't tell us how much of the (inflated) price you pay for the box is due to the OS. Microsoft's dev costs for Windows probably aren't £120 a copy either (especially considering what a tiny minority of users actually pays exactly that, as an explicit item separate from the hardware). So I reckon Windows still actually is "the poor man's OS": You probably pay more than that for MacOS, only it's baked into the cost of the hardware so you don't know how much, exactly, it is you're paying.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago