For all it's flaws: Vista was a truly breathtakingly beautiful operating system. I still remember fondly the matte frosted dark tinted hue from the start menu and the strong deep red of the shutdown button. Everything shimmered and refracted, with almost a tactile feel. My first iPhone felt like I was interacting beyond the current dimension, the retina display with the skeumorphic design made it feel like I wasn't just interacting with software, I was interacting with another digital world... and my first Macbook was similar; every application was gorgeously rendered natively: something even Windows couldn't manage despite having the lions share of developers.
All this, on LCD panels that were comically abysmal compared to the colour accuracy of the displays we take for granted today, and with less than a quarter of the pixels.
The thing is: I think the same issue plagues software also, that when it becomes a place where good money can be made, you attract people who want to make money and, by necessity, push out all the people who were there for the passion.
Diminishing quality of art and engineering sort of go hand-in-hand if MBAs need to make room for themselves and set up fiefdoms.
I'd say Vista introduced or changed—for the better—a ton of Windows paradigms, most of which still endure. User account control, dwm.exe and the WDDM, improved user profiles, the ribbon UI, and more. Vista had the most pervasive changes to Windows in the past two decades, from UI and UX to fundamental OS primitives, APIs, and syscalls.
Disdain levelled at Vista is unfair—it was a heavyweight OS that needed better hardware than was really commonplace at the time.
As for money now being the end game... I have no words. The stupid Weather app (sorry, no, WebView2 wrapper) on Windows 10 and 11 is exasperating.
It’s also known as “Intel GMA”, if that helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA
Microsoft relented to Intel and allowed it to be classified as "Vista capable" despite not being able to run WDDM.
This is a decent writeup of the situation:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-e-mails-re...
* what would you have done in Jim Allchin's position? He disagreed once finding out but ultimately trusted his team's judgement and stood by their decision (isn't that exactly the manager you want to work for?) Yet, look at the results
* hypothetically how do you think Steve Jobs would have handled it, by contrast?
* but Windows is a whole ecosystem with many stakeholders, while Apple is not, so the balancing act between Intel and HP is much more delicate. (Apple ultimately ditched Intel, right? But could Microsoft?)
(edit: clarify some wording)
We were promised that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of hardware would be significantly more powerful than it ended up being.
The amount of backlash we received because the quality of the final product we produced was lower than what we showed to the public was insane and continues to this day.
For context, I worked at Ubisoft on Tom Clancy’s The Division. this was the same period where watch dogs released.
I think we did the right thing, not because we chose to and that we were being an altruistic; but because we were forced to- by the first party console manufacturers as part of certification requirements.
If you release something that you know will perform poorly, that’s on you. It doesn’t matter if you’re Intel in this situation or if your Microsoft in this situation they are both equally guilty of allowing it to happen.
How do you assign blame in that situation? You don’t. they both should’ve done better.
as soon as Microsoft realised that Windows Vista would perform poorly on current generation hardware that the majority of the population had they should’ve worked to downgrade the visual elements and optimise the bloat away even at the cost of features.
When Intel realised that the 98% desktop market leader was going to release something that had graphical intensity requirements, they should have put more emphasis and effort into producing higher quality graphics processing capabilities- it’s not like Windows Vista had a short time it was in development for many many years
What would Intel have done, only supply chips to.. what? Linux machines? Macs? A funny fantasy, obviously unthinkable. Or go wage a marketing campaign against MS? That too in effect would cause lower sales of new machines if anything, directly hurting Intel.
MS would've seen large benefits especially in the long term.
Now this is all very easy to say in 2025, but I think MS should've known this, yet greatly underestimated the negative effects that this would have. The people making the decision probably thought "it'll be okay, and worth staying super chummy with Intel". Probably plenty of golf trips and steak dinners were exchanged.
Sometimes it seems like I was the only person that had that experience...
Even today, you look at screenshots of ios 6, and it's still timelessly beautiful. Some apps were atrocious, but you recognize them from a mile away.
count me in.
May I throw in BeOs' icons [1] for good measure?
The overdone gloss seemed to be a spiritual copies of all the Windowblinds themes, that were themselves inspired copies of Aqua.
But by God do I miss when icons actually used to represent something visually
Do you have screenshots of the particular versions you're talking about?
As for Time Machine, a screenshot won't do it justice[2].
[1]: https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/115033200191662888
Its the same with websites, where I routinely see people unhappy with flat website design, but I deliberately made my website a lot more flat because I think it just looks better. Not to detract from your opinion at all, you can like what you like, but I've just never understood the appeal of vista/xp era UI design over flat design
But with release of Office 2007 and Windows Live suite they started changing interface again and Windows 7 was based upon slight plastic flatness and ribbons all over the place.
There was a community ran project Windows Taskforce that tried to catch up all sorts of interface quirks and with provided mockups they wanted MS to further polish their flagship project between Vista and 7. Sadly all these efforts were gone when MS decided to go Metro in Windows 8.
some low points:
- low-contrast low-color shading
- thin fonts that are less readable
- hidden toolbars requiring multiple taps or drag to expose
- links or buttons with no visual clue they are selectable
I think the only thing I hate more is "touch anything in ios phone app to immediately place a call, even to a phone spammer"
unfortunately all of this got picked up by tesla, where you get all of these "features", but while driving a moving, bouncing car you have to control.
The icons for Leopard-era programs were outstanding. Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine. The comforting smooth grey gradient of window title bars, contrasted with the large, globular traffic light buttons. A typeface that worked well with the lower-resolution displays of the time, and unique icons for everything at every single size. Apple actually had a massive human interface guidelines document, which was promptly binned with Yosemite.
On Windows, that dark blue Start orb and the cool dark task bar, signalling a whole new OS experience. The new Welcome Centre. Freshly rewritten programs and new ones like Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Viewer, and the absolute beauty that was the Windows Media Centre. Flip 3D, customising the glass window borders, and the huge, high-resolution 512 × 512 icons of the high-quality, no-ads games shipped with Windows Vista and 7, which still stand up to this day.
Happy to die on this hill defending this opinion.