To make this obvious, let me use an analogy. If a vegan restaurant found a very successful steakhouse and decided to copy their decor of say game animal heads and rifles on the wall, it would probably decrease their sales regardless of how faithfully they match the aesthetics.
The context matters. Also the fact that both imaginary businesses are in the same industry of serving food isn't enough of a similarity. It's quite specific.
And even if the contexts match, the pursuit just makes them seen as a knockoff; a laggard, an imitation.
The goal isn't to meet the competition, it's either to beat it or be somewhere else.
Intentionally making yourself a 2nd rate Apple isn't a positioning strategy; they could simply introduce a discount line and knock you out in a single blow. It's phenomenally stupid
The center of window management in macOS I'd say is easy access to Mission Control (prev. Exposé). All Macs come with either a huge, multi-touch trackpad or a Magic Mouse with gestures to trigger it. I sometimes use my Macbook with a "normal" mouse— I've mapped all extra buttons to trigger Mission Control commands otherwise I wouldn't be able to effectively navigate my way around.
Moreover, full-screen windows are automatically made their own desktop, so one switches between these windows using desktop switching. I actually am just now remembering that the Dock supports window switching with a ctrl-click: I completely forgot since I only use it for rudimentary app switching and for windows it's all Mission Control and desktops.
This, is context at the OS-level and hardware levels, but of course there's also the user base and what they're used to after years of using their computers.
Copying some individual elements is just really dumb. For example, Gnome 3 copied the mac menu bar. Except menus don't actually go there (windows still have their own menu bar), negating the very meaning of having an unified menu bar.
The result is that my desktop now has a ugly-ass, useless, wasteful black bar on top. Why.
I have to agree with the OP, it's the triumph of form over function.
I use Windows Blinds on my Win10 system to make it look like Win98, which is close enough to 2K.
And for extra lulz, my screensaver is the Windows 95 loading screen.
macOS isn’t perfect but Apple hasn’t mangled core features like the task bar and start menu for something that is superficially prettier but lacks a bunch of actually useful features that used to exist.
but if majority of your lead designers never in their lives used the taskbar they are surprised when replacing it with a dock causes outcry
That, likely, highly depends on your industry. Designers doing mobile application design, as well as web design from my limited experience tend to steer towards Macs. Even within my college the entire graphics design department was Macs. Of course if you are working on a Windows based product you'd in theory expect the designers to use or be familiar enough with Windows but you may be surprised.
I'd be curious to know if there are regional (country) differences in this.
It’s tragic that because of elitism Microsoft does not hire those designers and instead hires designers who don’t care about their product.
When you have over a billion users worldwide there's an expectation that you don't treat your product like a startup's art project. I haven't met a single person who wasn't completely confused by Windows 8's UI or who liked the changes. I've seen lifelong Windows users spend 10+ minutes desperately looking for the shutdown button.
There's "inspiration" by different products but in the end you need to know your own product in order to improve it.
If you want innovation, how about performance, accessibility, compatibility,...
And I'm not an indestructible 20-year-old either :)
All laptops have a very special feature called external monitor support. And for some laptops, you can even buy docks.
Boom!
I know, it's amazing.
Arrogance is not doing any or ongoing competitive analysis.
If someone is selling something that's out of reach, financially, for most people, then making a cheaper and worse product available can still be good. Doesn't mean you prefer it.
I'm guessing Microsoft don't want to think of themselves as "the poor man's OS" however. And, they're not, it costs something like £120.
This discussing thread is getting lost in the weeds.
We were talking about people <<designing>> Windows.
For sure they should be using it, <<day-to-day>>. They should feel the same pain as their users are feeling and they should want to improve it.
Anything else is a travesty and that's how you end up with enterprise software (designed for the CEO, used by the peons), or Android apps (designed for iOS by people with iPhones, used by peons on Android).
The hardest part I think is working and sharing work 2 different systems at the same time. Not that the technical solutions do not exists, but muscle memory will always make that one system end up feeling unbearable and it might not because it is worse but by resistance to change.
In the case of UI/UX, I don't want this.
I use Windows because it's not MacOS. I absolutely hate MacOS. Microsoft UI/UX designers using MacOS as inspiration is a critical bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.
I want my taskbar to show labels. I want multiple windows of the same app to be a separate item on the taskbar so that switching between multiple windows of the same app is a single click. I want each window to have its own menu bar, rather than a single menu bar at the top. I want a taskbar on each monitor, each showing only the items on that monitor.
Windows 10 has all these as an option. If Win11 is imitating MacOS, all those go away.
"Whereas MacOS is free, it's included with the machine and Apple doesn't charge for it separately"?
But how much of the price you pay for that machine is because of the OS, that's an unknown. Maybe the actual development costs, distributed per device, are available somewhere deep in the bowels of Apple accounting, but that doesn't tell us how much of the (inflated) price you pay for the box is due to the OS. Microsoft's dev costs for Windows probably aren't £120 a copy either (especially considering what a tiny minority of users actually pays exactly that, as an explicit item separate from the hardware).
So I reckon Windows still actually is "the poor man's OS": You probably pay more than that for MacOS, only it's baked into the cost of the hardware so you don't know how much, exactly, it is you're paying.
Ask gamers that paid $3000 for the graphics card alone, I recon their opinion will differ
MacOS sure ain't the poor man's OS.
Windows always had a price, even if that price was included by the OEM in the price of the device.
Let me repeat that:
only Macs, of course
* IS just an upgrade. Those Macs all came with an OS originally, didn' they?
* ISN'T actually "free": You have to buy a Mac first. They cost money -- quite a lot of it, compared to most other PCs, I've heard.