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Comment by diimdeep | Hacker News Reader

Look at this screenshot of context menus in Windows 10 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2Y6rwoXEAAaQll.jpg:large win32, MFC, WinForms, WPF, Web.. Why don't stick to 1 framework and make it work good, deprecate rest, why have multiple buggy and ugly. If compare HTML/CSS and WPF improvement over last 15 years it is 10000 to 1. WPF could have been great 5 years ago, but I'm not sure it ever will be.

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The simplest answer is that Microsoft's software mimics the design of the organization with multiple fifedoms building their own toolkit, causing fragmentation.

We already know that the Office and Windows teams have different GUI toolkits from reports from inside the company. But there is evidently a lot more fragmentation than just those 2 groups.

What I find more interesting is that Google products are starting to feel similarly fragmented. Project fi, Android, Plus, and Search all look and behave differently. My damn phone gets SMS on Hangouts and the Messenger app, my voicemails come on the phone and hangouts. None of it makes sense.

We can all agree that inconsistent GUIs are bad, but it seems like a problem you have to solve from a top down organizational perspective, which might not obviously align with the business.

I'm actually not all that convinced inconsistent GUIs are bad. Especially when the main difference is the appearance. They all function identically.

The Excel team even has their own compiler!

The problem is that they keep compiling the same version of Excel, just changing a little bit the color scheme each time.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint were all coded between 1989 and 1993. And received major update with Word 6 and Office 95 and 97. Basically Office 97 was feature complete. Very little has changed since then. The ribbon bar and all the other minor increment improvements are really minor compared to the changes up to Office 97. Office uses it's own UI library. Using Word 6 in Win95 shows floating toolbars in Win3.1 UI theme. Office 95 had an italic title bar. Using Office 97 in WinXP or Win7 shows and Win95 UI theme.

Well, MS removed quite a few ridiculous features from the Office 97 days. Like auto summary or Cliparts.

But removed some quite useful features at the same time, like the ability to customize the UI by moving the most frequently used buttons to the front.

+ All your apps look the same

- Half of your apps are no longer supported

I think mostly everyone who uses their computer to make their living (ie the prime audience of MS) does not consider this a good trade-off

That argument works to an extent, but all of those screenshots are from components of the operating system itself, not third-party apps. Surely Microsoft has the resources to keep the core components of their OS up to date, and if not, they should devote fewer resources to creating new APIs and more to using them.

Deprecating all but one GUI framework doesn't mean breaking all but one. It just means picking one option and adopting it wholeheartedly. How different would all these Microsoft frameworks have been if they were only finalized after gaining the experience of porting over the entire OS? Microsoft might have ended up with a solution that could unify the landscape on its own merits.

Apple's OS X/macOS has always had an evolving look and feel with notable first-party apps that don't conform, but it's never been half as inconsistent as Windows has gotten.

And what I don't understand is that they are capable to create tools to create very productive UI, but do not seem to be using them themselves. Refreshing the appearance of a menu should take one of their intern a day at most.

That collage of screenshots is kind of misleading. There are issues however those screenshots are scaled, the theme is different from one to the next. Here's a more fair comparison: http://i.imgur.com/nCmOrmn.png

Because Microsoft supports critical applications that businesses use for well over ten years in a lot of cases. Zero other operating systems have to provide the platform stability that Microsoft does.

So, of course, if they have to focus on supporting only one, archaic platform, they never move forward or create anything new or improved. Which doesn't make sense. So you continue to create newer, better platforms, but continue to support the old ones for years to come. Eventually, older ones fall out of use and can eventually be retired.

They only have to provide this because they lock down their products. They do it to themselves.

This is only partially true. A large issue is that most of the software that runs on top of their products is also locked down. So when people have business critical software that's no longer supported by the original developer there's no way to fix it if the operating system gutted support for something they depend on.

Tailor-made business-critical software is supported in a completely different way than your average shrink-wrap.

"Sure we can update from Win32 to $modern. We estimate it to take between thirteen to seventeen man-months. You know the usual rate for a man-month, let us know when you want to start the project."

