7 ms·

Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqS

• moron4hire 7mo ago
  I'm a huge fan of the book "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. One of the things that he talked about is the importance of using materials honestly: not trying to pass plastic off as wood, using the given material to it's best ability (even if itis plastic). I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.
• lateforwork 7mo ago
  > 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.
  • DaiPlusPlus 7mo ago
    That’s an odd way to spell Motif.
    • gnerd00 7mo ago
      please recall that 8bit color was the common capability for CRT displays at that time. Simple one bit display was also common. Any smooth transitions in gray or color had to use dithering, or be very clever in the way they chose the palate. Certainly some historic credit goes to Motif, but, there are "levels to this game" .. Motif did not jump out as "wow that looks good" IMHO. Obviously NeXT was extreme in a different way.. sort of like a symphony orchestra more than an office machine. It is genuinely entertaining to see people defend the dull and pedestrian UI in Windows 95.
    • lateforwork 7mo ago
      Motif 1.0 shipped in 1990. NeXTSTEP in 1988 had 3D beveled controls. So I believe I got the spelling right :)
    • steve1977 7mo ago
      Motif was also 3D, but the actual look of Windows 95/NT 4.0 clearly took some inspiration from NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, for example the window decorations.
      • DaiPlusPlus 7mo ago
        I accept that's possible - if not likely (and everyone steals from each other!) - but even-so it only amounts to to the gunmetal-grey default colours and use of a 1px bevel/inset effect; because NS and NT3/NT4's UX/UI design and concepts are just so different otherwise. ...but I'm not personally convinced: instead, consider the demonstrable fact that similar engineering teams, working on similar problems, will independently come to substantially similar solutions; my favourite example to point to is how eerily-similar the Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab Gripen, and Dassault Rafale all look - even entirely indistinguishable at an air-show in-person - despite having zero shared pedigree - therefore it's possible that - given the constraints of desktop graphics hardware of the late-1980s/early-1990s - that a user-friendly desktop UI built around the concept of floating application windows - will all be similar in one way or another. ------- My pet-theory for why that "Windows 95 1px bevel" look is so prevalent is because it suits working with premade UI graphics rasters/bitmaps using indexed-colors: for example, imagine a Windows-style Property Sheet dialog: prior to Windows 95, software would manually draw all of the elements of that dialog directly to the framebuffer (i.e. using unbuffered graphics) which was slow - ugly - and is the cmputer-equivalent of using a lavatory in a cramped bathroom actively undergoing renovations without any drywall/plastering). Even if there was enough vram for double-buffering it's still going to be slow: painting each and every button, checkbox (with the checkmark!) and tab header. So instead, many individual UI graphics elements could be prerendered (at design-time, hopefully by an actual artist), but not as single bitmaps for the entire dialog - but as an indexed color bitmap for each control type, so no slow/expensive draw/painting is required: only a simple blitbit for each checkbox, for example. Using an indexed-color bitmap based on a 4 or 8 colors palette (face, 3D light, 3D dark, transparent/BG; etc) means a single blob only a few hundred bytes in size can represent a chisel-cut bevelled checkbox - while integrating with whatever the user's preferred color scheme is. ---- ....of course now we'll just build a UI in Electron, to hell with memory usage or integrating with the user's OS appearance settings. Le sigh.
• PunchyHamster 7mo ago
  I think there is distinction there between look and functionality. They were functionally just fine; good even compared to some modern abominations. But the look was just plain and ugly, even compared to some alternatives at the time. > Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon. Yeah I just ran it with 2000-compatible look; still ugly but at least not wasting screen space
  • layer8 7mo ago
    Windows 95 was a vast improvement in looks over 3.x. Of course tastes differ, but I found it very aesthetic, not ugly at all, and used the classic look until Windows 7 EOLd.
