Hacker News Reader

Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware. As long as Microsoft hardware, along with the marketing, remains touch-focused, they can hardly change their UI design trajectory. Yet the vision of Windows as a touch-heavy user interface remains a wishful-thinking fantasy, and works against what used to make Windows a productive UI. It’s really a tragedy.

View on HN

>Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware.

What I fail to understand is how MS apparently missed the part where Apple has clearly delineated OSes for their different hardware. You have iOS, iPad OS, macOS, tvOS, etc. Even the phone and tablet, which are nominally the same man-machine interface, are somewhat differentiated.

Why is MS so hellbent on making Windows a jack of all trades?

A separate mobile OS with a different UI for apps would mean having to establish an entirely new app ecosystem, which at present is effectively impossible (if it isn’t just another Android clone). It would probably have been possible in the early days of Windows mobile, but they botched that for various reasons. If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.

IMO, they need to establish a more structured and controlled UI layer/framework that would allow (or rather, enforce) auto-switching between touch and non-touch layouts, with a uniform look&feel across applications, while being as performant/reactive as win32/GDI applications, and then stick to that for the long run, so that it becomes the one Windows UI toolkit (like GDI used to be), similar to what Apple has on their OSs.

>If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.

No, a better alternative is sharing apps with Android. That's one of the things 11 promised (but still doesn't officially, the amazon app store integration is beta software).

Of course, they get one thing right and 2 things wrong. 11 is dramatically inferior to 10 when it comes to the comfort of tablet use. The window manager doesn't suit touch use the way tablet mode did before. Neither does the start menu.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com