[4cao]

The history of Microsoft is the history of workarounds on top of workarounds, year after year, rinse and repeat. Here's a novel thought: instead of providing yet another iteration of workarounds for the power user, how about just fixing it for every user.

Take for instance the Start Menu. When the Win-X "quick access" menu was added years ago, it was essentially an admission that the Start Menu is not the best way to start at least some things. It didn't really get much better since but the Search and Run functionality was integrated into it. Now one of the PowerToys replaces the Win-R menu as a yet another clumsy attempt at fixing the Start Menu by bypassing it. And it seems no new functionality beyond what is already implemented elsewhere is being added, except everything will of course get a different alternate look. Some more discussion about it here: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/44

It looks like there isn't anyone at Microsoft who can take a look at the big picture and decide what they actually want to accomplish with the UI in the medium run. Different groups of people come and go, keep adding different things, abandon them, after a while somebody else starts off with yet another approach in parallel without drawing any conclusions from the failed previous one, etc. The lack of co-ordination really amazes me. Microsoft used to once advertise with the slogan "Where do you want to go today?" These days it seems to me they're not going anywhere, just running in circles.

[WorldMaker]

I think it's an interesting refutation to Google's "one search box to rule them all" philosophy. Over the course of Windows Vista through 8.1 Microsoft attempted just that at a consumer scale that Google could only wish they could impact "where they live". (As much as people assume people live in the browser, Windows is still Windows.) The evidence mounted up overwhelmingly that people didn't want just one search box, that Google is wrong (they've yet to unify their search boxes like they claim to philosophically anyway), and that the context of where a search box appears matters, and so Windows 10 has seen the re-separation of search boxes.

One of those "context" switches that Microsoft finds is a useful context to know is "power user" versus "regular user": regular user Start Menu versus power user Win+X, regular user Search and Run versus power user Win+R/PowerTopys Run. (At one point in Windows 8 Microsoft tried to use the Win+R shortcut for something that wasn't "power user run a thing" and nearly saw a revolt.) It becomes a self-selecting "reveal" of different feature sets to match what features the user thinks they are ready for.

[genr8]

Microsoft is so large, and so disjointed, its not as simple as you make it out to be. The corporate culture prevents it. You forgot all the bureaucratic middle managers whos sole job is to enforce IT Silo'ing and gatekeep other teams from intruding into their area. I hate to say it like this, but the boomers created this mentality on purpose. Its rampant in incumbent tech/IT/dev, and fundamentally opposed to freedom of information and open source, because its focused on maintaining control and power and keeping people in their pre-designated place. If it was only a tech problem, we could absolutely solve this, but its a socio-political one first.