[reikonomusha]

I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great.

I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. Apple can do it, which leads me to believe the ability to pull it off is largely cultural. Something or someone in Apple demands design that is relatable, good-looking, and consistent, and Google simply doesn’t have the same driving force.

Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.

(Edit: And to be clear, I mean Google’s design implementation in its entirety, especially beyond Android, including this very webpage which describes their new design.)

[izacus]

To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you.

That's fine - we get used to stuff and rant when it changes in ways we don't expect. But the beta on my Android phone looks amazing and IMO better than iPadOS I have on a tablet.

[throwaddzuzxd]

> To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you.

I've used an Android phone (including 2 Nexus 5x and a Pixel 3a, my current one) my whole life and always thought it looked okay, but not great. I've had an OnCall iPhone for a few months though, and everything just looks way more polished, sane, and even comfortable. The animations are smoother. The colors are more beautiful. The content density is better. And mainly, everything looks less generic.

It's a feeling and I'm only a sample size of 1, but I don't think "you're just used to it" is the correct answer here.

[reikonomusha]

I disagree. You really have to appreciate the scale of Apple’s efforts, and look beyond iOS, which everybody always gets fixated on. This is much broader than “I prefer how iOS looks”. Their documentation, hardware, software, marketing, audio communications, videos and commercials, stores, clothing, packaging, etc. exude consistency and extraordinary care to visual design. Apple’s design is pervasive and truly their identity. As I said elsewhere, they’re not perfect, but I’d claim with enough effort and without any logical gymnastics, we could measure this vague idea to be at least an order of magnitude greater than Google’s.

[izacus]

I work extensively with Android and Apple iOS/macOS (as part of mobile development and simply as a user of hardware) and I think your claim about Apple is pretty much disconnected from reality. As soon as you step outside the marketing veneer, there's plenty of Apple that is really far from "pervasive" of their "identity". Try straying a bit outside the most commonly used documentation pages, most commonly used customer journeys or even use macOS for extended bit of time and you'll see how your claim simply doesn't hold up.

I feel you're just buying way too much into the Apple marketing schtick.

[KineticLensman]

> Try straying a bit outside the most commonly used documentation pages, most commonly used customer journeys or even use macOS for extended bit of time and you'll see how your claim simply doesn't hold up

I've experienced this recently, as a competent (DSLR) photographer trying to find out what I could do with the camera on my new iPhone Pro. I picked up more by browsing TikTok than from Apple's own material. One example was how to create long-exposure photographs from a 'live' photo. The function was actually discoverable through the iOS interface but I wouldn't have thought to try it in the way it was being used in TikTok tutorial.

(whether the long exposure effect is comparable with the equivalent from a dedicated camera is a different question)

[reikonomusha]

I don’t think you’re right, but what’s more interesting to me is just how much our opinions seem to diverge! I’m a developer as well, I use Linux (Debian with StumpWM) as my daily driver, and Mac for work. I’m pretty familiar with Macs, macOS, and iOS I’d say.

There could be so many reasons why we diverge, but I suspect we’d probably disagree on what we consider a “design philosophy” or “the details” in the first place.

Maybe it’s true that I only see the “common” things (and it’s great we agree that the “common” things are consistent!), but I’m curious where you see seriously inconsistent or plainly bad visual design at the proverbial fray that doesn’t exist in other ecosystems of this scale.

[minusf]

with every release macos introduces design elements that are inconsistent with apples own design language, and/or simply horrible (like the notifications icon in preferences _with_ a dot).

esp big sur moved in a big way to a more fisher price look.

that it all seems more consistent than all the rest is just a sad statement more about them than apple...

[thanatos519]

Indeed, Apple's consistency and care are incredible. I hate their Fisher-Price products, and I wish Google would stop trying to out-Fisher-Price them.

[lopis]

Nah. I've never used any Apple products besides occasionally using someone's iPhone. I'm not used to the UX and to the gestures, but the interface is strikingly consistent. There's still so much clutter in Android. Fortunately, on Android you can customize most things, but Google is restricting more and more what apps can actually touch.

