7 ms·

Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. I think this all stemmed everyone wanti

Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC. Deleting "Product" might save windows, short of that, I am doubtful.

mulmen 7mo ago
At this point Apple isn't even Apple. Product ate the world. I don't remember the last time someone came to me with a customer problem to solve. It's all warring fiefdoms.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Perhaps AI is taking off because it is the only thing actually listening to customer problems.
  - Lammy 7mo ago
    Monkey's paw curls: listening to customers, except literally and 24/7.
  - nlawalker 7mo ago
    Best insight I’ve seen today, thanks for this!
  - macNchz 7mo ago
    Great point. Just last week I used AI to build a minimal replacement for a SaaS tool I’ve used in the past that has obnoxious feature gating/price tiers. My version isn’t nearly a complete replica, but it has the base functionality I want without having to feel like someone spent hundreds of hours perfecting price tiers with artificial limitations that annoy me just enough to upgrade. Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago
  It's like...like a game...of thrones...
- Already__Taken 7mo ago
  Someone called it a number of years ago once each kind of brand new apple device couldn't plug into each other without a dongle.
Lammy 7mo ago
> and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows And yet somehow none of them are as nice as https://eartrumpet.app/ https://eartrumpet.app/ lol
- accoil 7mo ago
  What makes that nicer than the built in volume mixer?
  - Lammy 7mo ago
    Per-app mixing on the first-level menu. I like SoundSource on macOS for the same reason: https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/
    - accoil 7mo ago
      I right click the volume icon in Windows, select "Volume Mixer", and it gives me per-app mixing. Which I guess is an extra click, as with eartrumpet you can access the mixer with a single left click on the icon.
- tangwwwei 7mo ago
  had to stop using eartrumpet cos it kept randomly pulling the cpu to near 100%. updating didnt help
- branon 7mo ago
  Even this cannot adjust volume levels independently for multiple tabs in the same browser, which I have always been able to do on linux with pulseaudio/pipewire. People on windows use browser extensions for this, with full access to all tabs/sites...
  - weitendorf 7mo ago
    Every time I try to build a castle in my swamp, it gets to a certain height and then it just sinks? STOP telling me about civil engineering, we fucking invented that shit. And NO, we have to build it in the swamp, it feeds us and keeps us safe, and I'm darned proud to say we invented that too.
MetaWhirledPeas 7mo ago
I've never been bothered by Windows's changes, and I mostly think they were reasonable. But for a number of reasons it's never going to be easy for them to gain total acceptance: 1) the massive backwards compatibility back to Windows 95 stuff, 2) the willingness to try new and/or silly things that Apple is too stuffy to try, and 3) the fact that there's only ever going to be one "flavor" of Windows; if we were stuck with one single Linux distro people would be complaining about that one too.
- conception 7mo ago
  Windows compatibility is pretty overrated at this point. There are a bevy of programs we use commercially that are quite old that just don’t work on 11, and not well on 10. Compatibility mode only gets you do far.
- econ 7mo ago
  If you have two candidate ui designs you pick the best of the two. If you have an established ui and a candidate the new design needs to be dramatically better. It has to scream superiority. If it isn't that you are just ruining ux. I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options. With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???
  - Induane 7mo ago
    I'm actually not sure what you're saying about GIMP. I mean - I understand the frustration, the "button groups" or whatever they did to declutter things made things (imo) worse; I don't think it's a good default. BUT I don't actually understand your sentences for the most part. I really had to work to glean what you were talking about. I'm not trying to be insulting here; sometimes I write in inscrutable ways too. But - could you reword a few things so I know what you're trying to say?
gnarlouse 7mo ago
Apple achieved it with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Apple then spent ~15 years un-achieving it. It started with iOS 7, and has culminated in the Liquid (Gl)ass era: a mess of unintuitive menus, terrible and inconsistent UI patterns, the lobotomite twins Siri & Apple Intelligence. Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.
- Aperocky 7mo ago
  It has posix shell, all is forgiven, can't complain about UI patterns that I never interact with.
  - rbanffy 7mo ago
    Exactly. Who could imagine Apple would eventually inherit Sun’s crown as the king of the RISC unix workstation?
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      No one, given how A/UX went down. It was a mix of not buying Be, having a reverse acquisition with NeXT, Jobs taking over the reigns yet again, Sun doing a bunch of bad decisions. Nowadays, following the spirit of old Apple, they only care the UNIX underpinnings as good enough, and that's about it.
      - rbanffy 7mo ago
        Still, they managed to bring Unix to the masses. On a RISC platform even. And their Unix is just fine.
        pjmlp 7mo ago
        UNIX had already won the server room by them with RISC. Lets not pretend outside IIS with ASP, later ASP.NET, Active Directory, Sharepoint, SQL Server, SMB, there were any other deployment scenarios left for Windows.
Traubenfuchs 7mo ago
> windows search no longer searches your PC Absolutely baffling, when the perfect, magical, instant, high performance search tool has existed for a decade at least: "Everything" One of THE BEST windows apps.
- jodrellblank 7mo ago
  If you like “Everything”, you might like https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/ - a 2MB, no install, Explorer clone designed to be quick and including a similar fast search.
  - Traubenfuchs 7mo ago
    As an ex winforms dev, I haven‘t touched windows since I got an M1 max.
tempodox 7mo ago
Microsoft has always known better than their users, they practically invented this attitude. Others then copied it.
canucker2016 7mo ago
> ... the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen ... If you take a look at the size of widescreen monitors, you can kinda guess why someone decided to move the start button/menu to the middle of the screen. I know Samsung and Dell have ginmorous 49 inch monitors. Start menu that pops up from the lower left corner of the monitor would be a bad UX - the user might not even notice that a menu had popped up if that lower left corner of the monitor is out of their peripheral vision. Moving the Start menu to the middle of the screen does go against years of muscle memory... moving your mouse/trackpad to the lower left, using the monitor border as a stop-zone though. I guess they didn't want to make it an option/toggle hidden in some dialog box somewhere...
- delecti 7mo ago
  You used to be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen. IMO the more sensible move for widescreen monitors is to move it to the side so it takes up less screen real estate. Windows 11 removed the ability to move the taskbar like that; it's stuck on the bottom (unless you seek out 3rd party software solutions). Also it should be noted that (at least as recently as September, haven't used 11 since) you could move the start button back to the left side.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    The article mentions they're (re?)adding in the ability to put it on any edge of the screen
    - delecti 7mo ago
      Which is absolutely a good thing, but my point is that they removed a feature when it had only become more relevant with time. They get no credit for the change to move the start button to the middle, which is admittedly defensible if the goal was to accommodate widescreen displays, when they removed the ability to move the taskbar entirely, which had been in windows for 25+ years, and also had that benefit.
    - array_key_first 7mo ago
littlestymaar 7mo ago
> I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it Given the repeating pattern of Apple shipping a hated operating system update in recent year, it feels like it's more “everybody wants to be Steve Jobs and no one actually achieves it including Apple”.
pjmlp 7mo ago
People having Apple in high regard should also learn about its history, and the almost bankruptcy that didn't kill the company out of sheer luck.
Frieren 7mo ago
> Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. In a world where consumers have less and less power, products are designed to please CEOs. Money is power, as inequality grows and concentrates the average user/worker/citizen has less power and their voices matter less. Today's Internet is designed for the needs of big corporations, users are there just as another product to be sold.

