Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

Customers come at the bottom of that list.

In a worker-hostile culture, employees at all levels can easily become passive aggressive towards customers, because they're caught between bullying by management, which they have no control over, and pushback from angry customers, which they also have no control over.

MS has always operated like this. It's a huge machine that spends far more energy on internal politics, PR and impression management, and status games than it does on producing solid, reliable, beautifully crafted products. Personally my experience of MS products has been that the absolute best products are ok, I guess, while the worst have been so incompetently made they've been barely usable.

Apple has begun to operate like this. Jobs was User Number 1 and could push back on UX he didn't like. He wasn't always right, and he couldn't cover everything, but his influence was always there.

Cook is more of an autocrat and I strongly suspect he has an unconscious passive aggressive stance towards users. Apple has consistently produced high-profile user frustrations during his tenure - Maps, keyboard-gate, the reluctance to support pro users, Catalina, general software quality, among others - and there's been no move to make structural and cultural changes that could make future mistakes less likely.

Meanwhile the share price is doing just fine.

We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements.

Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.

There should be some rule internally at Microsoft that institutes a complete ban on new settings UI unless it actually replaces old UI. The amount of times I need to fall back to the old UI is absurd. Also - I'm not sure programmers appreciate how jarring it even is to have the same settings presented in two places. It forces users to construct some kind of mental model of the behind-the-scenes-actual settings, because of course the two dialogs sort of match, but not quite. Usually there are a bunch of settings only in the old dialog, and a few new ones only in the new, and some interactions between settings are meaningful, so... you basically just fiddle till it works or breaks.

Any (significant) UI change is bad. Churn is bad. If you want to change the UI because the old one really isn't good enough anymore, you want to do so as infrequently as possible, and as completely as possible: no two-slightly-inconsistent-UIs-at-once. Realize that every change starts with a serious downside and needs a lot of upside to compensate.

So I get that Microsoft wants to update some of the windows settings stuff (and other integrated apps). But the aim must be for a fairly quick transition; no years of overlap. And if for some reason overlap is absolutely inevitable, then sorry, you're going to have to make both systems 100% equivalent. Yes, that means adding features to the old UI, and adding legacy options to the new UI - but at least that way there's a migration path. The alternative is the mess we have now: little point in even having all those settings, because 99% of users are merely going to be hurt by all those options they cannot actually control correctly.

I'd honestly rather have retained some legacy win95 era controls and have only one control for each option, than this mess. If you're going to fix it... fix it already!