Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.
I lead software for a living. That means my days are meetings, roadmaps, hiring, unblocking people, and saying “no” a lot. The last time “writing code” was my actual job was a long time ago. I never stopped being able to code — I stopped having the time to code. At least in my day job. There’s a difference, and every engineering leader reading this feels it in their bones.
Windows 8 didn’t have a reason to look like a child drew the UI in paint. I remember well the moment I first booted up the technical preview of Windows 8, being flabbergasted by how bad it looked. I choked it up to being a technical preview, they likely didn’t get around to put decent graphics in, but no, it stayed like that.
Windows 8 also didn’t have a reason to go touch-first (and really touch-only) on the UI for a OS with a non-touch install base of around 99+%. That’s terrible UX.
Any decent UI/UX guy would have been able to tell them that they should make the UI switch between desktop mode and touch mode depending on what hardware was present or which mode the user selected.
As you said, it was “only” an hour of fiddling with the registry to bring it back, so it was mostly there. A decent UI/UX designer would have just added a button or an autoselection feature.
But since they said “screw professionals, let the managers do the design” you got shitty UI/UX that caused a massive flop.
The parallel I was drawing that with Win11 and the help of AI they are doing the same. They fire the experts and have the managers and other non-experts do the job of the experts and it falls apart.
Offtopic:
You know who also does that? GNOME. The whole GNOME DE is coded in JavaScript.
Sure it did. Tiles on Windows Phone were a big hit for a time. If anything, the problem on that side of things was that they didn’t commit and make sure the things that worked on the phone also worked on the “tablet” version.
Instead, they took the approach that "the developers will thank us for charging them an arm and a leg to learn and use the new APIs, like they always have, forgetting that developers often follow users, and almost every user was verbal about hating what MS had done, including Windows phone users who understoo what had been promised then effectively bait-and-switched.
Microsoft’s way has just always been so inspiring, you know?
I never got into gnome. Was more of an XFCE guy for a time, enough-so to realize Gnome had “deprecated” anything I liked about GTK. I was more looking for a classic start menu style with minimal overhead, and XFCE gave me that, while most other DE’s wouldn’t let me do stuff that Windows 95 had been cool with.