The constant changes in the Windows UI are the things that piss me off the most about Windows. Whenever I upgrade Windows, I get into the Control Panel and set the UI to the Classic scheme and leave it there. I refuse to spend a moment of my precious time chasing crap around a new UI designed by people who couldn’t get it right the first time, and have made it successively more obscure and confusing since then.
The rule in the computer industry for a successful UI: Design a UI, do some real homework on how to make it work, then stick with it - for as long as possible.
At cisco, we had the command-line UI which was cribbed from the DECsystem-10/20 and TOPS. We designed all manner of GUI network management schemes. Any time we even gently proposed deprecating the command line UI, we had our heads ripped off by customers. The TOPS-style UI works, it works well and it’s scriptable - so we were told again and again by customers carrying pitchforks and torches.
“The rule in the computer industry for a successful UI: Design a UI, do some real homework on how to make it work, then stick with it - for as long as possible.”
Nooooo, that what you do when you are petrified and you innovation has died. And besides the Win desktop people are acting like was perfection even though they complained about it for years, has been around for almost 2 decades. Why should MS in a rapidly changing market just keep on with that as the main focus just because?
“At cisco, we had the command-line UI which was cribbed from the DECsystem-10/20 and TOPS. We designed all manner of GUI network management schemes. Any time we even gently proposed deprecating the command line UI, we had our heads ripped off by customers. The TOPS-style UI works, it works well and it’s scriptable - so we were told again and again by customers carrying pitchforks and torches.”
If MS had the luxury of making something like this that barely .00003% of the world used, then it would not be worth it.