Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by neverywhere 1753 days ago
Microsoft is trapped by its own success. It is used all over the place and these old uses are hamstringing its ability to innovate because the new OS may not meet the needs of all of its previous use cases.

This has been Microsoft's predicament since probably 2000.
1 comments
AlexandrB 1753 days ago
I'm not sure there's any need to "innovate" on the UI in this case. It's a stable, mature product refined for >30 years to suit the desktop use case and billions of people are familiar with it and its metaphors. There's plenty of room for innovation on new features, but why mess with what works UI wise? Seems like change for change's sake.
link
tailspin2019 1753 days ago
I agree, especially if you compare it to Apple's approach of small, steady, iterative tweaks to the UI.

You can still keep the OS looking fresh and up-to-date without completely reengineering the UI with every OS generation.

Especially as this "complete reengineering" was so so so much worse each time, with additional "new" layers of (incomplete) UI being added on top of legacy UI that would inexplicably still be there. Simply the worst of all worlds.

I'm a big fan of the old Windows 2000 era UI (which partly, amazingly, still exists today), but I have no desire for it to stay around if they can just come up with something fully cohesive and all-encompassing to *fully* replace it with.

link