241–250 of 355 posts
Huh... I had no idea the Windows 1.0 logo looked like that. It's actually rather timeless. Kinda interesting that they've brought it back a little with the new logo.
Or better yet, Microsoft should create a new position called President of Simplification and Branding, then have all employees, including Steve Balmer, report to him.
The first thing he should do in his new role is fire Balmer.
The second thing he should do, which is alluded to in his presentation, is roll up all subsets of a given product into a single SKU. For example Windows 7 has the following versons: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. This does not include sub-editions, upgrade editions, and family pack editions. All of this should simply roll into a single version that includes all features. Let it be named Windows 7. Do the same thing for the upcoming Windows 8. Drop 32 bit support outright.
For windows set the price for this single version to $50.00.
After making this change alone, you could probably eliminate 500 FTE head count. Do this across all product lines and you could eliminate thousands of jobs, and numerous levels of management, a move that would reduce costs, but far more importantly interject some much needed nimbleness into the organization.
Next combine all like products that compete with each other. For example, consolidate Windows Media Player, Zune, and XBox Music product groups into a single product group.
Kill notepad. Acquire Light Table or Sublime Text editor and include it with every copy of the OS.
Fire 1 and 3 program managers. Fire 2 in 3 product managers.
Increase the base salary of every engineer by $30,000.00 or rebase their salary to $200,000, whichever is more.
I'm just getting started but you get the point ...
Dear everybody, Are you paying attention? This is how you build a portfolio. Did microsoft ask this person to do this? No. But he did it, and it's brilliant, and now he can put it in his portfolio under "speculative work". And then he gets a job doing this. I can't tell you how many people I talk to (I live in a college town, and frequently go to bars and strike up conversations with people) who just finished, or are…
This can go either way. Remember when dcurtis did a unsolicited spec redesign for the American Airlines website? We here at HN tore him a new one (justifiably so, it ignored so many critical aspects of the business, and came off as entirely impractical). When you do something like this, you better be sure you nail every single angle of it. FWIW, I normally hate spec redesigns - they're usually positioned in a pompous…
This is great. It will never work. A brand has to reflect the culture of how a product is made, sold, experienced, etc... Microsoft is not about simplicity, it's about feature creep. Microsoft sells software and licenses to big companies. Big companies don't want simple, they want value for their money - features! A better brand promise would be Microsoft - It Does Everything! Look at Windows 8. Is it going metro onl…
I think you're mistaking feature creep with their crazy good backwards compatibility. They simply can't remove anything.
Have any companies of this size done this successfully? It would require a lot of work but could help them greatly in the consumer space.
Xbox is a good example of this working in a new cooler market , it has so few ties with microsoft that some of my 10 - 15 year old cousins who dislike microsoft don't even realize the xbox is a microsoft product.
Allow me to be contrarian for a moment and say I don't like it. It's a nice experiment, and it's better than the new Windows logo, but to me it fails on a few different grounds. -- The typographic mark is less substantial, and the typeface is just poor. The existing logo isn't pretty, but it works just fine, and the arrow device connecting the O and S is cute. -- The use of a lower case "m" is just a slave to a trend…
It's not contrarian when a full half of the top-level commenters say they don't care for it. And really this seems to me pretty much par for the course for design work here on HN. Every single time someone posts an attempt at some design work that they have taken very seriously, it quickly degrades into a contest to see whom can say "meh" the most dramatically.
A great brand design is like a great API -- it's easy to build something that can pass casual scrutiny, but it's damn hard to make something that can survive decades in the field, appeal to many different type of customer, withstand changes in technology/aesthetic, and grow elegantly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He may be recognizable in a design discussion on HN, but hardly out of this context. Same goes for this guy. That of course is not to say that these sorts of efforts should be avoided, but I do think you are overestimating their impact.
I think you are underestimating the impact of being well known on HN for something like that. Nearly everybody who matters reads this site at least sometimes.
I can translate "[n]early everybody who matters" in this context, and it means a subset of Silicon Valley that thinks it is the entire universe. Hacker News these days is TMZ for Silicon Valley, with the occasional dash of Lisp thrown in. Conversations are usually way off-base and are wildly misrepresentative of reality in many cases. Half the discussions are folks opining on how poorly someone is running a business after digesting several years of Hacker News articles during their work hours at someone else's company, with no actual experience at the helm. I went after one guy for proclaiming that Tim Cook hasn't done shit for Apple in his entire career there, and I couldn't help but imagine the kind of person behind such a comment and it wasn't a pretty picture.
