I'll also give the opinion that Apple consistently creates some absolutely crap designs and when they do this, release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing they are instead met with applause on the "amazing design". It's a tiresome pattern repeated for decades now.

eg. The 'breathing status light' that lit up the room at night due to extreme brightness which meant every macbook of the era had stickers or tape over the LED with endless Q&A's of "How do i turn the annoying light off? You can't!". This crap design was met by articles extolling the subtle sign wave and off white hue. I kid you not. https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-look-at-apples-breathing-li...

Apple today seem to have acknowledged their mistake here and taken away status lights completely (also a crappy design hailed as amazing since they've just gone to the other extreme) which highlights the fact that no matter what they do they're hailed as being amazing at design, even when it's contradictory from their own previous 'amazing designs'.

Apple doesn't just get a pass on crappy design. It gets endless articles praising the virtues of everything they do even when, if you think about what they did for even a second you'd realize, "that's actually just plain crap design".

> Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon

Ribbon also has a similar research behind it, just like Windows 95. For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly.

I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. I also like it since it is very tastefully made for Office. 2010 was my favorite Office UI. It actually doesn't get rid of shortcuts either. Most of the Office 2003 ones were preserved to not break the workflow of power users.

Where Ribbon doesn't work is when you take out the contextual activation out of it. Most companies copied it in a very stupid way. They just copied how it looks. The way it is implemented in Sibelius, WinDBG or PDFXChange is very bad.

I think the interesting larger observation here is the perhaps both Microsoft and Apple peaked in their usability design between the mid-90s and late-aughts (I think Apple stayed at their peak for longer, particularly when you start thinking about the iPhone which, at the time, was streets ahead of what any other company was offering), and have both been on a down trend ever since.

Why is that though? Why does that appear to have to be the case given that neither seems anble to do annything but get worse nowadays? And why hasn’t any other player managed to step in and fill that void?

Clearly there are some broader forces and trends at play here.

Is it pressure to monetize in ever more intrusive, user-hostile, and “micro-tiresome” ways? Is it that they don’t really have to compete any more, or at least not with eachother?

What is going on here? I don’t understand. But I wish I did because then a way out might be easier to discern. Because - I still don’t think - Linux on the desktop (taking one aspect of the problem) is still necessarily ready to be the answer - certainly not outside of the technology, engineering, and scientific niches.

People need to go back and use Win 3.1 or MacOS 7.x to realize what a leap forward Win95 was. MacOS 7.x didn't even have preemptive multitasking! The start menu and task bar made their debut and immediately anchored the whole UI. Since then, Windows has made incremental advances (with the occasional step backwards), but no change has been nearly so radical. OS X would not have been possible without the influence of win95. We're still living in the Win95 age.

I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was functional but it wasn't particularly elegant. But the part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at Sun) were having the Workstation UX argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component was how there was always like 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing on Windows, and that was alleged to be "confusing and a waste of resources." And the counter argument was that different people would find the ways that work best for them, and having a combinatorial way of doing things meant that there was a probably a way that worked for more people.

The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or get things done. For me getting things done won every time.

> 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful

Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.

Microsoft has for short periods in its history put out good UX and design, but fundamentally the company doesn't defend taste and design.

The company treats good design almost like a marketing expense only worth doing if it creates short term brand perception changes. Throughout its history it's had moments of great design when a particular leader creates a culture that promotes it, but inevitably someone higher up rotates out that leader and the culture resets.

That has been the pattern with Windows, Zune / Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and many other consumer facing products.

I have some nostalgia for XP, especially the Zune theme (separate download, black+orange recolor of the default), but due to the Classic theme being available in so many versions and often using it either for more performance or easier ricing (can easily swap the colors and fonts via official settings), I'm also nostalgic for the Win95 or so UI. I think 2000 was the oldest I remember actually using, but I used XP a lot and 2000 not very much.

In the last decade+ of using GNU/Linux, I've also become very attached to bitmap fonts and simple solid colors, while I've grown to dislike curves and transparency. So sometimes I see a screenshot of some very old Mac OS version I never even used, and it just looks good, sharp, and clean to me, no real nostalgia involved.

I think SerenityOS's vision of a unix-like environment with classic Windows UI is genius. I don't follow the project that closely, but on paper it does seem like a good idea.

I think there is distinction there between look and functionality.

They were functionally just fine; good even compared to some modern abominations.

But the look was just plain and ugly, even compared to some alternatives at the time.

> Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.

Yeah I just ran it with 2000-compatible look; still ugly but at least not wasting screen space

By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company’s lifetime.

(If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows)

(I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)

Steven Jobs conveniently ignored the Start menu when discussing the competition. He probably secretly admired it, as it was a complete success story for Microsoft.

https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0717344B1/en

> Microsoft not having taste

the liquid glass designers (and probably their managers and design vps) should be repeatedly punched in the face with that video

MS may not have been as tasteful as MacOS, but the functionality was at least there and it was easy to find and use. That goes a long way to make up for the bland-ish look.

Then we lost even more taste, and eventually the functionality and user friendlyness, on both sides of the isle.

The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.

The "no taste" quote makes no sense given that Susan Kare did the many of the significant icons in Windows 95. She did the same for the Mac.

Agreed, especially since in Europe there was hardly any Apple presence.

It is no accident that to this day Demoscene is all about Spectrum, C64, CPC, MSX, Atari, Amiga, PC and there is hardly any retrogaming/demoscene focus of Apple hardware.

Regarding Windows, I would place Windows 95, NT 4.0, 2000 and 7 as my favourite UI flavour ones.

What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it crashed, it crashed hard without warning

With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare.

I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.

There's an entire is that loves 90s msft user interface. SerenityOS.

Amazing you say that because I almost posted that comment in response to that same clip in another HN thread, for the same reason. There's a tight integration between style, performance, and design on the Windows 95 and 98 that then now feels more like "true" Windows than anything since.

I think Jobs was right about Microsoft later on, but they certainly had taste during their peak.

But did you use 95 when you were young? I was using primarily MacOS at the time and always found windows particularly bad at everything, including UI/UX. I guess we like what we know…

I'm a huge fan of the book "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. One of the things that he talked about is the importance of using materials honestly: not trying to pass plastic off as wood, using the given material to it's best ability (even if itis plastic).

I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.

2000 was peak except for them still having those tiny non-resizeable dialogs with long lists in them which you have to scroll horizontally and vertically. WTF? Your typical Linux DE was better at that even back then.

I have good news for you. Even a Linux Mint Mate would make you happy again, let alone some of the windows 95 look alikes.

I generally agree, only that XP was okay in my opinion after one disabled all fluff so that it looked like 98SE.

It's no wonder XFCE and to lesser extent Mate are popular, XFCE4 does a nice job of being a handy tool and not in-your-face design manifest.

> Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon

What a waste screen real estate, IMO. The only reason it's still around is because screens are now 2X bigger, and screen real estate has become cheaper.

Windows 95 is a rip-off of NeXTStep

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