Let's not forget that there are still huge COBOL applications out there, still updated and maintained by rather well paid engineers.

The enterprise market has repeatedly chosen locked-down-and-supported over free-but-you're-on-your-own.

This will probably never change.

What would happen if the vendors got together as an organizational body (or their employees as a union/guild) and decided to just not provide the enterprise market with even one locked-down-and-supported option?

Then the one company that either bucks the trend or decides to enter the market after them with a locked down and supported option wins the market by default.

Are you imagining a union without any sort of industry-wide enforcement of disbarment for professional malfeasance? That's a pretty nonstandard interpretation of "union."

You'd be willing to disbar engineers for not adhering to your ideology?

Presumably, if it's a union disbarring people for doing something, then it's something the majority of its members feel strongly about. Like how, say, civil engineers feel about buildings being built to code.

Given that the union I was talking about above is specifically one that would be formed by ISVs to protect its member employees from being coerced into bad working conditions by their managers or the clients their demands come on the part of, I assume that "not having to maintain software in perpetuity with increasing labor-load" is probably one such ideological point they'd be likely to stand behind, among others. (Or it might not be; either way, I still think "union that can disbar programmers" is an interesting solution to the problems that programmers do care most about, whatever they may be.)

Remember, the point isn't to punish the disbarred engineer--they likely were coerced into the practice. The point is to signal to the companies who would attempt such coercion, that it will result in their engineers being removed from them, so they shouldn't bother. (Yes, the company's name might also be blackballed in the industry, but that might not matter to the company if they're still able to make money. On the other hand, having no engineers who would ever want to work for you, for fear of what it would do to their careers, would matter.)

The open web and open frameworks supporting it have changed significantly over the past 10 years. It's "keep the old stuff running" or "rewrite" there too.

The philosophy of WPF is that you do all of the UI yourself. It gives great flexibility to make anything look like anything else, but it provides a subpar experience if you mostly need your app to be functional, vs winforms. And as you point out it kills any form of standardisation. What's missing to WPF is good tooling. The current tooling in VS is nothing more than an XML editor, without a useful intellisense, and reverting to a blank page if you need to customize any control.

I wouldn't say it's encouraged to give every control a custom look. It can be done, and far more easily and useful than in Windows forms, but that doesn't mean you have to use it in every application. Horrible owner-drawn controls have been a thing before WPF and just because WPF has better separation between appearance and behaviour doesn't cause inconsistent looking UIs without the developer doing weird things.

The tooling you look for is probably Blend.

In Win9x and even WinXP Luna theme everything looked the same. Even as new as Win7 with its theme or the classic UI in Win7 99% looked very consistent.

But Microsoft tipping point was Win7, everything beyond 2009 was put the former UI and UX guidelines to the trash bin and it seems color blind designers and managers with no taste and understanding are working on the Windows UI. Win8 and Win10 are now and inconsistent mess of dozens of legacy UI frameworks. The little maintained Win32 API is still the most used and best in class - like 99% of applications are coded in C/C++ with Win32API. All the small scale enterprise dotNet apps with legacy WinForm or legacy WPF in legacy dotNetFramework or the new dotNetCore mess are used rarely outside of a small niche market. (all of my hundreds of applications on Win7 are Win32, I see no dotNetFramework in ProcessExplorer - would be highlighted in yellow). And the new WinRuntime aka UniversalRuntime seems to be a trainwreck as well, with limited to to the failing WinStore - clearly a success story ;) Oh and there is the failed Silverlight and the non-public UI API from Win7+ that is used in various new UI elements like Help, Addon dialog of IE10+.

It would be so nice if they once again focus on a nice looking UI theme, and focus on an consistent UI again. In Win95 to WinXP (or Win7) days everything looked to familar and nice put together. If one knew one Windows application, he knew how to use all other applications without searching around or reading a manual. Please surprise me with a nice UI, do away with thr evil phone home features and show that you value the user as your customer and not as dump sheep products. For this to ever happen, they need a major management change and turn-around.

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