alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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I think there's something to be said for the loss of institutional knowledge, as that was the time when the first set of Baby Boomers would have been transitioning out of operational roles or the workforce altogether. My experience as a Millennial is that they and older Gen-X, as a cohort, have been quite jealous of their accumulated expertise and generally reticent to pass it along, especially when they'd learned to keep every edge possible in the hyper-competitive job markets of the 80s and 90s. It's possible that a lot of knowledge just disappeared, leaving the younger generations to reinvent the wheel at a cuil over the circumstances that brought about the UX they'd grown up with.