6 ms·

The most common form of Microsoft-hate usually centers around how a company of such gargantuan size makes such gargantuan fuck-ups. But this is to be expected o

The most common form of Microsoft-hate usually centers around how a company of such gargantuan size makes such gargantuan fuck-ups. But this is to be expected of companies of gargantuan size, and is certainly not limited to Microsoft alone (although recently they've had more than their fair share). My qualm with Microsoft is all the little things that they let slip through. Little things like having a control panel with 100 different links with nondescript names. Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? Were they so entrenched in the Microsoft way of doing things that they were accustomed to a shitty user experience? Or did the aesthetically minded engineer have his voice drowned out by the bureaucracy? If the higher-ups were yelling down the food chain, "build an Apple-killing UI!", I can see how they would settle on what became the app-centric look of Windows 8. But blatantly idiotic decisions around the little things like control panels, choosing wireless connections, and the sheer difficulty of navigation, make me realize that somewhere at Microsoft something is really fucked up.

nitrogen 13y ago
I for one preferred the old control panel, and disable category view on any Windows machine I have to use.
- ballard 13y ago
  Oh god, a million times yes. I really like the old windows way and prefer the osx pref panes. It seemed like MSFT confusing churn to say we changed something (and therefore "fixed" something) without knowing what made sense or what/if there was a customer problem. Instead it created a bigger problem of customer confusion (relearning). All companies including Apple have done this, but the takeaway is that not caring about customer impact is inevitably a recipe for strategic failure as others that do take marketshare (Zappos). It's also a dick move antithetical to providing quality product|service.
- Wohui 13y ago
  I thought he was criticizing the icon view, fair enough.
blntechie 13y ago
Wasn't control panel decently organized even in Windows XP SP2? Honestly, I don't see much difference between Mac's System Preferences now and Control Panel of Windows XP era. Searching these settings sucked in XP but Windows 7 resolved that. Windows 8 is one thing I can agree with you. It made using the PC unnecessarily hard for mouse and keyboard users.
- xarien 13y ago
  For my windows partition, I actually quite enjoy the move from win 7 to win 8. Here's a few things that I've taken a liking to: 1) Boot into desktop mode. This was introduced in 8.1 and definitely better for my uses than having to open a desktop from the metro UI in 8.0. 2) Win-f, I used to use win-r quite a bit to run programs quickly. However, with the changes MS has made with caching, win-f is just as fast and saves me from having to remember the commands for system preferences and the like. 3) Powershell. Win 8 ships with powershell and it's actually decent. 4) I have personally found it to run faster than win 7 as it shifts more UI load to the graphics card.
  - nullgeo 13y ago
    Windows 7 also ships with Powershell.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - Ygg2 13y ago
      Did anyone found it usable? I struggled to automate some recursive copy/filter of files. I don't remember that task taking that long to automate on Linux.
      - ballard 13y ago
        I found PowerShell incredibly crunchy. I will admit I was paid to drive hyperv from ruby remotely. What happened is that WinRM wasn't usable and that PowerShell was the lowest barrier mechanism to drive the functionality. It was nasty but thanks to WMI and some 3rd party PowerShell REPL that job was over. I wouldn't willingly give up Ruby much less Perl or Bash for PS. It seems like another "thumb their nose" CLR, C#, closed-source NIH proprietary lock-in tactic. Years ago I wrote tons of jscript to silently deploy lots of software remotely, and it wasn't as slow to become "productive" at as PS.
sgarman 13y ago
Things like you are describing are not always designed from the ground up the way you see them in the end. It's quite probable it built up over time starting with just a few controls ending in many. It's easy in retrospect to see this error but it's been built and shipped and probably lower priority for a company of that size. This is a pretty common issue for large companies or projects with many people aka design by committee.
weixiyen 13y ago
In terms of UI (flat content based UI) at least, they did not copy Apple, it was the other way around. Apple just did it better.
- wtallis 13y ago
  It seems like you're referring to the visual style, but I think the comment you were replying to was about the structure and behavior more than mere skinning, and about differences that far predate iOS 7. There's a reason the term is "look and feel", not just "look"; that second half is where Apple so often distinguishes itself.
  - weixiyen 13y ago
    No. I'm not referring to the visual style alone. Microsoft didn't just do flat UI to be cool. There was a purpose behind it to focus on content first, the same thing literally is being preached by Apple. Apple just executed better when it came down to it but they definitely borrowed many ideas from both Android and MS in terms of interaction alone.
    - cpayne 13y ago