mulmen 7mo ago

At this point Apple isn't even Apple. Product ate the world. I don't remember the last time someone came to me with a customer problem to solve. It's all warring fiefdoms.

bombcar 7mo ago
Perhaps AI is taking off because it is the only thing actually listening to customer problems.
- Lammy 7mo ago
  Monkey's paw curls: listening to customers, except literally and 24/7.
- nlawalker 7mo ago
  Best insight I’ve seen today, thanks for this!
- macNchz 7mo ago
  Great point. Just last week I used AI to build a minimal replacement for a SaaS tool I’ve used in the past that has obnoxious feature gating/price tiers. My version isn’t nearly a complete replica, but it has the base functionality I want without having to feel like someone spent hundreds of hours perfecting price tiers with artificial limitations that annoy me just enough to upgrade. Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
_doctor_love 7mo ago
It's like...like a game...of thrones...
Already__Taken 7mo ago
Someone called it a number of years ago once each kind of brand new apple device couldn't plug into each other without a dongle.

Lammy 7mo ago

> and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows And yet somehow none of them are as nice as https://eartrumpet.app/ https://eartrumpet.app/ lol

accoil 7mo ago
What makes that nicer than the built in volume mixer?
- Lammy 7mo ago
  Per-app mixing on the first-level menu. I like SoundSource on macOS for the same reason: https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/
  - accoil 7mo ago
    I right click the volume icon in Windows, select "Volume Mixer", and it gives me per-app mixing. Which I guess is an extra click, as with eartrumpet you can access the mixer with a single left click on the icon.
tangwwwei 7mo ago
had to stop using eartrumpet cos it kept randomly pulling the cpu to near 100%. updating didnt help
branon 7mo ago
Even this cannot adjust volume levels independently for multiple tabs in the same browser, which I have always been able to do on linux with pulseaudio/pipewire. People on windows use browser extensions for this, with full access to all tabs/sites...
- weitendorf 7mo ago
  Every time I try to build a castle in my swamp, it gets to a certain height and then it just sinks? STOP telling me about civil engineering, we fucking invented that shit. And NO, we have to build it in the swamp, it feeds us and keeps us safe, and I'm darned proud to say we invented that too.

