I thought all the microsoft hate came from the anti competitive behaviour like - embrace, extend and extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish , along with documented anti competitive behavior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft and similar patent trolling against linux and most recent android.

All of those things that Microsof were hated for in the 90s are just mainstream tech business practice in 2014. For better or worse, they were trailblazers that big tech companies since have copied, not just a one-off bad guy. Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are all doing exactly the same stuff, where they can and where they calculate they can get away with it.

Microsoft didn't even invent the practices. The tactics--like bundling--are only illegal when you have an monopoly and you exploit the monopoly to win over different markets.

That said, I don't believe Microsoft is a monopoly any longer, at least for consumer PCs.

IBM existed before Microsoft.

agree, these practices were standard and around before microsoft, but doesn't mean we still can't dislike companies for doing it.

People born when the antitrust lawsuit was prosecuted would now be in college. So I would expect that if what you said is true, going forward, MS hate explained by those reasons would decrease. It would be like people in their 30s today holding a grudge against IBM for their role in the PCs v. clones battle.

Edit: I suspect the problem for MS is not lingering hate from the early-mid 90s, but more one of fading into irrelevance among people who are today 18-25 y/o

Here's a good story about the shutdown menu in Vista, and how it came to be:

Original rant by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html

Answer from the guy working on the shutdown menu: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.no/2006/11/windows-shutdown-cr...

Another response from the guy that implemented the OSX shutdown menu: http://arno.org/arnotify/2006/11/the-design-of-the-mac-os-x-...

It's simply astonishing that the "Vista shut down menu" meme continues to come up after all this time, and that the wrong lessons continue to be drawn.

Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down."

Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely understood. They still had strange labels like "Hibernate" and "Sleep." There was still a "Log out" option. There was still a "Lock" option.

Turns out, none of that was the problem. The problem was that people didn't understand what the power icon did. Replace the icon with text that said "Shut down", and suddenly they knew what it did, and started clicking on it. They stopped opening the fly-out menu, and the "Paradox of Choice" went away.

The lesson is not that you should stop offering choices to your users! You can offer simplicity and choice at the same time. Just stop replacing text labels with confusing icons.

Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 had a "Shut down" text label. Windows XP had both an icon and text. Windows Vista had an icon but no text. Windows 7 went back to just text. The only design that caused confusion was Windows Vista.

I agree that the main problem wasn't the options, but I do think that some of options are were unnecessary (the distinction between hibernate and sleep, for instance).

The real lesson is that design by comittee over years trying to reach a compromise will often result in terrible design decisions. It wouldn't even have been a problem if they had kept the icon, if it just did what people expected it to! (shutdown, not sleep as was the default). And now we have Windows 8, where they've hidden the shutdown menu inside Settings.

Sometimes a designers experience does not match other people. Example is I use reboot and logout far more than I use Shutdown

I agree that the default was wrong in Windows Vista. I disagree that an icon would've been OK -- as Joel Spolsky pointed out, he had no idea what the icon would do. That's why he opened the fly-out menu, and that's why a lot of users opened the fly-out menu. Where they got confused.

I just found it frustrating that the tech press echo chamber ganged up on the fly-out menu, when that wasn't even the problem. The fact that Microsoft eliminated the complaints with just one button in Windows 7 shows exactly where the actual problem was.

On every Microsoft topic a lot of old stories come up. I think many people at Microsoft know that things have been going wrong during the Vista development, and a lot has changed since then.

This is an excellent set of reads for shedding light on why things at Microsoft are the way they are, thanks for digging them up and sharing!

"This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink."

Unfortunately we are down this road and I'm unhappy with software taking away features I use. I can't wait for chrome to be one white screen with no buttons.

Wasn't control panel decently organized even in Windows XP SP2? Honestly, I don't see much difference between Mac's System Preferences now and Control Panel of Windows XP era.

Searching these settings sucked in XP but Windows 7 resolved that.

Windows 8 is one thing I can agree with you. It made using the PC unnecessarily hard for mouse and keyboard users.

For my windows partition, I actually quite enjoy the move from win 7 to win 8. Here's a few things that I've taken a liking to:

1) Boot into desktop mode. This was introduced in 8.1 and definitely better for my uses than having to open a desktop from the metro UI in 8.0.

2) Win-f, I used to use win-r quite a bit to run programs quickly. However, with the changes MS has made with caching, win-f is just as fast and saves me from having to remember the commands for system preferences and the like.

3) Powershell. Win 8 ships with powershell and it's actually decent.

4) I have personally found it to run faster than win 7 as it shifts more UI load to the graphics card.

Windows 7 also ships with Powershell.

