Comment by Fischgericht
3 months ago
I do remember to have read a couple of years ago that the Windows Ui team got replaced and now only consists of Mac users, never having used Windows themselves.
If that is true, it's now wonder that they do not understand all the value that Windows NT has brought, why having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc made sense. And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios. Taking away options will ALWAYS hit some of your customers. And there are a gigantic amount of applications where you want local system accounts only. Yes, Dear Microsoft, computers without an Internet connection do exist and are a common thing.
For us it's Win10 IoT LTSC so we have updates for a couple of more years, and by then hopefully the last remaining software and hardware we have will be usable with Linux.
I think this change (and everything in Windows 11) is being driven by the MS Account PM watching telemetry and making number go up.
Their telemetry data didn't seem to help them figure out how important the start menu is for users. I doubt it's going to help them really do anything else either. They might have the data, but they're not using it.
I was at Microsoft during Windows 8 and the decision to remove the start menu was made with telemery data first and foremost.
"Only 3% of users regularly use the start menu." was the justification.
Then they did a bunch of research with eye tracking software to justify the new 'start screen' saying that it was actually better for users who do use the start menu because they were able to locate an item on the full sceeen overlay faster than the traditional start menu.
3 replies →
I would wager that most users that left telemetry on are fine with whatever changes Microsoft makes to the operating system and user interface, and that most people that turned telemetry off are the ones which want and need a good start menu and did not want those changes.
Not sure. If they would actively read that telemetry data they would notice that the market share of Win11 due to their actions is shrinking, not rising.
But maybe they are holding the telemetry graphs upside down? ;)
And, obviously, a Windows system not connected to the Internet will not give you Telemetry, so this part of your customer base is invisible to you. As a PM, you would have to actually talk with your actual customers to learn about it.
Or they could have just done a survey where customers can vote on what they want. I assume that "Half of the OS settings dialogues now apply changes the moment you klick a checkbox, without a OK / Cancel button; and the other half of the OS allows you to review your changes and revert them in one go if you want."
It's just said seeing this great NT system getting crippled and ruined by actively making it harder to use and limiting choices.
The W11 market share isn't shrinking though. A few statistics tracking of websites shows that, but there are plenty of reasons that would go down for w11. Nobody (<0.05%) are buying machines and installing W10.
2 replies →
It's crazy they don't even have a toast sort of notification for checking a box. Some visual flair to let a user know "this was successful"
Engagement numbers went up and to the right because it requires multiple infuriating clicks and keystrokes to do basic things. Start menu randomly resorted your apps? 2 more clicks to find the app you wanted!
> And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios.
You're conflating the vertical integration of hardware and software (Apple's walled garden) with Microsoft's current direction (you can't use Windows without MS online services).
Microsoft has never given a damn about customers being free to use the software the way they want to. In light of how the company is behaving today, the "openness" of Windows WRT to hardware was clearly only about market share.
That was impressively delusional.
> having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc You mean all the stuff apple brought to personal computers?
By the way, you can use a Mac (and iPhone) without an Apple ID and there's no sign that this is changing.
Facts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
In what way do you think that's relevant? Large portions of that standard had already been abandoned in the Windows 95 era. Nowadays, approximately nobody uses Shift-Insert for Paste, and most laptop users wouldn't even know where to find an Insert key without hunting for it.
1 reply →
Thanks, I couldn't have said it better myself:
> The detailed CUA specification, published in December 1987, is 328 pages long. It has similarities to Apple Computer's detailed human interface guidelines (139 pages). The Apple HIG is a detailed book specifying how software for the 1984 Apple Macintosh computer should look and function. When it was first written, the Mac was new, and graphical user interface (GUI) software was a novelty, so Apple took great pains to ensure that programs would conform to a single shared look and feel.
Windows NT came out in 1993 by the way.
2 replies →
I googled a little... You can use iPhone without an appleid but you cannot install any apps. I wouldn't call this "using" even
The original article was about Windows, which is equivalent to Mac OS not iPhone.
Anyway there is a lot you can do with the default apps. But yes you can’t use the App Store without an Apple ID.