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Comment by Fischgericht | Hacker News Reader

I do remember to have read a couple of years ago that the Windows Ui team got replaced and now only consists of Mac users, never having used Windows themselves.

If that is true, it's now wonder that they do not understand all the value that Windows NT has brought, why having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc made sense. And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios. Taking away options will ALWAYS hit some of your customers. And there are a gigantic amount of applications where you want local system accounts only. Yes, Dear Microsoft, computers without an Internet connection do exist and are a common thing.

For us it's Win10 IoT LTSC so we have updates for a couple of more years, and by then hopefully the last remaining software and hardware we have will be usable with Linux.

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I think this change (and everything in Windows 11) is being driven by the MS Account PM watching telemetry and making number go up.

Not sure. If they would actively read that telemetry data they would notice that the market share of Win11 due to their actions is shrinking, not rising.

But maybe they are holding the telemetry graphs upside down? ;)

And, obviously, a Windows system not connected to the Internet will not give you Telemetry, so this part of your customer base is invisible to you. As a PM, you would have to actually talk with your actual customers to learn about it.

Or they could have just done a survey where customers can vote on what they want. I assume that "Half of the OS settings dialogues now apply changes the moment you klick a checkbox, without a OK / Cancel button; and the other half of the OS allows you to review your changes and revert them in one go if you want."

It's just said seeing this great NT system getting crippled and ruined by actively making it harder to use and limiting choices.

The W11 market share isn't shrinking though. A few statistics tracking of websites shows that, but there are plenty of reasons that would go down for w11. Nobody (<0.05%) are buying machines and installing W10.

[For those who are not into the LTSC IoT stuff: Basically it's a decrapified Win10 with support and security updates until January 13 2032. Yes, 2032.]

I am seeing the exact opposite. It's not just that my tiny company has completely moved to Win10 Enterprise LTSC IoT, but every newly bought computer gets Win11 nuked and that installed. In Germany (shady) resellers of Win10 LTSCblabla licenses are popping up.

Pretty much everyone in the embedded electronics industry that has to use Windows is doing ass covering right now by buying the LTSC licenses while you still can.

The departures time table on your airport or train station is not going to be replaced because M$ claims that Win11 is incompatible with it. It will be moved to LTSC if it's not already on that for long. Same for ATMs, the strange machine my dentist uses together with her drills etc.

Of course I have no clue how/if Win10 LTSC market share is or can be detected at all. But from inside the embedded electronics industry I can say: Panic buying of Win10 LTSC licenses going on.

Not a contradiction to what you wrote, by the way: "Nobody" ) is buying Win10 Pro or Ent anymore. But they are buying LTSC in heaps according to sadly only anecdotical evidence.

) Well, not in their online shop, but if you ask, you very well can still buy new Thinkpads with Win10 installed from Lenovo, for example.

One of the screens on the Vancouver SkyTrain platform crashed once and displayed the xfce logo, which made me feel a bit of excitement in wondering how it was implemented.

It's crazy they don't even have a toast sort of notification for checking a box. Some visual flair to let a user know "this was successful"

Their telemetry data didn't seem to help them figure out how important the start menu is for users. I doubt it's going to help them really do anything else either. They might have the data, but they're not using it.

I would wager that most users that left telemetry on are fine with whatever changes Microsoft makes to the operating system and user interface, and that most people that turned telemetry off are the ones which want and need a good start menu and did not want those changes.

I was at Microsoft during Windows 8 and the decision to remove the start menu was made with telemery data first and foremost.

"Only 3% of users regularly use the start menu." was the justification.

Then they did a bunch of research with eye tracking software to justify the new 'start screen' saying that it was actually better for users who do use the start menu because they were able to locate an item on the full sceeen overlay faster than the traditional start menu.

I think they forgot what people actually use the start menu for: accessing things not immediately available on desktop/taskbar. People don't use it to explore/play around. They're looking for something.

So of course they figure they can insert ads for their own shit, make it a Bing website search, whatever. People don't want fucking an internet search. They're looking for things on their computer.

I feel like these people have a fundamental misunderstanding of how human memory works. We have way better spatial memory than for words. The start menu is one of the better tools for that, because it can contain a lot of information (applications) based on where the user puts them and it's easily accessible. You don't have to minimize other applications, like you do if you want to access the desktop, and the start menu loads instantly (well, it did until Windows 11/before ads).

You're not supposed to "look" for where something is, you're supposed to know. Just like you're not supposed to look for the X in the top right corner of an application. You know it's there and you know that if you move the mouse into the corner you can click it (which is very infuriating when some UI design decides that the top right corner pixel does not count for pressing the X button). The start menu in the bottom left worked in a similar way.

Yeah, but all of that was supposed to apply to the Windows 8 start screen also

Engagement numbers went up and to the right because it requires multiple infuriating clicks and keystrokes to do basic things. Start menu randomly resorted your apps? 2 more clicks to find the app you wanted!

> And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios.

You're conflating the vertical integration of hardware and software (Apple's walled garden) with Microsoft's current direction (you can't use Windows without MS online services).

Microsoft has never given a damn about customers being free to use the software the way they want to. In light of how the company is behaving today, the "openness" of Windows WRT to hardware was clearly only about market share.

That was impressively delusional.

> having a standard on menu structure, a standard for all UI controls etc You mean all the stuff apple brought to personal computers?

By the way, you can use a Mac (and iPhone) without an Apple ID and there's no sign that this is changing.

I googled a little... You can use iPhone without an appleid but you cannot install any apps. I wouldn't call this "using" even

The original article was about Windows, which is equivalent to Mac OS not iPhone.

Anyway there is a lot you can do with the default apps. But yes you can’t use the App Store without an Apple ID.

Facts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

In what way do you think that's relevant? Large portions of that standard had already been abandoned in the Windows 95 era. Nowadays, approximately nobody uses Shift-Insert for Paste, and most laptop users wouldn't even know where to find an Insert key without hunting for it.

I use shift insert to paste all the time.

Thanks, I couldn't have said it better myself:

> The detailed CUA specification, published in December 1987, is 328 pages long. It has similarities to Apple Computer's detailed human interface guidelines (139 pages). The Apple HIG is a detailed book specifying how software for the 1984 Apple Macintosh computer should look and function. When it was first written, the Mac was new, and graphical user interface (GUI) software was a novelty, so Apple took great pains to ensure that programs would conform to a single shared look and feel.

Windows NT came out in 1993 by the way.

Did not mention facts to counter you but to provide... facts.

Parent comment by mine by the way also did not claim anyone invented anything, but that Windows once HAD and FOLLOWED human interface guidelines that made the system optimized to be used by... humans. While now MS is fighting their human users.

But to give you feedback: Sometimes it is nice to sit on a shady park bench on a Sunday without an apple fan boy running by with a loudspeaker "AND DID YOU KNOW? JOBS INVENTED BENCHES!!!".

The HN story is about whether you can log in to Windows without a Microsoft account.

You then went on a rant about how the reason Windows stopped having standard menu structures is because the Windows UI team now only consists of Mac users.

Even though you don't need an Apple ID to log in to macOS, and those standard menu structures come from Apple in the first place.

Thanks for the feedback. Your communication style is schizophrenic and melodramatic and I still have no idea what you actually think.

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