Modern Design at Microsoft

To judge by this page, Microsoft's vision of Modern Design involves very little meaningful content on the page as you load it, sideways scrolling (which interferes with the Mac Back/Forward gesture), and tiny text in a serif font.

Something like the way GDS Design Principles is laid out strikes me as a modern approach. Clearly written, responsive, and designed for the web.

This, on the other hand, is a complete turd. Obscure, only readable on a desktop, and has walls of text. Reminds me of the full flash sites of the early 00s.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples

For the youngsters among you, this is in fact a very old design discipline which was used to organise what were called books. Unlike books, which were bound collections of fixed size pages (done for compactness and strength), this is an emulation of what used to be called a scroll, a much older form of organising text which was abandoned as impractical as soon as we figured out book binding.

So Microsoft are emulating an archaic and impractical form of information presentation and calling it modern, how typically Microsoftian. Unless of course, this is a rare example of Americans using the word 'irony' correctly, in which case, bravo!

Shiny new look (which I like, BTW) layered on top of the cruft that is Win32.

As great a job that Microsoft has done with maintaining compatibility with legacy apps, at some point you have to introduce something new. I'd like to see a new systems API on top of the kernel that is object-oriented, and perhaps has single-level store and is processor architecture agnostic so I only have to ship one image for both Intel & ARM.

Am I the only 1 that waited a few minutes? Till I noticed you should scroll sideways....