[joawowiij]

I've had a work iPhone 7 for years now and I'm still entirely confused by its UI due entirely to inconsistency. Where are my apps? Certainly not organized in a handy alphabetical app drawer, they're just randomly arrayed over multiple home screens in whatever order they were installed in, requiring effort to organize and then memorize where every single one is, or requiring search using the keyboard (slower particularly when you don't quite remember the name of the app).

The fact that I can never figure out in any given app how the back button is supposed to work (is it in the taskbar? or at the top of the screen? or am I supposed to swipe from the left?) or where the settings can be (sometimes in the app, sometimes in the Settings app) is deeply confusing.

Sometimes when the keyboard is up, swiping down from the top closes it, sometimes it scrolls. I find that I genuinely have no idea what's going to happen whenever I tap anywhere. The keyboard decides to just change words using autocorrect far more aggressively than my SwiftKey on Android.

Maybe one day I'll learn how to use iOS, but I know that it's definitely not "strikingly consistent".

[cpuguy83]

There is an "app drawer". Swipe left from the home screen. Click in the search box.

[joawowiij]

That just shows "Siri Suggestions" and I have to type in the box. I don't want to search, keyboards on phones are universally bad. I want an alphabetized list.

[cpuguy83]

Have you updated? It is an alphabetical list one you go into the search box.

[moshmosh]

> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.

Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hierarchies for UI elements, and not labeling things. That on top of "flat design" tending to make it hard to tell what the hell anything means or is.

(Apple, for their part, is getting increasingly bad on this front and have been since iOS 7, but mostly that's about discoverability for moderately-advanced functionality, not [except rarely] extremely basic UX fails that even this non-UX-expert developer recognizes as terrible)

[EDIT] it doesn't help that every time they upgrade, it seems like everything's totally different and layouts & UI paradigms have been redesigned from the ground up. This despite my steering them to fairly basic, vanilla-Android phones.

[saurik]

Yeah... I don't know if this works the same on Android, but on iOS I find the Google Docs app ridiculously confusing to the point where I often find myself clicking back and forth by accident through various dialogs in a loop trying to get to the "I just want to edit this document" step as it is so not what my brain expects that unless I stop entirely and stare at it and go "what was the stupid thing they expected me to click on at this point?" I just automatically click the wrong thing every time. Like, there is even a dialog that pops up in one of the loops I often get caught in with a "cancel" button that seriously cancels my attempt to cancel something, which my brain just can't wrap itself around fast enough :(.

[moshmosh]

I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.

[hnzix]

The wiggly sperm play progress animation is incredibly distracting. UI should never obtrude on the actual content.

[nahuel0x]

The sperm progress bar is the very definition of a jumping the shark moment.

[baybal2]

It feels to me an improvisation upon Clearlooks

[donatj]

I suspect it’s structural, and that Apple has a lot more levels of internal design critique — in everything top to bottom.

Google seems more loosely linked and in most things seems like the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

[pjmlp]

Naturally, otherwise how to justify PWA vs ChromeOS vs Fuchsia vs Flutter vs JetPack Compose.

[EvilEy3]

You just listed 5 unrelated teams that have nothing in common. What's you point?

[pjmlp]

Oh but they do, each of them wants us to write apps and devices with their OS/technology stack.

Lets see which one of them wins out the Google political wars on the long term of Google Attention Span (TM).

[mhoad]

Honestly from the outside looking in when you look at the big picture I don’t find it that much of a mystery. Long term plans are a unified model of computing under the Fuschia umbrella which is going to run everywhere from iot to servers. I don’t think they are subtle about wanting to control the entire stack of computing.

All the pieces are already in place (in various early stage forms) to make that move eventually from Android and Linux to Fuschia.

