[DaiPlusPlus]

> This problem isn’t exclusive to SwiftUI though, WinUI/Windows App SDK is also mobile-flavored likely due to its UWP heritage, lacking basic desktop widgets like a tableview/datagrid.

Hah, it's far worse than that - Microsoft has let their desktop DX story stagnate for 15 years now (WPF was launched in 2006), since then Microsoft hasn't launched any new desktop-first UI framework for Windows, nor offered more than token improvements to User32, CommonControls, and WinForms since then.

It's no lie that everything MS has done in the UI-framework space since Windows 7 in 2009 has been a waste of time and money. It started-off with the "Metro" Windows Phone reboot, then the shoehorning of that into Windows 8, and the various XAML-derived frameworks since then - and none of them have attempted to tackle the very fundamental flaws (declarative data-binding doesn't scale, INotifyPropertyChanged breaks causality tracking and cannot be unit-tested, mutable ViewModels were carved by Lucifer himself!) - and as you said, no care or attention is paid to applications needing high information-density display.

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...so while all this is going on, the Office org came up with its own in-house GPU-accelerated UI introduced in Office 2013 which we can all agree is slow, bloated, glitchy (y'ever used Excel with a 500Hz mouse?), but also proprietary and undocumented, so the wider Windows ecosystem can't benefit from the Office org's framework which would have otherwise (almost) neatly filled the gaps left-behind by the Windows org.

I just want Satya to hire me for the job-title of "VP of Consistent User-Experience" and I'd make it a top-priority that Windows itself comes with a reusable spreadsheet+datagrid component that all applications can use - and it wouldn't cost the company more than a year and a few million dollars - but save billions by avoiding lost developer confidence - and would serve to remind everyone that native desktop UX can always be better than browser-based UX.

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Sorry, am ranting.

[geodel]

MS UI-framework story is essentially over. From now one they are all about converting all UI to ReactJS or some other flavor of it. This will include the whole MS Office suite.

It is all about financialization of software so art and craft wouldn't matter. End goal is simply cloud desktop with integrated AI/ChatGPT user interface which can be charged per user / per month basis.

[glhaynes]

...so while all this is going on, the Office org came up with its own in-house GPU-accelerated UI introduced in Office 2013 which we can all agree is slow, bloated, glitchy (y'ever used Excel with a 500Hz mouse?), but also proprietary and undocumented, so the wider Windows ecosystem can't benefit from the Office org's framework which would have otherwise (almost) neatly filled the gaps left-behind by the Windows org.

That's funny, just a few hours ago I was looking at some pics of Office 95 running on Windows 95 and reminiscing about how Office's menu bars and toolbars looked/worked differently than the system standard ones despite both being presumably worked on in parallel. Some things never changed.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Well, yeah - Ever since Office 95, the Office UI has always been different to the base OS in some way or another (I think Office 97 was the closest it has ever been to the "stock" Windows UI), but not outrageously-so until Office 2007 came out; Office 2010 is my personal favourite edition because it was the last edition that had a coherent visual design with a fast and snappy UI that didn't require gigabytes of RAM and a GPU to run with reasonable performance, even if Office 2010 cemented the fact that the high-degree of end-user software customization we used to enjoy was now on-the-way-out: now all we can do in Office is choose either Light vs. Dark scheme - and pick from a limited selction of tacky-looking ribbon background images as though we're picking-out a new Trapper-Keeper for the new school-year.

[Narishma]

I don't think Office 95 had a different UI than the rest of the system. The only thing I remember being different about it is the title bar where they introduced the gradient that was later picked by Windows 98 and 2000. The menus and toolbars looked and worked the same as other Windows 95 applications.

You may be thinking of Office 97, which introduced the "flat" look for the toolbars and the animated sliding menus.

[glhaynes]

I believe you’re right, thank you!

[doublepg23]

It's funny the most "consistent user experience" I have day-to-day is on GNOME.