6 ms·

Guess: Designer-minded Windows execs were hell-bent on moving to a macOS-like taskbar for years. Height, item count and behaviour is massively different wether

Guess: Designer-minded Windows execs were hell-bent on moving to a macOS-like taskbar for years. Height, item count and behaviour is massively different wether you simply have icons or "legacy" long rectangles with text. They successfully persuaded engineering to not have this big UX gap for such a crucial part of the interface so they axed labels. Now after 1.5 years and lackluster adoption they got enough bad feedback to revert this. Even though I'm happy (this was also a dealbreaker for me, even though you could hack the old taskbar via dll-s) I think this shows how much in a deadlock Windows OS development is. Almost all of the recent changes are surface-level, on one side you have employees disconnected from the core user base, on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility.

Tempest1981 4y ago
I'm curious who makes the decisions... who has final say -- designers or engineering or PMs or execs? (So I'll know who to blame :-)
- poisonborz 4y ago
  This sheds some light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
  - Bjartr 4y ago
    Thanks, I was thinking of exactly this post so it's useful you shared it!
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    > I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook The more you make it like a Mac, the less barrier there is for a user to jump ship to a Mac. I wonder if any of the increase in Apple marketshare is due to Windows becoming more Mac-like.
logifail 4y ago
> on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility Ah, those users. Users who want their OS to stay firmly in the background and let them get on with their jobs, and who aren't actually that bothered about "feature" upgrades every month or three. Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product. The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand: - any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time, and there's a lot of these) get pissed because on top of having to pay Microsoft for new software (to avoid not getting updates for EOL software), they have to spend significant sums re-training employees, testing upgrade paths, rework internal tooling... - if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars (the market for hardware sporting actual parallel ports or ISA slots is insane, because so much early 90s hardware runs on that) - at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden. Linux userland generally doesn't care a bit about backwards compatibility, and Apple announces BC breaks early enough / keeps support long enough that users can upgrade over time - aided by the fact that most hardware that people attach to Macs doesn't cost more than ten to fifty grands (=very expensive audio / video stuff) and has to be upgraded anyway to keep up with new features. That in turn puts pressure on Microsoft to keep up with innovation. - on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward - mostly, no transistor space wasted with long-superseded crap dating back to the 1980s and way better power management - while Microsoft is more or less at the whims of Intel's mismanagement and the utter crap that third-party ARM SoC vendors throw onto the market and dare call a CPU.
  - 4y ago

Tempest1981 4y ago

I'm curious who makes the decisions... who has final say -- designers or engineering or PMs or execs? (So I'll know who to blame :-)

poisonborz 4y ago
This sheds some light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
- Bjartr 4y ago
  Thanks, I was thinking of exactly this post so it's useful you shared it!
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook The more you make it like a Mac, the less barrier there is for a user to jump ship to a Mac. I wonder if any of the increase in Apple marketshare is due to Windows becoming more Mac-like.

logifail 4y ago

> on the other the endless sea of enterprise customers representing a burden for compatibility Ah, those users. Users who want their OS to stay firmly in the background and let them get on with their jobs, and who aren't actually that bothered about "feature" upgrades every month or three. Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product.

mschuster91 4y ago
> Something is very wrong with a business when a big proportion of the customer base is viewed as a burden on the product. The curse of products that are - in their foundations - over thirty years old and used by billions of people. To expand: - any time Microsoft does fundamental changes to the look and feel or to management/configuration, enterprise users (the kind that buys tens of thousands of licenses at a time, and there's a lot of these) get pissed because on top of having to pay Microsoft for new software (to avoid not getting updates for EOL software), they have to spend significant sums re-training employees, testing upgrade paths, rework internal tooling... - if MS breaks too much or forgets to add compatibility modes/quirks, said enterprise customers are going to be pretty pissed because that can sometimes mean they have to buy new machines costing many millions of dollars (the market for hardware sporting actual parallel ports or ISA slots is insane, because so much early 90s hardware runs on that) - at the same time, desktop Linux distributions and macOS keep iterating and innovating without having that burden. Linux userland generally doesn't care a bit about backwards compatibility, and Apple announces BC breaks early enough / keeps support long enough that users can upgrade over time - aided by the fact that most hardware that people attach to Macs doesn't cost more than ten to fifty grands (=very expensive audio / video stuff) and has to be upgraded anyway to keep up with new features. That in turn puts pressure on Microsoft to keep up with innovation. - on top of that, technical baggage keeps holding back Microsoft as well. Apple ditched Intel long ago and now reaps the reward - mostly, no transistor space wasted with long-superseded crap dating back to the 1980s and way better power management - while Microsoft is more or less at the whims of Intel's mismanagement and the utter crap that third-party ARM SoC vendors throw onto the market and dare call a CPU.
- 4y ago