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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

>Windows's UI mess is just a reflection of them hiring modern developers

While I agree UI consistency is dead even on MacOS now, personally I believe the Windows issue stems from them being too scared to actually push out full redesigns.

Look how vocal and angry people were when they started redesigning Settings even though most of control panel was designed for sub 800x600 resolutions.

This is why we're stuck with such inconsistency because they can never make sweeping changes without people freaking out, this is why we're stuck with things like that terrible device manager that refreshes the whole view and flickers 3 times when you plug in a USB device.

Really Windows should be pushing out a complete redesign and update of at least 2 of these apps every version. People will scream and shout every time they do but it's the only chance Windows has to completely modernize itself and get it up to par with Mac system tools and standard apps.

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What surprises me is how little functionality the new settings app has, and how often to get things done, I need to click through to an older settings screen.

Its not that they modernized the old settings / configuration screen. They made a new one that does about 1/3 of the job and still links to the old one for the last 2/3. It does not seem like Microsoft intend to slowly have the new settings setup subsume the old settings. Nor do they seem to want to improve the old settings. Instead we are left with a weird stack of settings screens.

This is largely because "modern" design has such poor information density, it requires 15 different screens for a single screen of a "legacy" UI.

They've made it pretty clear that to prioritize they've been following the 80/20 rule as best they can with the data they have. They try to prioritize the things people do most often in each iteration because they don't have the budget to do 100% of the things all at once. (And it probably is a waste of time to upgrade settings features that 0% of people use.)

The big real complication is that data they have available on what is used 80/90% of the time is telemetry. It's not a coincidence that the people that find that the settings they use the most that haven't been converted are in the set of people most complaining about telemetry and most actively disabling it.

9 years and counting.

As sibling mentions, the problem isn't that they made a new settings panel, it's that the new settings panel is both slower and less functional than the old ones!

When you refuse to hire junior developers for $50-60k and every new hire has to be a $200k rockstar, the rockstars have to provide value. They have to have something to show. So they have to rearrange something, replace something, do something.

This isn't unique to Windows. It's a general problem. When something like network configuration or screen resolution had been a pretty stagnant thing for 20 years, you could just leave it alone or... spruce it up. Sure, it's always possible that there are better ideas. But implementing a change because you have a better idea is one thing. Implementing a change to justify your salary is another thing.

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