I agree. In my opinion, the problem is that Microsoft and Apple discovered more lucrative markets, making their desktops less important. For Apple, the iPhone’s revenue completely dwarfs the Mac’s, and even services bring in more revenue than the Mac. Microsoft still makes a lot of money selling Windows licenses to OEMs and corporations, but somehow Microsoft still feels compelled to extract even more money from Windows by placing ads in the OS and by selling subscription services.

As a fan of desktop GUI software that conforms to well-developed platform UI guidelines such as the old Apple Human Interface Guidelines, I believe the rise of mobile computing and the Web hurt the desktop. Software companies ship cross-platform applications using least-common-denominator frameworks instead of writing apps with UIs that are tailor-made to each platform. While this saves development time, and while it’s popular to say “having an Electron app is better than having no app,” it makes the desktop experience less consistent and more difficult to use. In addition, the desktop UI has become more mobile-like even in ways that are inappropriate for desktop computing, such as the proliferation of hamburger windows, the tendency to hide settings (thus requiring additional clicks to perform operations that used to be done in one or two clicks), oversized bars, title bars being crammed with buttons (making it harder to move windows via dragging the title bar), excessive padding, etc. There is a difference between making things easier for users versus dumbing things down, but I feel that a lot of software designers these days don’t know the difference.

I would like to see a return to UI consistency across applications, and I’d also like to see a desktop environment that caters to power users.

A dream of mine is some type of “component-based” desktop operating system, where everything is an object that can be manipulated through either a GUI, the command line, or programmatically. The backend would be inspired by technologies like Smalltalk, GNU Emacs, Lisp machines, and Apple OpenDoc, but with modern considerations such as security and parallelism.