• DaiPlusPlus 7mo ago
  By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company’s lifetime. (If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows) (I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)
  • derefr 7mo ago
    I think there was a period from Windows 3.1 to somewhere during Windows 98 (maybe right up until the release of Office 97?) where both first-party and third-party Windows apps were all expected to be built entirely in terms of the single built-in library of Win32 common controls; and where Windows was expected to supply common controls to suit every need. This was mostly because we were just starting to see computers supporting large bitmapped screen resolutions at this point; but VRAM was still tiny during this period, and so drawing to off-screen buffers, and then compositing those buffers together, wasn't really a thing computers could afford to do while running at these high resolutions. Windows GDI + COMCTL32, incl. their control drawing routines, their damage tracking for partial redraw, etc., were collectively optimized by some real x86-assembly wizards to do the absolute minimum amount of computation and blitting possible to overdraw just what had changed each frame, right onto the screen buffer. On the other hand, what Windows didn't yet support in this era was DirectDraw — i.e. the ability of an app to reserve a part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or to "run fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its screen-buffer entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps; and the only way to draw into those windows was to tell Windows GDI to draw for you. This gave developers of this era three options, if they wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something "fancy": 1. Make it a DOS app. You could do whatever you wanted, but it'd be higher-friction for Windows users (they'd have to essentially exit Windows to run your program), and you'd have to do all that UI-drawing assembly-wizardry yourself. 2. Create your own library of controls, that ultimately draw using GDI, the same way that the Windows common controls do. Or license some other vendor's library of controls. Where that vendor, out of a desire for their controls to be as widely-applicable as possible, probably designed them to blend in with the Windows common controls. 3. Give up and just use the Windows common controls. But be creative about it. #3 is where games like Minesweeper and Chip's Challenge came from — they're both essentially just Windows built-in grid controls, where each cell contains a Windows built-in button control, where those buttons can be clicked to interact with the game, and where those buttons' image labels are then collectively updated (with icons from the program's own icon resources, I believe?) to display the new game state. For better or worse, this period was thus when Microsoft was a tastemaker in UI design. Before this period, early Windows just looked like any other early graphical OS; and after this period, computers had become powerful enough to support redrawing arbitrary windowed UI at 60Hz through APIs like DirectDraw. It was only in this short time where compute and memory bottlenecks, plus a hard encapsulation boundary around the ability of apps to draw to the screen, forced basically every Windows app/game to "look like" a Windows app/game. And so, necessarily, this is the period where all the best examples of what we remember as "Windows-paradigm UI design" come from.
• okanat 7mo ago
  > Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon Ribbon also has a similar research behind it, just like Windows 95. For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly. I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. I also like it since it is very tastefully made for Office. 2010 was my favorite Office UI. It actually doesn't get rid of shortcuts either. Most of the Office 2003 ones were preserved to not break the workflow of power users. Where Ribbon doesn't work is when you take out the contextual activation out of it. Most companies copied it in a very stupid way. They just copied how it looks. The way it is implemented in Sibelius, WinDBG or PDFXChange is very bad.
  • derefr 7mo ago
    > I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. Well, yes, but that observation doesn't prove the point you think it does. People who were highly experienced with previous non-ribbon versions of Office, disliked the ribbon, because the ribbon is essentially a "tutorial mode" for Office. The ribbon reduces cognitive load on people unfamiliar with Office, by boiling down the use of Office apps to a set of primary user-stories (these becoming the app's ribbon's tabs), and then preferentially exposing the most-commonly-desired features one might want to engage with during each of these user stories, as bigger, friendlier, more self-describing buttons and dropdowns under each of these user-story tabs. The Ribbon works great as a discovery mechanism for functionality. If an app's toplevel menu is like the index in a reference book, then an app Ribbon is like a set of Getting Started guides. But a Ribbon does nothing to accelerate the usage of an app for people who've already come to grips with the app, and so already knew where things were in the app's top-level menu, maybe having memorized how to activate those menu items with keyboard accelerators, etc. These people don't need Getting Started guides being shoved in their face! To these people, a Ribbon is just a second index to some random subset of the features they use, that takes longer to navigate than the primary index they're already familiar with; and which, unlike the primary index, isn't organized into categories in a way that's common/systematic among other apps for the OS (and so doesn't respond to expected top-level-menu keyboard accelerators, etc, etc.) I think apps like Photoshop have since figured out what people really want here: a UI layout ("workspace") selector, offering different UI layouts for new users ("Basic" layout) vs. experienced users ("Full" layout); and even different UI layouts for users with different high-level use-cases such that they have a known set of applicable user-stories. A Ribbon is perfect for the "Basic" layout; but in a "Full" layout, it can probably go away.
