3 ms·

Also Microsoft couldn’t match Apple taste with effectively all resources in the world. And they really tried. True taste is interesting because is more like a

by dmarcos 2mo ago

Also Microsoft couldn’t match Apple taste with effectively all resources in the world. And they really tried. True taste is interesting because is more like a worldview, a modus operandi, a continuous process… those are harder to replicate.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
MetaWhirledPeas 2mo ago
Funny you mention Apple because they are proof that taste can be king. Yeah they also kidnap their users into their ecosystem and make smart business decisions, but what really differentiates them is taste. And Microsoft is sort of the counterpoint. There's more than one way to succeed I guess.
- kazinator 2mo ago
  Or, used to be proof.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  Apple's taste during the 1990's almost killed the company.
  - imhoguy 2mo ago
    Because let's admit it, later it was a taste of one guy who got another "chance" or the company got a "chance" to be lead by him. Now as he is gone the company still carries that taste legacy with better or worse results.
  - Earw0rm 2mo ago
    It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack, and that in turn was making them uncompetitive in application support, which would likely have killed them. It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would never have won out.
pjmlp 2mo ago
Apple the company that was rescued from bankruptcy 30 years ago due to a miracle, yeah taste gets nowhere without a big bank account. Lets see if they will mostly sell iPhones to the end of their time now.
Earw0rm 2mo ago
That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental to the process of making the product. Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org structure which generated stupid requirements. And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design outcomes.
fodkodrasz 2mo ago
Microsoft was superior in both in the windows 95-2000 era, and with Metro (on phone, on desktop it was half-assed). The problem was when they started to try matching Apple, instead of staying true to the core of their own aesthetics. Both the Fisher-Price XP style which was bot zeitgeist, and an attempt to answer for the skeumorphic tragedy apple was pursuing, and the recent floats, spacings, central taskbar mimichking the dock, etc...
- bigDinosaur 2mo ago
  I'm not really convinced Metro was better than anything Apple at the time, even though it was refreshing and interesting. Was it actually easier to use? I didn't really find that nor see it with others.
  - fodkodrasz 2mo ago
    I used Windows Phone, and it was great, minimal, intuitive, and prodcutive for most usecases I had (email, texting, calls, maps/navigation, banking, listening to music, light productivity, taxi). It did not fit the gimmicky ad ridden hellscape we live in now, I'm not sure how it got so far in Microsoft. Possibly from some old memories of living of selling products instead of creating addictions and selling data of the addicts. Version 7 and 8 were great UX-wise, I have mixed memories about 10, mostly performance regressions bugged me, but was still faster than most non-flagship androids of the time... yet sometimes it felt sluggish to WP7 on potato hardware. The typography based UI was both fast and very readable and focused for well thought out apps. The standardized navigation buttons (on android button order may vary be vendor/model), and the clear gesture based navigation instead of hidden intearctions everywhere (long press, 3d press, app switching gestures etc), but using gestures for in-app navigaton were all easy to understand and grasp even by the elderly. It was readable, well organized, nobullshit, but that is not what the masses crave. Metro was like how a "dumb smartphone" should be, in my opinion. On desktop ot didn't work well. The live tiles were still a good idea, and if the taskbar supported them, it might have been a good idea (or not, was not tried, but could have be a bit like the old NeXT style refined, not stagnated and skeumorphized like on the mac).
petra 2mo ago
Microsoft's taste was "good enough". They lost because of an app ecosystem, and because of Apple's brand power, the same way beautiful Chinese shoes will lose to Nike.
carlosjobim 2mo ago
Nokia was able to match and surpass Apple in taste on all fronts with their N9 phone and MeeGo OS. So it is possible, but how to do it I couldn't tell, since all large organizations are saturated in corruption.

by dmarcos 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

MetaWhirledPeas 2mo ago

Funny you mention Apple because they are proof that taste can be king. Yeah they also kidnap their users into their ecosystem and make smart business decisions, but what really differentiates them is taste. And Microsoft is sort of the counterpoint. There's more than one way to succeed I guess.

kazinator 2mo ago
Or, used to be proof.
pjmlp 2mo ago
Apple's taste during the 1990's almost killed the company.
- imhoguy 2mo ago
  Because let's admit it, later it was a taste of one guy who got another "chance" or the company got a "chance" to be lead by him. Now as he is gone the company still carries that taste legacy with better or worse results.
- Earw0rm 2mo ago
  It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack, and that in turn was making them uncompetitive in application support, which would likely have killed them. It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would never have won out.

pjmlp 2mo ago

Apple the company that was rescued from bankruptcy 30 years ago due to a miracle, yeah taste gets nowhere without a big bank account. Lets see if they will mostly sell iPhones to the end of their time now.

Earw0rm 2mo ago

That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental to the process of making the product. Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org structure which generated stupid requirements. And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design outcomes.

fodkodrasz 2mo ago

Microsoft was superior in both in the windows 95-2000 era, and with Metro (on phone, on desktop it was half-assed). The problem was when they started to try matching Apple, instead of staying true to the core of their own aesthetics. Both the Fisher-Price XP style which was bot zeitgeist, and an attempt to answer for the skeumorphic tragedy apple was pursuing, and the recent floats, spacings, central taskbar mimichking the dock, etc...

bigDinosaur 2mo ago
I'm not really convinced Metro was better than anything Apple at the time, even though it was refreshing and interesting. Was it actually easier to use? I didn't really find that nor see it with others.
- fodkodrasz 2mo ago
  I used Windows Phone, and it was great, minimal, intuitive, and prodcutive for most usecases I had (email, texting, calls, maps/navigation, banking, listening to music, light productivity, taxi). It did not fit the gimmicky ad ridden hellscape we live in now, I'm not sure how it got so far in Microsoft. Possibly from some old memories of living of selling products instead of creating addictions and selling data of the addicts. Version 7 and 8 were great UX-wise, I have mixed memories about 10, mostly performance regressions bugged me, but was still faster than most non-flagship androids of the time... yet sometimes it felt sluggish to WP7 on potato hardware. The typography based UI was both fast and very readable and focused for well thought out apps. The standardized navigation buttons (on android button order may vary be vendor/model), and the clear gesture based navigation instead of hidden intearctions everywhere (long press, 3d press, app switching gestures etc), but using gestures for in-app navigaton were all easy to understand and grasp even by the elderly. It was readable, well organized, nobullshit, but that is not what the masses crave. Metro was like how a "dumb smartphone" should be, in my opinion. On desktop ot didn't work well. The live tiles were still a good idea, and if the taskbar supported them, it might have been a good idea (or not, was not tried, but could have be a bit like the old NeXT style refined, not stagnated and skeumorphized like on the mac).

petra 2mo ago

Microsoft's taste was "good enough". They lost because of an app ecosystem, and because of Apple's brand power, the same way beautiful Chinese shoes will lose to Nike.

carlosjobim 2mo ago

Nokia was able to match and surpass Apple in taste on all fronts with their N9 phone and MeeGo OS. So it is possible, but how to do it I couldn't tell, since all large organizations are saturated in corruption.