Additionally, I think everyone sees Flutter for web as some kind of joke right now but it seems pretty clear to me that this too is an early stage play to kill the idea of “native apps that live inside a closed garden App Store environment”.

I think we are close to seeing a world where the internet (as most people use it) is going to be moving away from the traditional document based browser approach to something a bit more app centric before long.

I find things like the Chrome team’s project Fugu suddenly make a LOT more sense when you start looking elsewhere at other things that seem unrelated at first (K8s, Fuschia and a few others come to mind).

They are all aiming to meet in the middle before long. People are already saying Safari is the new IE for example and I think that is about to become much more apparent in the next couple of years.

[ywoski]

Eh kind of but you are mixing the OS with the application framework to make it look like more things exist.

PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out).

So really it's three.

PWAs, Flutter, and Jetpack Compose.

Of which I think PWAs rightly exist alongside a native solution.

Flutter is sort of the odd one out and not sure where it will be long term. Although it's becoming more clear Fuchsia is probably going to be for IoT devices, so I could see Flutter being used as an application framework for them (which IMHO makes a lot of sense.)

[coldtea]

>PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out). So really it's three.

I don't think the parents point is that all those are frameworks.

Rather that they have two many frameworks and platforms, with no coherent unified platform strategy (Apple's iOS, macOS, ipadOS, watchOS are all the same under the hood, and their UI frameworks are also unified or getting there fast).

[mhoad]

The corporate arm of Google has some seriously strange Scientology style vibes about it and I think that is a big driver naturally in their approach to design.

If you go and read the material design docs for example, this isn’t my full time area of expertise but I don’t see anything controversial in there and there is no way in hell that they haven’t tested the hell out of it from every possible angle but the outcome is honestly kind of soulless.

My actual full time area of expertise is in running A/B tests and I’ll be the first to say that the link between “good aesthetics” and what actually works is much weaker than you might expect. See Amazon for another clear example.

[dragonwriter]

> I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design.

While people selling design languages like to pretend that they are objective, design is largely aesthetics which is largely subjective. IMO, Google is consistently far better than Apple, which consistently, at least since the iPhone era, has come off visibly trying to hard (though recently less so than in the over-the-top skeumorphism period.)

[piva00]

Design isn't just aesthetics... Design is interaction, is taking care of how responsive this or that action can be, it's much more about HCI than on how things look like.

You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design, you can't say that Google is consistently far better than Apple in overall design, you might prefer Google's aesthetics but design as a whole I can't really agree with you.

[dragonwriter]

> You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design

No, I’m not; aesthetic preferences are not limited to the visual, and preferences and relative importance of all the elements you identify are within the scope of subjective aesthetic preference. Though grandparent who I was responding to was focussed entirely on the visual—their whole criticism of Google design was: “...end up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great.”—so if I was focussed, even exclusively, on the visual aspects of design in my response it would have been appropriate in context.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The latest Chrome on MacOS has absolutely murdered the old Chrome desktop. There are now pointless circles around the quicklinks. You can customise the colours but you can't fully customise them, so the best you can get is a weird palette that doesn't look how you want it to look.

It's sort-of usable if you set up some custom wallpaper, but that takes a while to load, and while it's loading the page glitches with the original colour scheme on grey.

The experience was fine as it was. Now it's somewhere between irritating and infuriating.

[slver]

> Apple can do it

Apple is still slowly recovering from its iOS7 moment, so not a great example.

[reikonomusha]

I disagree; I believe Apple is a great—if not the best—example at the company-scale we speak of. Apple has goofed many times, but on the whole, their design philosophy has been both consistent and excellent. Apple typically gets certain new UI paradigms wrong, but doesn’t flub design on the whole: typography, spacing, white space, colors, animation, etc.

With all that said, it is difficult to speak purely objectively about design, so our opinions very well may differ completely reasonably. The best we can get are some large studies with statistical usability results, but, I admit, it’s easier to simply be handwavy. :)

[slver]

Apple may be the best example, but to me iOS7 remains a huge shift to shocking mediocrity they're still recovering from.

