Windows always strikes me as a mishmash of ideas with very little overarching vision. A somewhat superfluous example of this is the branding of basic system tools; you have things like Task Manager, Device Manager, Disk Management etc. On Vista and 7 you can access them by mousing about in the start menu a lot or by trying to search (or using run, or right clicking on Computer and selecting manage). But typing ‘Dev’ into search doesn’t return anything related to Device Manager and only when you type the full name does search return some long winded response like ‘Manage Devices and Drivers on this system’ in the middle of a wall of result text. It shows no connected vision between the ability of the search feature to surface succinct information and the design of the OS to differientiate its core tools. Attempting to be helpful by returning a list of tasks in long winged descriptions betrays the lack of coherence of each tool and its purpose.

MacOS largely succeeds in this regard. I can access Disk Utility simply by typing ‘du’ (or even just ‘di' or just ‘d’ since it learns your preference) into spotlight and hit enter. I can launch any app this way without the need to clutter by desktop, dock or taskbar with shortcuts. Disk Utility and the various other utilities generally get large well branded icons and names that set them apart. Many of the Windows tools just use pretty bland and similar looking tiny icons making the visual aspect of search useless.

Worse still is that if you can have several Device Manager programs installed. I’ve a lab system that requires Win7. The frame grabber is accessed through its own Device Manager and my flow control system has something similarly named.

Reading the article it is easy to see why this behaviour is the case. There is clearly very little time for polish and for a singular vision on how everything should look and feel (taste?). It not surprising to see new Mac users delight in the attention to detail of MacOS. Windows often is obtuse and gets in the way.

Windows 10, for all its sins, makes some big improvements. Right clicking the start button or pressing Super-X instantly returns a list of all these system tools.