Did anyone found it usable? I struggled to automate some recursive copy/filter of files. I don't remember that task taking that long to automate on Linux.

It's a doddle. You just have to install Cygwin and do it in bash.

http://cygwin.com/

Indeed.

I found PowerShell incredibly crunchy.

I will admit I was paid to drive hyperv from ruby remotely. What happened is that WinRM wasn't usable and that PowerShell was the lowest barrier mechanism to drive the functionality. It was nasty but thanks to WMI and some 3rd party PowerShell REPL that job was over. I wouldn't willingly give up Ruby much less Perl or Bash for PS. It seems like another "thumb their nose" CLR, C#, closed-source NIH proprietary lock-in tactic.

Years ago I wrote tons of jscript to silently deploy lots of software remotely, and it wasn't as slow to become "productive" at as PS.

Honestly I loved Windows XP, although I really only used it as a teenager because it was the only OS that could run Civilization III. I remember that blue control panel that neatly organized all the settings - it is astounding that it was considered more user-friendly to just make a big three-column list of every subcategory of settings.

One thing to note is that for someone who knows what they're doing, the structure of settings don't make much of a difference, because you'll find things eventually. It makes a big difference when technology-inept people like my mom have to fix problems like "how do I make the computer screen not hurt my eyes?". They just don't connect the phrase "display settings" to the concept of brightness, so navigating settings becomes a nightmare for them.

I can never find the programs one. I swear every time I open it Windows checks a rnd to see if it should be called All Programs or Programs & Features.

One can classify sw development companies into dev centric or UI centric. Microsoft is the former. Tivo, Apple ( more to apple than this though) and some others are User centric.

It refers to where the seat of power is in the company which defines strategy and envelops products. A dev centric company like Microsoft does not become User centric by hiring a UI designer..

Hence, Windows UI will always be sub par. USer centric design is very deep, not superficially changeable, and can't be simply bolted on.

Something tells me the COM-wranglers out there might quibble with the "dev-centric" label. :)

Correction: Tivo was User centric, but is now just sitting back and enjoying the patent royalties.

> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting?

Reportedly Bill Gates was one such person: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...

I for one preferred the old control panel, and disable category view on any Windows machine I have to use.

Oh god, a million times yes. I really like the old windows way and prefer the osx pref panes. It seemed like MSFT confusing churn to say we changed something (and therefore "fixed" something) without knowing what made sense or what/if there was a customer problem. Instead it created a bigger problem of customer confusion (relearning). All companies including Apple have done this, but the takeaway is that not caring about customer impact is inevitably a recipe for strategic failure as others that do take marketshare (Zappos). It's also a dick move antithetical to providing quality product|service.

I thought he was criticizing the icon view, fair enough.

System Configuration (msconfig) for me was a huge, huge disappointment product after product by Microsoft. Sure it's for "power" users, but I think a lot of people want to make certain applications not start up at boot, and not all software makes it easy to do in application. For more than a decade I have waited for them to allow resizing the damn window so I can read something more than the first few letters of an application name, path, etc. Nothing!!!

In Windows 8 they moved this functionality to new Task manager, and it's window is resizable.

Things like you are describing are not always designed from the ground up the way you see them in the end. It's quite probable it built up over time starting with just a few controls ending in many. It's easy in retrospect to see this error but it's been built and shipped and probably lower priority for a company of that size. This is a pretty common issue for large companies or projects with many people aka design by committee.

In XP, when connecting to a wireless network, you are required to type the network's password twice. How the UI team came to that decision I'll never know.

> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting?

When I was at MS, we usually used the command line to change settings. It was horrible. It used GUIDs. Literally GUIDs. But it was a stable target. You didn't have to relearn it every nightly build. And you could script it.

We sort of assumed that if the control panel would sit still we could learn it easily enough, but that assumption couldn't be tested until it was too late.

In terms of UI (flat content based UI) at least, they did not copy Apple, it was the other way around. Apple just did it better.

It seems like you're referring to the visual style, but I think the comment you were replying to was about the structure and behavior more than mere skinning, and about differences that far predate iOS 7. There's a reason the term is "look and feel", not just "look"; that second half is where Apple so often distinguishes itself.

No. I'm not referring to the visual style alone. Microsoft didn't just do flat UI to be cool. There was a purpose behind it to focus on content first, the same thing literally is being preached by Apple. Apple just executed better when it came down to it but they definitely borrowed many ideas from both Android and MS in terms of interaction alone.

I love the live tiles in Windows. No idea why Apple ignored that...

That's just graphic design. UI is about how it's designed to work, what controls are where, what labels, what feedback it gives, etc.

The same UI can have different themes easily.