They're good, but they used to be better. Alas.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Ive has gone, and there's been a notable uptick in the workability of product designs and (more subjectively) in visual coherence.

Ive did best under Jobs. There were numerous disasters when Jobs was no longer around to keep Ive on the rails, including iOS7, the butterfly keyboard, the touch bar, and the clunky first few iterations of Watch itself.

Big Sur is more Fisher-Price than it could be. Visually it's not a classic, but it's also better that mediocre.

But the new iMacs are probably the best iMacs ever, without the backward references and very visible Design™ of the post-Jobs Ive years.

[slver]

Analyzing the contribution of particular individuals gives us no insight here. Sure, iOS7 definitely happened because Forstal was fired and Ive put in charge. But Ive didn't personally design any of iOS7, he was guiding others.

Apple just purely politically decided to reject everything they've done up to that point and bite more than they can chew, in precisely the same way Apple NEVER DOES, and other companies, like Microsoft with Vista or Windows 8 for example, often do.

This was very uncharacteristic for Apple, and yes the aftermath is still present to this day. We're at iOS15 almost, and they're still scraping bits of shit that hit the fan in iOS7.

Also macOS is turning uglier by the minute.

[blondin]

thank you. same experience on mobile here.

i was on my phone and skimmed more than half the article before giving up and admitting it's actually unreadable and that i have no idea what great new thing they were trying to present.

this is somehow baffling.

[daanluttik]

I have always preferred the cleanness of android over thr imho weird ui design of iOS. I get that people loved the hardware esthetics of iPhones over android phones but not the software esthetics. At least nog since material design started. The weirdness of ios having to put blur on everything rather than just having one clean background color. The weird need to have everything be a rounded rectangle with gradient. And Id also give android the lead in whitespace use and a slight edge in font.

[hesarenu]

I feel in general Android UI is vastly better than Apple. Apple had a better ui before Material design came into picture.

[tux1968]

Would be nice to hear a practical example or two in order to understand from where your opinion springs.

[wutbrodo]

I don't have much experience with iOS products, but I recall early in smartphone history being flabbergasted by the lack of basic affordances like a notification bar, or quick settings (eg to switch wifi on/off). I'd imagine both UIs are vastly different now, so I don't think that these examples are directly relevant. But I heard so much in those days about how iOS's UI was vastly superior and was so shocked by my first introduction to it, that I remain baseline skeptical of claims that it's objectively better than Android. People just seem too blinded to realize that their personal preference isn't a universal measure of quality. (This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI")

As far as picking practical examples, my lack of familiarity with iOS means some of these may be obsolete, but some obvious ones that come to mind:

1) Is iOS multitasking still as poor as it used to be? Eg, are split-screen apps on the iPhone still impossible?

2) Are homescreen widgets still impossible on iOS?

3) Are you still forced to open (eg) app links with lower-quality off-brand apps like Apple Maps, or can you set your preferred app the first time you open a link of a certain type?

I'm not even going very far afield here, as I'm only picking things that a) I know iOS had a feature gap in at some point and b) I would trip over at least weekly were my OS to have these issues. I'd imagine that one could do a little research and come up with more such examples (as well as examples where iOS's UI is superior to Android's).

[dd444fgdfg]

1) yes. but I think it's better for it and obviously plenty of others do too including apple

2) no, home screen widgets in iOS have been a feature for a while now

3) no, iOS asks me if I want to open in Apple Maps or Google Maps.

I think you're conflating features and design. Whether or not there's a particular feature (turn of WIFI), is not an attribute of the design. So you can fairly say the iOS feature set was too minimal, but you can't attribute that to UI design

[wutbrodo]

> yes. but I think it's better for it and obviously plenty of others do too including apple

This is unfalsifiable, and the line of thinking that generates it is trivially rebutted with a quick look at recent history. All of the limitations I mentioned were lauded as not-actually-useful by Apple (and their partisans) until they launched me-too version, at which point everyone immediately flipped to excitement.

