Now I'm not talking about internals. I'm sure that kernel was progressing all those years, for example. I'm talking about user-visible stuff.
Windows XP cartoon UI: terrible. Windows 10 UI: terrible. Good old Windows 2000 UI was just better in every way.
Windows shell? It was good in Windows 2000. Start was good. May be fast search would be a worthy feature to add, but that's about it. They redesign it every year, but it's not getting better.
Windows explorer? It was good in Windows 2000. They move buttons around, but that's not needed.
Control panel is 100x better than this settings nightmare UI.
They invent new UI frameworks every few years. That's not needed. WinAPI is good enough.
It won't happen. But they actually built a perfect OS and lost it. Forever, as corporations can't admit their mistakes. They could have improved upon it all this time, instead of trying to replace it.
With Nadella Microsoft is going downhill. Yes, they're doing things that looks interesting. Like integrating VM with Linux. That's cool. But they kind of gave up. Back in the time, they were actually pushing their own agenda. They had their own tech. Now they gave up and adapt old proven tech. Good for customers, but it's path to the end. If someone learned WSL, it's just one step to true Linux, why pay for Windows at all. Ditto about Edge. They built their own browser engine. How cool is that? Very few corporations were able to do so. And they gave up.
Microsoft lost his teethes. May be they just don't care about desktop anymore. Well, I don't care about Microsoft anymore.
Windows 98 was pretty decent. Everybody hated Windows Me.
Windows XP was pretty decent. Everybody hated Windows Vista.
Windows 7 was pretty decent. Everybody hated Windows 8.
Windows 10 is pretty decent. People are hating Windows 11.
And so on and so forth.
Windows ME had some legit quality of life improvements over 98. Although 98se had a few of them already.
Winxp SP2 was good. OG winxp had its issues.
Windows 10 was a clusterfuck, from forced updates bricking machines to telemetry shoveled down everyone's throat to paid-for calculator to online accounts needed for local logins and all the way to its inbred UI. Total cluster, literally zero improvements to day-to-day use vs 8.1.
Honestly, I even miss the charms bar/gesture; it was easy to make a larg general swipe and then choose "shutdown" to shutdown.
>forced updates
can be turned off with a few clicks, no external tool required, no command line anything. its just shy hard enough that people who should not do it wont accidentally figure out how. If you dont know how you know what to google for, if not you are one of thous people who should not turn updates off.
>telemetry
can be turned off mostly but not so easy. however its an essential part of how a modern OS is maintained people dont like it and I get why but fixing up bugs from just user bug reports is simply not feasible anymore.
>paid-for calculator
no clue what that means
>online accounts needed for local logins
simply not true. Ive used every windows from 95 to 11 and not one needes an online account. to this day I dont have one and beside the obviously cloud based apps like onedrive I can use everything just fine.
>literally zero improvements to day-to-day use vs 8.1.
pointless statement as it depend on use-case. plenty people only use office and a browser sure the OS updates have no use for them.
One thing missing in this discussion is DirectX. Windows 10 launched with a new version and tried to market itself as a gaming platform. People playing AAA games on PC is a sizeable market and this would've been a significant everyday upgrade for them.
I wish I could still be using windows 7. sigh.
Either way, I’m almost a little happy that windows is a disaster right now, because maybe more people will try Linux. :p
Drive letters, registry…
They had a decent UI, reasonable kernel and popular API.
Registry is a good idea. They just had to iterate on it a little bit more, IMO. More data types (like enums), better interoperability with standard tools, built-in documentation, better UI, exposed backup/restore functions. Registry had great potential. It's better than flat /etc filesystem with miriads of configuration formats and clunky non-coherent documentation scattered all over. They did not realize this potential, unfortunately.
It’s an inelegant relic from a very, very distant past. A poor design decision that QDOS copied from CP/M more than 40 years ago and that Windows users are made to deal with to this day.
The registry is a database where a folder should be. It’s such a bad idea that Microsoft doesn’t use it for its new apps since .NET
How dare you :P Windows UI peaked with XP.
Windows is a fundamentally mediocre OS that is made great by means of its wide compatibility with software and hardware. It's not sexy but it kind of works.
Then they figured we now live in a mobile/touch world and went in that direction. But hardly anybody has a mobile Windows device, so it misses the target. To this day, store apps look like they're made for phones.
Windows used to be a system where you had the feeling its yours. General purpose computing. Do whatever you want. Increasingly, it feels like some hybrid cloud OS, where gradually you give up user control.
Windows 8, a UI clusterfuck, introduced a new design language. That was 2012. Almost a decade later, and not even in Windows 11, is the UI consistent. It's a facade. Why does it take a decade to skin a OS?
Windows 11 removes customization options whilst that is exactly what Windows is about.
Too many developers were switching to Mac, so now Linux is integrated. Not in itself a bad thing, don't get me wrong.
It seems they're running in every direction at once and just give up on each direction halfway through.