• beloch 7mo ago
  People need to go back and use Win 3.1 or MacOS 7.x to realize what a leap forward Win95 was. MacOS 7.x didn't even have preemptive multitasking! The start menu and task bar made their debut and immediately anchored the whole UI. Since then, Windows has made incremental advances (with the occasional step backwards), but no change has been nearly so radical. OS X would not have been possible without the influence of win95. We're still living in the Win95 age.
  • cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
    OS X inherited its multitasking model from NeXTSTEP, which predates Win95 by several years.
  • LtWorf 7mo ago
    You have to use windows 95 with a computer from 1995 to realise how painfully slow it was compared to windows 3.
    • hollandheese 7mo ago
      Windows 3.11 loads in less than a blink of an eye on my Pentium MMX, while Windows 98 takes at least a minute to boot. This is with a 8 GB CF card as the HDD too, so the I/O is going as fast as possible.
      • M95D 7mo ago
        It's because of drivers and PnP and especially USB. When you load Win3.1, WinNT4 and lower, drivers load without scanning for hardware presence. It's just a disk to memory copy. In Win95, the first PnP OS, it scans for PnP hardware at every boot. That's slow. To prove my point, you could try loading some of the USB drivers for DOS or one of the ISA PnP configuration utilities (such as ICU - Intel Configuration Utility), see how fast it boots then! Also, if you left the network config untouched, it defaults to TCPIP+DHCP, and when DHCP doesn't respond (cable unplugged), it's another 30s delay. Win311 didn't have TCPIP unless you install it manually. It also asks you to configure it during installation - less likely to select DHCP if you don't have it. And then, in Win311, network is started by DOS (NET START in autoexec.bat), not by Windows.
• AnotherGoodName 7mo ago
  I'll also give the opinion that Apple consistently creates some absolutely crap designs and when they do this, release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing they are instead met with applause on the "amazing design". It's a tiresome pattern repeated for decades now. eg. The 'breathing status light' that lit up the room at night due to extreme brightness which meant every macbook of the era had stickers or tape over the LED with endless Q&A's of "How do i turn the annoying light off? You can't!". This crap design was met by articles extolling the subtle sign wave and off white hue. I kid you not. https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-look-at-apples-breathing-light https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-look-at-apples-breathing-li... Apple today seem to have acknowledged their mistake here and taken away status lights completely (also a crappy design hailed as amazing since they've just gone to the other extreme) which highlights the fact that no matter what they do they're hailed as being amazing at design, even when it's contradictory from their own previous 'amazing designs'. Apple doesn't just get a pass on crappy design. It gets endless articles praising the virtues of everything they do even when, if you think about what they did for even a second you'd realize, "that's actually just plain crap design".
  • gerdesj 7mo ago
    I recently had to get printing working for a family member on an Apple tablet. I'm not an Apple jockey so it took me a while to sort out and I've being using computers since 1980 and consulting since 1995. You tap an icon that looks like the outline of a rectangle with an arrow pointing up. Then you tap the name of the printer. Then you tap another rectangle with an up arrow and then tap the word "Print". I may have got the precise steps wrong but it really is that abstruse to print something on a tablet. Never mind that mDNS/Bonjour has done its thing - the steps to actually indicate that you want to print is frankly weird. What on earth is that box with an up arrow actually supposed to mean? Why does the interface switch from icons to text?
    • 1bpp 7mo ago
      Android uses the 'share' icon to represent the same thing, which is maybe a little more legible, but still feels like shoving way too many actions under a confusing modal they shouldn't be in. Even worse when apps implement a custom share dialog.
• Telaneo 7mo ago
  MS may not have been as tasteful as MacOS, but the functionality was at least there and it was easy to find and use. That goes a long way to make up for the bland-ish look. Then we lost even more taste, and eventually the functionality and user friendlyness, on both sides of the isle.
• pcurve 7mo ago
  What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it crashed, it crashed hard without warning With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare. I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.
  • analog31 7mo ago
    I once proved to my boss that a font was crashing System 7. And we always unplugged the network when we didn’t need it because a crash on one Mac could bring down every other Mac on the network.
  • cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
    With System 7 or Mac OS 8/8.5/9, if one used it for long enough with a stable software setup you'd eventually get a gut feel for what programs, extension sets, etc were most likely to invite a crash (it wasn't a terrible idea to reboot after a long web browsing session with Netscape for instance). It wasn't surefire, but one could get it into a somewhat stable state. You never stopped hammering ⌘S, though. Windows 2000 was incredible. Running it after having wrestled with 98SE was like getting teleported from a garbage dump to sunny meadow with a fresh ocean breeze. I've never seen machines transform quite as radically as they did when upgrading from something earlier to 2000.
  • giantrobot 7mo ago
    General protection errors and BSODs say hello, also to hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE to restart.
• throwawaytea 7mo ago
  I have good news for you. Even a Linux Mint Mate would make you happy again, let alone some of the windows 95 look alikes.
• ChuckMcM 7mo ago
  I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was functional but it wasn't particularly elegant. But the part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at Sun) were having the Workstation UX argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component was how there was always like 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing on Windows, and that was alleged to be "confusing and a waste of resources." And the counter argument was that different people would find the ways that work best for them, and having a combinatorial way of doing things meant that there was a probably a way that worked for more people. The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or get things done. For me getting things done won every time.
  • jimbokun 7mo ago
    Jobs did understand that. In the same quote he says Microsoft earned their success.
  • qalmakka 7mo ago
    This. Windows 9x-2000 GUIs were probably the pinnacle of OS UX, but were utterly ugly and boring as UIs. Their looks were unimpressive and boring, but they got the job done and they were easy to use and worked well. Windows 95 was like a 90 cents spoon - not particularly appealing, but extremely useful
• jeberle 7mo ago
  The "no taste" quote makes no sense given that Susan Kare did the many of the significant icons in Windows 95. She did the same for the Mac.
• jdswain 7mo ago
  The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.
  • sedatk 7mo ago
    Exactly. Windows Cairo was planned to be a competitor to NeXTSTEP, and later, parts of it made it to Windows 95 and NT.
• nextstepfan 7mo ago
  Windows 95 is a rip-off of NeXTStep
• JustinGoldberg9 7mo ago
  There's an entire is that loves 90s msft user interface. SerenityOS.
  • M95D 7mo ago
    SerenityOS was born dead. Let me explain why. No new OS today will ever be used by any significant number of people without 1) a working web browser and 2) hardware support for laptops, phones, wifi cards... you know... stuff people already have. SerenityOS might get a working browser. Not very likely, but it might get it. The #2 condition will only be solved if it somehow "imports" Linux drivers or wrap Windows binary drivers in a compatibility layer (like Linux used to have for wifi). Their policy to not use any external code or libraries is what will finally kill the project. It's simply not possible for them to rewrite any significant portion of drivers needed. Not even Linux can keep up and they have lots of contributors from the hardware industry. They could probably make SerenityOS a VM-only OS. That could work. Run Linux as a HAL and SerenityOS as a UI on top. But then, why not write a complete Linux userspace to replace Gnu?
    • renehsz 7mo ago
      SerenityOS serves as a cool side project for those who like to tinker with OS dev. I don't think it was "born" with any other goals in mind. Neither was their browser project, it just happened to turn into something a lot more serious.
• opan 7mo ago
  I have some nostalgia for XP, especially the Zune theme (separate download, black+orange recolor of the default), but due to the Classic theme being available in so many versions and often using it either for more performance or easier ricing (can easily swap the colors and fonts via official settings), I'm also nostalgic for the Win95 or so UI. I think 2000 was the oldest I remember actually using, but I used XP a lot and 2000 not very much. In the last decade+ of using GNU/Linux, I've also become very attached to bitmap fonts and simple solid colors, while I've grown to dislike curves and transparency. So sometimes I see a screenshot of some very old Mac OS version I never even used, and it just looks good, sharp, and clean to me, no real nostalgia involved. I think SerenityOS's vision of a unix-like environment with classic Windows UI is genius. I don't follow the project that closely, but on paper it does seem like a good idea.
• kettlecorn 7mo ago
  Microsoft has for short periods in its history put out good UX and design, but fundamentally the company doesn't defend taste and design. The company treats good design almost like a marketing expense only worth doing if it creates short term brand perception changes. Throughout its history it's had moments of great design when a particular leader creates a culture that promotes it, but inevitably someone higher up rotates out that leader and the culture resets. That has been the pattern with Windows, Zune / Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and many other consumer facing products.
