The story of that theme seems strange to me. On one hand, Raymond Chen says[1] it was a decoy in order to avoid leaking in-development Luna outside Microsoft. On the other, Microsoft’s own Office XP and VS .NET (before 2005) have styling that fits Watercolor better than it does Luna. I don’t know how to reconcile these facts.
Why do Windows 10/11 windows look like such garbage compared to this? Now window borders are invisible and the title bar is just one single color instead of that nice fade.
Because one of the principal designers of Windows 8 liked print design and thought computer UIs could learn from its literally centuries-long history[1]. I can’t even say he didn’t have a point (in particular, the “wasted space everywhere” cries don’t really provoke that much sympathy from me—waste, yes, everywhere, no). But it does indeed not seem to be working out for conventional KVM interfaces and not even that well for touch.
As a side note, Google’s Material Design (mentioned in neighbouring comments) actually had a fairly detailed physics (metaphysics? metaphorical physics?) worked out[2] in the first version, but the second regressed to a list of widgets and metrics, and then the everything-is-flat current one arrived.
Everything is just slow, slow, slow. Gotta hunt around for the window border instead of seeing it. Gotta hut for the edges between buttons. Gotta hunt for where the title bar becomes the window content. Gotta try to scroll every list because you can't immediately see which ones continue beyond the visible area.
You don't get promoted or get to keep your job by leaving the UI untouched for years.
That would be a cool Dilbert style yearly performance review:
- So what did you do this year?
- Nothing. I just left everything the way it's been for the past 10 years.
- Fantastic! I see a promotion in your future
Same goes for MacOS, iOS and Android UX too. They keep making changes for the sake of changes which are downgrades most of the time because the UI teams need to justify their salaries.
Windows 2000 was build 2195, 2210 is only 15 days later. It's reasonable that branding was switched to Whistler pretty early, working on the next version, but this build is still extremely close to just being a plain Windows 2000.
And earlier builds had the way cooler Watercolor theme[2] (IMHO) than the final Fisher-Price-looking theme.
1. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Whistler
2. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Watercolor