      I love the live tiles in Windows. No idea why Apple ignored that...
- coldtea 13y ago
  That's just graphic design. UI is about how it's designed to work, what controls are where, what labels, what feedback it gives, etc. The same UI can have different themes easily.
pancakesown 13y ago
System Configuration (msconfig) for me was a huge, huge disappointment product after product by Microsoft. Sure it's for "power" users, but I think a lot of people want to make certain applications not start up at boot, and not all software makes it easy to do in application. For more than a decade I have waited for them to allow resizing the damn window so I can read something more than the first few letters of an application name, path, etc. Nothing!!!
- anonymfus 13y ago
  In Windows 8 they moved this functionality to new Task manager, and it's window is resizable.
angryasian 13y ago
I thought all the microsoft hate came from the anti competitive behaviour like - embrace, extend and extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish , along with documented anti competitive behavior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft and similar patent trolling against linux and most recent android.
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  People born when the antitrust lawsuit was prosecuted would now be in college. So I would expect that if what you said is true, going forward, MS hate explained by those reasons would decrease. It would be like people in their 30s today holding a grudge against IBM for their role in the PCs v. clones battle. Edit: I suspect the problem for MS is not lingering hate from the early-mid 90s, but more one of fading into irrelevance among people who are today 18-25 y/o
- codeulike 13y ago
  All of those things that Microsof were hated for in the 90s are just mainstream tech business practice in 2014. For better or worse, they were trailblazers that big tech companies since have copied, not just a one-off bad guy. Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are all doing exactly the same stuff, where they can and where they calculate they can get away with it.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    IBM existed before Microsoft.
    - angryasian 13y ago
      agree, these practices were standard and around before microsoft, but doesn't mean we still can't dislike companies for doing it.
  - rhino369 13y ago
gnaffle 13y ago
Here's a good story about the shutdown menu in Vista, and how it came to be: Original rant by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html Answer from the guy working on the shutdown menu: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.no/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html http://moishelettvin.blogspot.no/2006/11/windows-shutdown-cr... Another response from the guy that implemented the OSX shutdown menu: http://arno.org/arnotify/2006/11/the-design-of-the-mac-os-x-shutdown-feature/ http://arno.org/arnotify/2006/11/the-design-of-the-mac-os-x-...
- primitivesuave 13y ago
  This is an excellent set of reads for shedding light on why things at Microsoft are the way they are, thanks for digging them up and sharing!
- guardian5x 13y ago
  On every Microsoft topic a lot of old stories come up. I think many people at Microsoft know that things have been going wrong during the Vista development, and a lot has changed since then.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  It's simply astonishing that the "Vista shut down menu" meme continues to come up after all this time, and that the wrong lessons continue to be drawn. Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down." Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely understood. They still had strange labels like "Hibernate" and "Sleep." There was still a "Log out" option. There was still a "Lock" option. Turns out, none of that was the problem. The problem was that people didn't understand what the power icon did. Replace the icon with text that said "Shut down", and suddenly they knew what it did, and started clicking on it. They stopped opening the fly-out menu, and the "Paradox of Choice" went away. The lesson is not that you should stop offering choices to your users! You can offer simplicity and choice at the same time. Just stop replacing text labels with confusing icons. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 had a "Shut down" text label. Windows XP had both an icon and text. Windows Vista had an icon but no text. Windows 7 went back to just text. The only design that caused confusion was Windows Vista.
okwa 13y ago
In XP, when connecting to a wireless network, you are required to type the network's password twice. How the UI team came to that decision I'll never know.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
_delirium 13y ago
> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? Reportedly Bill Gates was one such person: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...
dspeyer 13y ago
> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? When I was at MS, we usually used the command line to change settings. It was horrible. It used GUIDs. Literally GUIDs. But it was a stable target. You didn't have to relearn it every nightly build. And you could script it. We sort of assumed that if the control panel would sit still we could learn it easily enough, but that assumption couldn't be tested until it was too late.