[wutbrodo]

The parent comment said the Android UI was better; I took that straightforwardly to mean the UI in general. He does mention "since Material", so I can see how you interpreted it as a reference to design.

That just makes the downvotes more ridiculous! There's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine someone liking any design over another.

[iamtommcc]

To answer your questions:

1. Yeah, still not great. 2. No, homescreen widgets now exist in iOS 3. Short answer is "kind of". There's official support for setting default web & email clients, but many (most?) apps support setting a preference for e.g. mapping providers.

All that being said, I think you're coming at things mostly from a feature angle which is perhaps a different discussion.

From a pure aesthetic consistency, polish, and end-to-end visual experience perspective Apple still does a better job than Google.

Whether or not that extra dash of visual polish makes up for feature deficiencies or ecosystem limitations is a broader question of course.

[hesarenu]

This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI" - heh. This is not the first time i am saying in this forum. But before ice cream sandwich Android UI was plain ugly. I am not talking about UX or other features. But with Material design they have a better UI and even better UX as well. Apple was always known for it UI but that not mean you take that as a fact instead of evaluating it as time goes by.

[mind-blight]

I think the android back button is a good example. Having that exposed at the OS level creates a smoother navigation experience across applications.

[f6v]

You’d be surprised how many Android developers never got the difference between the back button and “up” action. I think this created so much confusion and inconsistencies.

[moshmosh]

Last time I was an Android user (and, for quite a while and for a couple different spans, an Android developer), that button was a ton of fun for when I wanted to see what random-ass crap the OS or application would decide to do when I pressed it. It was a "press only if you can't find something better to press" button given prime real-estate.

[EDIT] I think the fundamental problem with it is that, if an app screen deliberately presents a back button, there's nearly a 100% chance the current application will handle it in some way that makes sense for the current screen. With an always-on back button, the user has no way of knowing which of three handlers will receive it: 1) The OS, 2) The application, but not handling it in some way that makes sense for the current screen, or 3) The application, handling it sensibly for the current screen. You're rolling the dice.

[RuleOfBirds]

Not original commenter, but some examples of Android's superior UI/UX: - "Back" action is consistent and not in a different spot in each app. - Notifications are more actionable, organized, and clear. - Actions tend to be more clear and discoverable. On ios apps you need to try swiping, clicking, holding, and pinching seemingly random elements to "discover" basic actions. I forgot which app, but one of Apples literally starts you on some screens scrolled a little...and you have to guess you can scroll UP to find extra info and options. - So many extra steps to do anything. E.g. you can turn on/off wifi in quick settings for both, but on Android you can get to your wifi settings by long pressing the quick settings button, but in ios you have to open and navigate through settings. - Can't arrange app icons as flexibly or have widgets on home screen. - ios notification panel has like 3 different modes all with different capabilities and purposes depending on how you open it. - The app settings are ridiculous to navigate in ios. Sometimes they're in app, sometimes in the settings app's app settings pages, and iirc, sometimes in separate settings app pages altogether (e.g. I think permissions or accessibility settings per-app have a whole 'nother place to find them. - Notification page search bar has really poor, irrelevant results that display above the web results you really want. - Scrolling on ios is slower and more jittery than Android these days which surprises me. - Apps look squished and busy with text with ios' UI. Not always clear what's a button, what's swipable, whether you're deeply nested in navigation or at the top, etc. - ios seems to skip loading indicators and just show empty screens, which is really frustrating. - Very subjective but ios emojis have a pseudo-realistic creepy vibe and icky feel to me.

Etc, etc, I have more but I'll stop there :-/ I love my MacBook and use ios for a few professional needs, but ios feels almost unusable in comparison as an everyday device to me.

[piva00]

> E.g. you can turn on/off wifi in quick settings for both, but on Android you can get to your wifi settings by long pressing the quick settings button, but in ios you have to open and navigate through settings.

