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A comment on Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System. Parent comment

Re:Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System by pavlov on Sunday August 20, 2017 @11:36AM (#15058816)
One of the reasons Windows succeeded for so long is that it enabled people to do a common set of activities with minimal training and maximizing reuse of as few common patterns as possible.

And ironically, one of the reasons why Windows was successful in developing these patterns for office applications is that much of the work was done by IBM.

The UI in Windows 3 was functionally almost identical to the Presentation Manager interface that had been designed for the IBM-Microsoft collaboration OS/2. The design implemented an IBM standard called CUA [1].

CUA is not an exciting UI, but it did a good job of consolidating existing desktop software patterns under a consistent set of commands and interactions. The focus on enabling keyboard interaction was crucial for business apps, and a strong contrast to the mouse-centric Mac (which didn't even have arrow keys originally).

The kind of extensively data-driven UI system development that CUA represented is totally out of fashion nowadays, though. Making office workers' lives easier is terribly boring compared to designing quirky button animations and laying out text in giant type.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

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Re:Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System by BatFastard on Sunday August 20, 2017 @03:09PM (#15059789)
Good observations. Truth is "It's really hard to develop user interfaces that are easy to use and powerful at the same time." I have been working on one in my passion project for years, and the balance between presenting just enough information with a clear path to more, and filled the screen with overload is a delicate balance.
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