nitrogen 13y ago

I for one preferred the old control panel, and disable category view on any Windows machine I have to use.

ballard 13y ago
Oh god, a million times yes. I really like the old windows way and prefer the osx pref panes. It seemed like MSFT confusing churn to say we changed something (and therefore "fixed" something) without knowing what made sense or what/if there was a customer problem. Instead it created a bigger problem of customer confusion (relearning). All companies including Apple have done this, but the takeaway is that not caring about customer impact is inevitably a recipe for strategic failure as others that do take marketshare (Zappos). It's also a dick move antithetical to providing quality product|service.
Wohui 13y ago
I thought he was criticizing the icon view, fair enough.

blntechie 13y ago

Wasn't control panel decently organized even in Windows XP SP2? Honestly, I don't see much difference between Mac's System Preferences now and Control Panel of Windows XP era. Searching these settings sucked in XP but Windows 7 resolved that. Windows 8 is one thing I can agree with you. It made using the PC unnecessarily hard for mouse and keyboard users.

xarien 13y ago
For my windows partition, I actually quite enjoy the move from win 7 to win 8. Here's a few things that I've taken a liking to: 1) Boot into desktop mode. This was introduced in 8.1 and definitely better for my uses than having to open a desktop from the metro UI in 8.0. 2) Win-f, I used to use win-r quite a bit to run programs quickly. However, with the changes MS has made with caching, win-f is just as fast and saves me from having to remember the commands for system preferences and the like. 3) Powershell. Win 8 ships with powershell and it's actually decent. 4) I have personally found it to run faster than win 7 as it shifts more UI load to the graphics card.
- nullgeo 13y ago
  Windows 7 also ships with Powershell.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    Did anyone found it usable? I struggled to automate some recursive copy/filter of files. I don't remember that task taking that long to automate on Linux.
    - ballard 13y ago
      I found PowerShell incredibly crunchy. I will admit I was paid to drive hyperv from ruby remotely. What happened is that WinRM wasn't usable and that PowerShell was the lowest barrier mechanism to drive the functionality. It was nasty but thanks to WMI and some 3rd party PowerShell REPL that job was over. I wouldn't willingly give up Ruby much less Perl or Bash for PS. It seems like another "thumb their nose" CLR, C#, closed-source NIH proprietary lock-in tactic. Years ago I wrote tons of jscript to silently deploy lots of software remotely, and it wasn't as slow to become "productive" at as PS.

sgarman 13y ago

Things like you are describing are not always designed from the ground up the way you see them in the end. It's quite probable it built up over time starting with just a few controls ending in many. It's easy in retrospect to see this error but it's been built and shipped and probably lower priority for a company of that size. This is a pretty common issue for large companies or projects with many people aka design by committee.

weixiyen 13y ago

In terms of UI (flat content based UI) at least, they did not copy Apple, it was the other way around. Apple just did it better.

wtallis 13y ago
It seems like you're referring to the visual style, but I think the comment you were replying to was about the structure and behavior more than mere skinning, and about differences that far predate iOS 7. There's a reason the term is "look and feel", not just "look"; that second half is where Apple so often distinguishes itself.
- weixiyen 13y ago
  No. I'm not referring to the visual style alone. Microsoft didn't just do flat UI to be cool. There was a purpose behind it to focus on content first, the same thing literally is being preached by Apple. Apple just executed better when it came down to it but they definitely borrowed many ideas from both Android and MS in terms of interaction alone.
  - cpayne 13y ago
    I love the live tiles in Windows. No idea why Apple ignored that...
coldtea 13y ago
That's just graphic design. UI is about how it's designed to work, what controls are where, what labels, what feedback it gives, etc. The same UI can have different themes easily.

