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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

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Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#531

Post by ProfessorLayton »

nine_k wrote: post #120
mapontosevenths wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was so focused on the enterprise they forgot that enterprises are made up of individual users. Any trade-off that favors the enterprise in lieu of the user actually benefits nobody in the long term.

Crucially, at enterprise sales, those who make putchase decisions are not the actual users (except maybe for Outlook and Excel). They sometimes play golf together with vendors though. This is how stuff like MS Teams of Oracle Forms gets sold: it checks all the compliance boxes, has support, an SLA, "is industry strength", etc.

This is true until it isn't though. Blackberry was doing great with enterprise users until people refused to give up their iPhones even at work.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#532

Post by rbanffy »

pdonis wrote: post #84
rbanffy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform. Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is…

MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about. MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's pr…

Microsoft was a language company at the start - they had a huge share in 8-bit computers and their BASIC made into the ROMs of almost every computer sold in the 70s and 80s. Then they branched out to applications, with little success (I remember Multiplan on CP/M, DOS, and Mac). When they started selling PC-DOS and MS-DOS they had no applications play to speak of. Office only came much later, and the apps that appeared for Mac, Word and Excel, were ported to Windows starting on Windows 2. Word for DOS struggled in the market and never reached a significant share.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#533

Post by gwf »

An honest accounting of this history has to call out Sinofsky's role, and it's not pretty. He nearly killed the company in pursuit of power, insisting that everything be brought under his control. Who pushed in 2005 that online and search had to be organized under Windows? That was Sinofsky. He forced the engineering team that most needed to move fast onto three‑year product cycles--sheer insanity, and just one of a 1000 bad calls that ultimately contributed to his ouster from Microsoft. And when it came time to plan his own exit from Microsoft, who did Sinofsky turn to? Jeffrey Epstein, of course, because that's what normal people do. Treat everything Sinofsky writes as an attempt to launder his reputation--then add another layer of skepticism on top of that--because Steven Sinofsky does not live in the same moral universe as the people whose careers and products he derailed.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#534

Post by xoac »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #477
hu3 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but neither Linux or Windows lag to resize windows in any of my 4 machines. They range from old laptops to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D workstation. Just yesterday a friend's father needed help setting up their second-hand old laptop with an old i5 processor. I slapped KDE and there was no lag to be seen. Bonus point that Windows and some Linux distros have sane, intuitive window management. Whereas with macOS I keep seei…

If we're talking a simple "hello world" window then sure, you can resize that at 60fps on pretty much any system. But most nontrivial apps can't re-layout at 60fps (or 30fps even). They either solve it by (A) allowing the window to resize faster than the content, leaving coloured bars when enlarging [electron], or (B) stuttering or dropping frames when resizing. A pleasant exception to this I've noticed is GTK4/Adwai…

For all the grief they are getting GTK4/Adwaita/Gnome is doing a lot for performance and consistency of experience.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#535

Post by jlarocco »

loeber wrote: post #480
shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

It's because we went from the Desktop environment, where rules were well-documented and standardized, to the Web/Mobile environment, where rules had to be reinvented and, for the most part, were not. We've lost design idioms , which is a huge tax on users everywhere. I've been mad about this for years: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-desig...

The rules didn't have to be reinvented - web/mobile devs chose to ignore them.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#536

Post by jlarocco »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #317
shiandow wrote: post #277

What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…

> We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten.

I think the world changed. "Power users" in the traditional sense use Linux and BSD now. Microsoft and Apple dropped them when they realized how lucrative it would be to dumb things down and make computers more like cable TV.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#537

Post by mrguyorama »

encom wrote: post #355
bityard wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers like Vivaldi that cater to power users are gaining in popularity. They are not trying to be the next Chrome, they are just out to serve their niche well. Firefox has nothing to differentiate itself from Chrome at this point.

>Firefox has nothing Not only that, but for a time, Firefox seemed to be copying everything Chrome did, maybe as a way to stop the exodus of users. But people who wanted Chrome-y things were already using it, and people who didn't might as well, because Firefox was becoming indistinguishable from it. God I wish Mozilla would be made great again. It's tragic how mismanaged it is.

To a first degree, nearly everyone who installed Chrome did so because of Google putting "Runs best in Chrome" on every page they own and including it with every single possible download, including things like Java updates!

Almost nobody chose Chrome. Microsoft had to change how defaults were managed because Chrome kept stealing defaults without even a prompt.

People use "the internet", they don't give a fuck about browsers. Firefox only got as high a usage as it did because of an entire decade of no competition, as Internet Explorer 6 sat still and degraded.

Chrome was installed as malware for tens of millions of people. It used identical processes as similar malware. It's insane to me how far out of their way lots of "Tech" people go to rewrite that actual history. I guess it shouldn't be surprising since about a thousand people here probably helped make those installer bundling deals and wrote the default browser hijacking code.

It should be a crime what Google did with Chrome. They dropped Chrome onto unsuspecting users who never even noticed when malware did the exact same thing with a skinned Chromium a couple days later. Microsoft was taken to court for far less.

How was Mozilla supposed to compete with millions of free advertising Google gave itself and literal default hijacking?

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#538

Post by DanielHB »

weitendorf wrote: post #493
loeber wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because we went from the Desktop environment, where rules were well-documented and standardized, to the Web/Mobile environment, where rules had to be reinvented and, for the most part, were not. We've lost design idioms , which is a huge tax on users everywhere. I've been mad about this for years: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-desig...

Over the past year I've started thinking a lot more about design and UI work, and I think it's basically impossible to design things, or create design systems, that appeal broadly to different types of users in a cross-platform way. I personally love dense UIs and have no expectation of doing certain kinds of work on a phone or low-powered device like a chromebook, phone, or bottom-barrel laptop. But if you're a comp…

It is absurd that there is no standardized UI toolkit, or rather that the web browser _is_ the standard with is characteristic _lack_ of user interaction idioms.

The fact that there are multiple platforms for UIs* is a huge failure of the industry as a whole. Apple, Microsoft and Google could have had a sit down together at any point in the last 20+ years to push some kind of standard, but they decided not to in order to protect their gardens.

*: a standardized UI platform doesn't necessarily mean a standardized platform. Just standardization of UI-related APIs and drawing.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#539

Post by cineticdaffodil »

rigonkulous wrote: post #333
iamcalledrob wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…

>We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. I think its more like the OS vendors have stopped being operating system vendors, and are now - instead - vendors of eyeballs to advertisers . The less the user is GUI'ing, the more they are just watching, placid, whatever else is on their screen. For native apps to survive, they need to not be platform-specific - i.e. web apps, which require a browser…

It seems you fumbled your starmenue click, the start menue will be right back, right after these messages.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#540

Post by cyberax »

bombcar wrote: post #160
rincebrain wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1] [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...

Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.

Calling that "the GPU acceleration" on Mac OS X was a bit overstating the things. It supported rotations, compositing, and some other bulk operations, but text and precise 2D graphics was rendered on the CPU.

It _still_ is not trivial to render high-quality 2D graphics on the GPU.

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