• glenstein 7mo ago
  Amazing you say that because I almost posted that comment in response to that same clip in another HN thread, for the same reason. There's a tight integration between style, performance, and design on the Windows 95 and 98 that then now feels more like "true" Windows than anything since. I think Jobs was right about Microsoft later on, but they certainly had taste during their peak.
  • reddalo 7mo ago
    Performance started going downhill with Windows XP, and then even more with Windows Vista. Modern Windows doesn't feel snappy anymore, even thought we have the most powerful computers we've ever had. Sometimes I use some old Win32 apps, and they feel so responsive and light...
• bartread 7mo ago
  I think the interesting larger observation here is the perhaps both Microsoft and Apple peaked in their usability design between the mid-90s and late-aughts (I think Apple stayed at their peak for longer, particularly when you start thinking about the iPhone which, at the time, was streets ahead of what any other company was offering), and have both been on a down trend ever since. Why is that though? Why does that appear to have to be the case given that neither seems anble to do annything but get worse nowadays? And why hasn’t any other player managed to step in and fill that void? Clearly there are some broader forces and trends at play here. Is it pressure to monetize in ever more intrusive, user-hostile, and “micro-tiresome” ways? Is it that they don’t really have to compete any more, or at least not with eachother? What is going on here? I don’t understand. But I wish I did because then a way out might be easier to discern. Because - I still don’t think - Linux on the desktop (taking one aspect of the problem) is still necessarily ready to be the answer - certainly not outside of the technology, engineering, and scientific niches.
  • vee-kay 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • h2zizzle 7mo ago
    I think there's something to be said for the loss of institutional knowledge, as that was the time when the first set of Baby Boomers would have been transitioning out of operational roles or the workforce altogether. My experience as a Millennial is that they and older Gen-X, as a cohort, have been quite jealous of their accumulated expertise and generally reticent to pass it along, especially when they'd learned to keep every edge possible in the hyper-competitive job markets of the 80s and 90s. It's possible that a lot of knowledge just disappeared, leaving the younger generations to reinvent the wheel at a cuil over the circumstances that brought about the UX they'd grown up with.
• baq 7mo ago
  > Microsoft not having taste the liquid glass designers (and probably their managers and design vps) should be repeatedly punched in the face with that video
  • kmeisthax 7mo ago
    What's doubly-insulting about Liquid Glass is that Windows Vista did the glass thing better. Aero rivaled mid-2000s Aqua in design chops, and in some ways did a better job of showing off what GPU compositing could do. But most importantly Microsoft actually understood that text on glass needs loads of background protection, damn it.
• frizlab 7mo ago
  But did you use 95 when you were young? I was using primarily MacOS at the time and always found windows particularly bad at everything, including UI/UX. I guess we like what we know…
• jgalt212 7mo ago
  > Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon What a waste screen real estate, IMO. The only reason it's still around is because screens are now 2X bigger, and screen real estate has become cheaper.
• lstodd 7mo ago
  I generally agree, only that XP was okay in my opinion after one disabled all fluff so that it looked like 98SE. It's no wonder XFCE and to lesser extent Mate are popular, XFCE4 does a nice job of being a handy tool and not in-your-face design manifest.
• pjmlp 7mo ago
  Agreed, especially since in Europe there was hardly any Apple presence. It is no accident that to this day Demoscene is all about Spectrum, C64, CPC, MSX, Atari, Amiga, PC and there is hardly any retrogaming/demoscene focus of Apple hardware. Regarding Windows, I would place Windows 95, NT 4.0, 2000 and 7 as my favourite UI flavour ones.
• assaddayinh 7mo ago
  [dead]
• panzi 7mo ago
  2000 was peak except for them still having those tiny non-resizeable dialogs with long lists in them which you have to scroll horizontally and vertically. WTF? Your typical Linux DE was better at that even back then.
• 1970-01-01 7mo ago
  Steven Jobs conveniently ignored the Start menu when discussing the competition. He probably secretly admired it, as it was a complete success story for Microsoft. https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0717344B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0717344B1/en