Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by int_19h » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:36 AM UTC

hyperrail wrote: post #506

hyperrail wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(disclaimer: I was an individual engineer in the Windows division during the Windows 8 project, i.e. reporting through Steven Sinofksy) I think you're being a bit unfair to the Windows division during the Win8 lifecycle. Maybe that's just my rose-tinted glasses though. I know there are some HN/proggit commenters who like to harp on the supposed toxic rivalry between the Windows orgs and Microsoft developer tools orgs…

> It was also when Windows was aggressively pushing their Metro styling on everything in the company, sometimes to ridiculous lengths - e.g. Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs! You can still see the blog posts announcing this "feature" when it shipped in the first public beta of VS 2012, and the comments on them.…

> If anything, visual studio should have adopted the all-lowercase typography of the original metro-style design language from zune and windows phone 7, not AN ALL-UPPERCASE ONE.

Win7 Metro also had ALL CAPS in a few places, which is where I believe this was copied from since it was used there on the top of the screen, so where the menu bar is in a desktop app. The MSDN blog post that announced it also specifically cited Zune: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al.... That said I have no idea why they actually did this, only that it was not a popular decision among devs working on VS at the time - so much so that they snuck in that registry key that'd let you disable it (I bet the management really appreciated that when they had to back out after overwhelmingly negative feedback). The monochrome icons were also unpopular on the team, but there was little they could do about that one.

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

#602

Post by hakfoo » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #342

2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are: 1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shou…

Is 1) such a bad thing?

There aren't really that many apps that make sense to work in a full-fat form all the way from wearable to phone to tablet/laptop/desktop.

Tablet/Laptop/Desktop is probably solvable by a single toolkit set (remember the brief era of Windows 7/8 tablets, many of which had fold-back or snap-on keyboards and pointing devices if you needed precision beyond what a touchscreen could offer?) but I don't really want to run KiCAD on my phone or a smartwatch, for example.

Saying outright "we have different tooling for big and small devices" (or even three sets-- large device/handheld/wearable) should steer developers into providing tools built to the task and purpose. Maybe the phone/wearable version only has limited tools that work well on a tiny screen and is as a result smaller and more efficient?

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

#603

Post by hakfoo » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #554

hbn wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy They were way too late to make a dent. Ballmer made the mistake when the iPhone came out to not get their ass in gear to compete. Microsoft's first potential real competitor to the iPhone came with Windows Phone 7 at the very end of 2010. The iPhone was announced in January 2007 and they didn't have anything to compete until almost 4 years later. I'm…

Yeah, especially funny since they had the early lead with their iPaq PDAs and Windows CE. Which they completely squandered by ignoring them. Then they acquired Nokia that already had an almost-ready ecosystem of apps, with good snappy UI. And then spent two years building a (shitty) framework on top of the long-neglected Windows CE kernel. Which was known from the start to be a stopgap solution before they port the f…

The difference is that iOS was clearly designed to wow the consumer. It was shiny, it offered the promise of full-scale web browsing and the established media ecosystem. It was not a power tool. (remember the first versions didn't even offer third-party apps).

Windows CE/Mobile was heavily shaped by the corporate presence. People didn't queue up at midnight at Best Buy to buy CE devices, they were sent down from IT and ran a handful of bespoke line-of-business apps. People associated them with big clunky barcode scanner devices, not sleek hi-fi media players. It had all the consumer charm of a corporate lanyard and ID badge.

I'm not sure they could have respun the existing product to get that to "sexy consumer facing item" without a huge rework anyway. And the rework was excellent-- I liked Windows Phone enough to own 3 (a Lumia 1020, then replacing it with a 530 after the screen broke, and a bargain 640 as a modest upgrade) The experience was smooth even on the bottom-range device and it felt more holistically designed than contemporary Android.

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

#604

Post by throwaway2037 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

iamcalledrob wrote: post #471

throwaway2037 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Qt? It is the gold standard for cross-platform desktop UI frameworks. It is (1) performant (C++-based), (2) does not look outdated, and (3) not bug-ridden.

Qt apps don't feel great on macOS, though it's by far the best for mac-ish UI. Dropbox was Qt for a long time and I'd argue it worked well for them. Its easy to fall into "uncanny valley". On Linux, Qt apps feel a bit off in GNOME, though you can never satisfy everyone as its the wild west. I think Qt also suffers from not really being anyone's favourite. On the one hand, you have web developers who tend to not reall…

    > Lastly, you have native Windows developers who have been burned so many times they don't advocate for anything in life anymore.

Bollocks.

DotNet WinForms has been rock solid for 15 years. And there are so many good 3rd party widgets if you need them.

If you prefer C++, then Windows Template Library (WTL) is also rock solid and released more than 20 years ago.