MetaWhirledPeas 7mo ago

I've never been bothered by Windows's changes, and I mostly think they were reasonable. But for a number of reasons it's never going to be easy for them to gain total acceptance: 1) the massive backwards compatibility back to Windows 95 stuff, 2) the willingness to try new and/or silly things that Apple is too stuffy to try, and 3) the fact that there's only ever going to be one "flavor" of Windows; if we were stuck with one single Linux distro people would be complaining about that one too.

conception 7mo ago
Windows compatibility is pretty overrated at this point. There are a bevy of programs we use commercially that are quite old that just don’t work on 11, and not well on 10. Compatibility mode only gets you do far.
econ 7mo ago
If you have two candidate ui designs you pick the best of the two. If you have an established ui and a candidate the new design needs to be dramatically better. It has to scream superiority. If it isn't that you are just ruining ux. I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options. With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???
- Induane 7mo ago
  I'm actually not sure what you're saying about GIMP. I mean - I understand the frustration, the "button groups" or whatever they did to declutter things made things (imo) worse; I don't think it's a good default. BUT I don't actually understand your sentences for the most part. I really had to work to glean what you were talking about. I'm not trying to be insulting here; sometimes I write in inscrutable ways too. But - could you reword a few things so I know what you're trying to say?

gnarlouse 7mo ago

Apple achieved it with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Apple then spent ~15 years un-achieving it. It started with iOS 7, and has culminated in the Liquid (Gl)ass era: a mess of unintuitive menus, terrible and inconsistent UI patterns, the lobotomite twins Siri & Apple Intelligence. Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.

Aperocky 7mo ago
It has posix shell, all is forgiven, can't complain about UI patterns that I never interact with.
- rbanffy 7mo ago
  Exactly. Who could imagine Apple would eventually inherit Sun’s crown as the king of the RISC unix workstation?
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    No one, given how A/UX went down. It was a mix of not buying Be, having a reverse acquisition with NeXT, Jobs taking over the reigns yet again, Sun doing a bunch of bad decisions. Nowadays, following the spirit of old Apple, they only care the UNIX underpinnings as good enough, and that's about it.
    - rbanffy 7mo ago
      Still, they managed to bring Unix to the masses. On a RISC platform even. And their Unix is just fine.
      - pjmlp 7mo ago
        UNIX had already won the server room by them with RISC. Lets not pretend outside IIS with ASP, later ASP.NET, Active Directory, Sharepoint, SQL Server, SMB, there were any other deployment scenarios left for Windows.

Traubenfuchs 7mo ago

> windows search no longer searches your PC Absolutely baffling, when the perfect, magical, instant, high performance search tool has existed for a decade at least: "Everything" One of THE BEST windows apps.

jodrellblank 7mo ago
If you like “Everything”, you might like https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/ - a 2MB, no install, Explorer clone designed to be quick and including a similar fast search.
- Traubenfuchs 7mo ago
  As an ex winforms dev, I haven‘t touched windows since I got an M1 max.

tempodox 7mo ago

Microsoft has always known better than their users, they practically invented this attitude. Others then copied it.

canucker2016 7mo ago

> ... the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen ... If you take a look at the size of widescreen monitors, you can kinda guess why someone decided to move the start button/menu to the middle of the screen. I know Samsung and Dell have ginmorous 49 inch monitors. Start menu that pops up from the lower left corner of the monitor would be a bad UX - the user might not even notice that a menu had popped up if that lower left corner of the monitor is out of their peripheral vision. Moving the Start menu to the middle of the screen does go against years of muscle memory... moving your mouse/trackpad to the lower left, using the monitor border as a stop-zone though. I guess they didn't want to make it an option/toggle hidden in some dialog box somewhere...

delecti 7mo ago
You used to be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen. IMO the more sensible move for widescreen monitors is to move it to the side so it takes up less screen real estate. Windows 11 removed the ability to move the taskbar like that; it's stuck on the bottom (unless you seek out 3rd party software solutions). Also it should be noted that (at least as recently as September, haven't used 11 since) you could move the start button back to the left side.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  The article mentions they're (re?)adding in the ability to put it on any edge of the screen
  - delecti 7mo ago
    Which is absolutely a good thing, but my point is that they removed a feature when it had only become more relevant with time. They get no credit for the change to move the start button to the middle, which is admittedly defensible if the goal was to accommodate widescreen displays, when they removed the ability to move the taskbar entirely, which had been in windows for 25+ years, and also had that benefit.
  - array_key_first 7mo ago

littlestymaar 7mo ago

> I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it Given the repeating pattern of Apple shipping a hated operating system update in recent year, it feels like it's more “everybody wants to be Steve Jobs and no one actually achieves it including Apple”.

pjmlp 7mo ago

People having Apple in high regard should also learn about its history, and the almost bankruptcy that didn't kill the company out of sheer luck.

Frieren 7mo ago

> Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. In a world where consumers have less and less power, products are designed to please CEOs. Money is power, as inequality grows and concentrates the average user/worker/citizen has less power and their voices matter less. Today's Internet is designed for the needs of big corporations, users are there just as another product to be sold.