This is false, you can do the same on iOS nowadays... Long press the WiFi icon from the tray (after expanding the WiFi/airplane mode/Bluetooth widget box) and you will get to the list of networks.

A bunch of other statements are also not completely true, such as the widgets on Home Screen (or are you talking about some specific type of widgeting feature that iOS doesn't have?).

> ios notification panel has like 3 different modes all with different capabilities and purposes depending on how you open it.

Can you show me this? Can't replicate that in any of my current iOS devices, not that notifications on iOS is good but this issue with Notification Centre has been fixed for a while.

> Scrolling on ios is slower and more jittery than Android these days which surprises me.

How did you measure this? I just went to try this out, scrolled through some browser pages and apps that have infinite scrolling my iPhone 12 Pro Max and my flatmate's OnePlus 9 Pro, no idea what you mean because the experience is, for me, very similar.

> Apps look squished and busy with text with ios' UI. Not always clear what's a button, what's swipable, whether you're deeply nested in navigation or at the top, etc.

This is due to you not using iOS perhaps, I have the same issue with Android after not using it at all for 6+ years, I don't understand the interface and what is interactive or not.

> ios seems to skip loading indicators and just show empty screens, which is really frustrating.

I don't experience this and it seems to be much more a critic of apps you've experienced it rather than iOS as an OS.

I am not an Apple fan, I just use their products because they suffice my use cases, but I feel you conflated some very different issues and subjective judgment stated as facts.

[hesarenu]

The general UI design is far simpler cleaner than iOS. iOS feels very dated. Notification dropdown is a big UI improvement. Navigation is better because of back button unlike the tiny back link in iOS. They did change the time picker which i had issues before because of the scroll picker(my hands are sweaty). These are wrt iPad, which i use mostly for testing iOS apps not a normal day to day use.

[reikonomusha]

For better or for worse, being functional and having good (visual) design can often be measured distinctly. Ideally they go hand-in-hand (i.e., good visual design ought to positively serve functionality). Most of Android’s visual design, regardless of functional convenience and consistency, feels cobbled together by people who downloaded Inkscape. The typography, iconography, animation, etc. are, in my opinion, all off.

[hesarenu]

Its your opinion. As for me Android has a visual consistency which is not matched by iOS. As is said before iOS is dated. Though it has been dated fore few years. I still remember when i first got the iPad and saw the UI. I was like maybe i am on a older version. Nope latest version. Material design has been improving, need to see if this re-design is better than before.

[cesarvarela]

Let me blow your mind:

If you swipe anywhere from the left edge of the display to the right, you can go to the previous screen, kind of like pages in a book.

(Doesn’t work on all apps, probably from developers than aren’t aware of the convention)

[hesarenu]

Let me blow your mind

My fellow developer did not know that you can long press on mac bottom bar like for years. He observed it when i did it. I think i even noticed it after many days. That's the problem with hidden gestures. Android the same issue when you hide the bottom bar. I just keep it on, swiping is anyway difficult when palms are sweaty.

[izacus]

> Would be nice to hear a practical example or two in order to understand from where your opinion springs.

Kinda amazing how all "practical examples" are being downvoted by Apple fans on this site :D

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Apple sells tangible goods. Google is a middleman selling online ad services. Apple's customers are consumers. Google's customers are advertisers. Do advertisers care about Google's choice of colors and shapes. Google only needs to be effective at one thing: selling online ad services.

Without advertising revenue the middleman is doomed. Not true for companies, like hardware vendors, that sell products (instead of giving them away as a means to enable more collection of data about users, who will be the targets of online ads).

[andrekandre]

  Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.

google's chat ux disaster would say otherwise...

[mponw]

My guess is they want to avoid any signals of dominance. It's not that they cannot afford to look stylish.

The question was probably "how modern or innovative do we want to look?" and the answer something like: "let's better lay low for the next years with all the public scrutiny and the risk of a breakup".

Microsoft has employed the same strategy for years, IMO.