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Comment by max51 | Hacker News Reader

> It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI

That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.

For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.

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And as I understand it, much of that sort of problem comes down to the “warring factions” model found at Microsoft internally where the whole company is never on the same page, a problem that Apple doesn’t suffer from as badly.

It isn't quite as simple as that. The guy that ran the windows org during that time thought himself the Steve Jobs of Microsoft and didn't hear anything different (to the point of having multi-page public blog posts about how much the launched windows 8 US was the best thing ever and if you didn't agree, you were just wrong).

During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus.

The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.

Apple is a lot better at eating their own dogfood than microsoft. They had UI designers working on macbooks at the Microsoft office, that alone probably explains a lot of issues with the OS

Office 365 is completely batshit in that dimension - let's just do totally different affordances and modals from the rest of the system we're running on top of, because people love change.

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