Re:How To Get Your Own Fanboys
by alex_c on Thursday May 01, 2008 @11:10PM
(#179208)
I agree about the hardware design (Microsoft actually made(?) some pretty good peripherals).
I was referring more to software design. I have never encountered so many plain boneheaded interface decisions as in Microsoft products, from roughly Win95 up to and including WinXP. I'm not even talking about ugly (which I can forgive), I'm talking about simply unusable - tiny text areas without scrollbars in which you sometimes have to input a large amount of text, or worse, text inputs instead of text areas. Tabs being used where they really shouldn't, resulting in dialogs with up to 5 rows of tabs, and with extra "Advanced" buttons on some of the tabs that bring up another pop-up. That kind of stuff. Vista and the new Office have been really pleasant surprises so far in this respect.
I was referring more to software design. I have never encountered so many plain boneheaded interface decisions as in Microsoft products, from roughly Win95 up to and including WinXP. I'm not even talking about ugly (which I can forgive), I'm talking about simply unusable - tiny text areas without scrollbars in which you sometimes have to input a large amount of text, or worse, text inputs instead of text areas. Tabs being used where they really shouldn't, resulting in dialogs with up to 5 rows of tabs, and with extra "Advanced" buttons on some of the tabs that bring up another pop-up. That kind of stuff. Vista and the new Office have been really pleasant surprises so far in this respect.