[meanguy]

Historically Microsoft has flown by the seat of its pants with a lot of this stuff. You wouldn't believe how horrible the Windows 95 or Windows XP interfaces were right up to the last possible minute.

As might be expected with anything "flashy" or "cool" in a company not exactly defined by those adjectives, there was a shortage of skill and an overage of opinions. Only after true "ship it" crush set in did the less qualified people seem to scurry away and worry about little details like, oh, an entire laptop product line that didn't boot.

For example: kernel dev Mark Lucovsky got some perverse thrill by checking in the startup bitmap. In his mind, this granted him some sort of final authority over the branding of a product that sells a half billion copies. We'd let him yell at the testers and people providing feedback that it looked like shit -- then we'd giggle while Dave Cutler punched holes in the walls in the build lab. Then with egg on their faces and casts on their hands, they'd go do something they were good at while the designers and a few hand-picked nerds possessing the barest hint of aesthetic capability tried to save face at the last minute.

The variable now is Sinofksy who unfortunately seems to think he really knows design. This is the guy who thought that removing items from menus "based on the user's work habits!" was a great simplifying metaphor in Office 2000. You'd look at a menu for months gradually building familiarity with the product. Then that one day when you finally needed to insert a friggin' table, the damn option wouldn't be there any more.

I'm sure he has all sorts of data proving how great everything is. I can't tell you how much data we had "proving" that the original Xbox controllers were way better than the Nintendo or Sony controllers, too.

[randomfool]

Design has become much more important since WinXP and design is one of the pilars of Win8- Microsoft may not have taken it too seriously in the past, but it certainly is now.

The design of Win8 has been very meticulously planned- I don't think we'll see any significant changes at all.

I am curious though about how often they plan on updating platform apps such as mail- will we see significant improvements every 3-6mo, or will it be tied to the OS release schedule?

[ak217]

XP's interface was horrible after the last possible minute, too. Aero is great though, but, hilariously, from what I understand it's being thrown out in Windows 8.

[PJones]

My understanding is that it's only Aero Glass that's being canned, that being the smoked glass effect transparency on everything. Presumably it's a battery life thing, since even bargain basement onboard GPUs can handle it performance wise these days.