Comment by drzaiusapelord

I find there's almost no effort made for UI on the enterprise level of things. Which is understandable nowadays with powershell, but previously the GUI was usually the only way to get things done and seeing the old simpler interfaces was the norm. I guess this is what happens when you have engineers in charge and product managers not caring about the experience. This should lead to wonderful things, but in the MS world at least, it leads to old broken dialogs like pressing "open" to create a new file, not remembering previous folders and being thrust into c:\windows\system32 everytime, lack of handy quick access and shortcut buttons, and lots of F5 mashing because nothing refreshes itself for some reason.

Everytime I deal with MS enterprise products it just blows me over how anything of theirs actually works. There seems to be a strong empahsis to dogfood everything (okay to install this you need a .net version you don't have, a bunch of random libraries, some framework thing MS is kinda sorta pushing, a random KB or two, maybe silverlight, and then install process itself requires multiple reboots and usually troubleshooting). Then you have to install the application itself and its many hotfixes and service packs. This will definitely result in troubleshooting cryptic error codes as none of this stuff really works out of the box.

That said, while 10 and 2012 are perhaps uglier and less refined beasts, there does seem to be an emphasis on a single UI style with a real effort to hide the legacy stuff, as well as a much stronger emphasis on getting away from the GUI and just using powershell. No idea how that will ultimately pan out, but I do miss the old start menus. The 10 menu seems like it would be amazing, like you should be able to stretch it and fill it with tiles and shortcuts trivially. Instead it seems like something a little hostile to you and something MS uses to promote whatever it feels lime promoting at the time (xbox, bing, cortana, etc).