The other day's thread about the sale of Sortfolio is a great example of this. The entire thread was arguing with DHH and Jason Fried about their own company's transaction. No, really[1].
There are exceptions. There is the occasional absolutely phenomenal and industry-affecting discussion here. There are people that use their "Hacker News reputation" for good. However, standing atop a pillar of arrogance as tall as "everybody who matters is here" just screams a complete disconnect with how our industry actually works.
In the grand scheme of information technology, startups are tiny little mosquitoes that are, with few exceptions, swatted to death quickly and quietly. The occasional mosquito that kills a human, though, is the one that gets press and pays off its investors mightily. That's the golden mosquito, and a whole tribe of mosquito farmers has popped up in pursuit of their payoff. However, simply because a couple mosquitoes have succeeded at killing a human does not, I repeat does not, indicate that the entire world of disease revolves around mosquitoes, nor that a forum discussing mosquitoes is representative of epidemiology as a whole. The average startup employs what, a dozen people? IBM employs more than four hundred thousand[2]. And before you turn around and mock IBM, they've made enough money to research and do great things[3] while your startup is still struggling to come to terms with burn rate in search of that ever-elusive revenue.
Please dig yourself out of the hole of narcissism and reconnect with reality. Hacker News is not the entire world, and more than half of the movers and shakers in the industry have probably never even glanced at a comment thread. I will ever remain relieved if that fact does not change.
An aside which reinforces that point:
After getting hellbanned, I stopped worrying about combating stupidity in Hacker News threads. I stopped reading most of them, to be quite honest. I relaunched my blog and wrote a long essay I've been meaning to write about how Python decorators work[4] which before, I could never seem to find the time for. I adopted an ethos of using my time for sharing knowledge instead of arguing about pointless shit, like Sortfolio's acquisition price or what the meaning of Steve Jobs parking in a handicap space is or what some UI designer named Dustin Curtis thinks about Quora's latest funding round. I'm learning to listen to what people have to say rather than waiting for my turn to speak, just to refute my conversational opponent's take on Microsoft as if it matters or has any bearing on my life whatsoever.
The effect that removing frequent Hacker News contribution has had on me as a person is nothing short of extraordinary, so if "everybody that matters" is here, God help our industry.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4191233
[2]: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/perfo...
I posted and complained about that same skeumorphic podcasts app today. Apple leads so much in the realm of hardware design but is starting to take steps backwards in it's own application/software design. I'm very anxious and hopeful for Microsoft to progress in this arena and give Apple some competition.
I see the Sony and Toshiba labels and they still throw me. I'd really like to see Microsoft step up their game in hardware. I know they all come from the same factories, but there's something about the simplicity of and the lack of another brand on Apple's products that make them so gorgeous to me.
Microsoft should fire their VP of Marketing immediately without severance. Then hire this guy as his/her replacement. He should be given a $1 million retention bonus for 365 days of employment. Or better yet, Microsoft should create a new position called President of Simplification and Branding, then have all employees, including Steve Balmer, report to him. The first thing he should do in his new role is fire Balmer…
I really don't understand what makes you say that, many of the people have given out points like: * typefaces suck * 'moonshot' ain't nice * the slate doesn't mean much
To be frank I am quite amazed by the point I put above. I have been following minimallyminimal's blog for quite some time now and his work is really amazing. And specifically this rebranding effort carries a lot of meaning and shows the dedication he put in. He has taken so many cases to showcase the usage of the 'slate' logo.
As for me, I love the slate logo a lot. He is able to make different combinations by transforming the original base unit and created logos for other products. I feel that it adds more value to the logo because of it's flexibility and fluidity. The old logo couldn't be transformed in any manner to generate logos of their other products.
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And the worst part of all this discussion here is that it went astray at so many places. But, if Microsoft had this logo in the Windows 7 products, no one would have said a thing then. We just accept what the company is offering. When someone put in his time in doing a rebranding, I guess we better appreciate it and put in relevant points. Pouring in crap like 'the design is poor' doesn't do any good to anyone.