pancakesown 13y ago

System Configuration (msconfig) for me was a huge, huge disappointment product after product by Microsoft. Sure it's for "power" users, but I think a lot of people want to make certain applications not start up at boot, and not all software makes it easy to do in application. For more than a decade I have waited for them to allow resizing the damn window so I can read something more than the first few letters of an application name, path, etc. Nothing!!!

anonymfus 13y ago
In Windows 8 they moved this functionality to new Task manager, and it's window is resizable.

angryasian 13y ago

I thought all the microsoft hate came from the anti competitive behaviour like - embrace, extend and extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish , along with documented anti competitive behavior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft and similar patent trolling against linux and most recent android.

jessedhillon 13y ago
People born when the antitrust lawsuit was prosecuted would now be in college. So I would expect that if what you said is true, going forward, MS hate explained by those reasons would decrease. It would be like people in their 30s today holding a grudge against IBM for their role in the PCs v. clones battle. Edit: I suspect the problem for MS is not lingering hate from the early-mid 90s, but more one of fading into irrelevance among people who are today 18-25 y/o
codeulike 13y ago
All of those things that Microsof were hated for in the 90s are just mainstream tech business practice in 2014. For better or worse, they were trailblazers that big tech companies since have copied, not just a one-off bad guy. Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are all doing exactly the same stuff, where they can and where they calculate they can get away with it.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  IBM existed before Microsoft.
  - angryasian 13y ago
    agree, these practices were standard and around before microsoft, but doesn't mean we still can't dislike companies for doing it.
- rhino369 13y ago

gnaffle 13y ago

Here's a good story about the shutdown menu in Vista, and how it came to be: Original rant by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html Answer from the guy working on the shutdown menu: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.no/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html http://moishelettvin.blogspot.no/2006/11/windows-shutdown-cr... Another response from the guy that implemented the OSX shutdown menu: http://arno.org/arnotify/2006/11/the-design-of-the-mac-os-x-shutdown-feature/ http://arno.org/arnotify/2006/11/the-design-of-the-mac-os-x-...

primitivesuave 13y ago
This is an excellent set of reads for shedding light on why things at Microsoft are the way they are, thanks for digging them up and sharing!
guardian5x 13y ago
On every Microsoft topic a lot of old stories come up. I think many people at Microsoft know that things have been going wrong during the Vista development, and a lot has changed since then.
tanzam75 13y ago
It's simply astonishing that the "Vista shut down menu" meme continues to come up after all this time, and that the wrong lessons continue to be drawn. Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down." Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely understood. They still had strange labels like "Hibernate" and "Sleep." There was still a "Log out" option. There was still a "Lock" option. Turns out, none of that was the problem. The problem was that people didn't understand what the power icon did. Replace the icon with text that said "Shut down", and suddenly they knew what it did, and started clicking on it. They stopped opening the fly-out menu, and the "Paradox of Choice" went away. The lesson is not that you should stop offering choices to your users! You can offer simplicity and choice at the same time. Just stop replacing text labels with confusing icons. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 had a "Shut down" text label. Windows XP had both an icon and text. Windows Vista had an icon but no text. Windows 7 went back to just text. The only design that caused confusion was Windows Vista.

okwa 13y ago

In XP, when connecting to a wireless network, you are required to type the network's password twice. How the UI team came to that decision I'll never know.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

_delirium 13y ago

> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? Reportedly Bill Gates was one such person: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...

dspeyer 13y ago

> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? When I was at MS, we usually used the command line to change settings. It was horrible. It used GUIDs. Literally GUIDs. But it was a stable target. You didn't have to relearn it every nightly build. And you could script it. We sort of assumed that if the control panel would sit still we could learn it easily enough, but that assumption couldn't be tested until it was too late.