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Comment by dos1 | Hacker News Reader

Why is Microsoft so hell-bent on destroying the desktop OS that made them what they are today? The Metro stuff is fine for tablets, but it's a TERRIBLE user experience on a traditional desktop computer.

I don't even understand this "everything must be a super simple little app" approach that both Apple and (and now because they're a big copy cat) Microsoft are taking. Is this really what the populace wants? I understand that constraints often yield the best designs, but this is a little crazy.

And as far as the dev tooling - that was one area that Microsoft was notably competent. I really can't see how this will benefit them in the long term. Seriously, what is the upside for them? A few more Metro apps? They'll win the battle but lose the war.

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It's a disease. Once everyone realized that touch (and mobile more generally) interfaces were going to "replace" the desktop for many day-to-day uses, they all went nuts trying to rearchitect and "evolve" the desktop in that direction.

Thus Unity, and Gnome 3, and Lion, and Metro. And most of these things don't even suck, they're just needlessly different.

What irks me and others, I suspect, is that the standard WIMP desktop was a mature, well-understood, and very usable metaphor. There's nothing wrong with it.

http://mate-desktop.org probably won't go all "tablet" any time soon.

For you. For me. Not for grandpa. And there are more grandpas than hackers right now.

Immediate visibility of functionality, dropping the filesystem metaphor, standardizing and simplifying the installation of software, and enforcing a consistent UX works better than WIMP for a significant portion of people who would rather not expend effort on making their tools carry out their will. (Only, of course, if their wills are relatively simple. But the intuitiveness vs. power tradeoff is a technology problem, and one there is going to be market pressure to solve.)

For you. For me. Not for grandpa. And there are more grandpas than hackers right now.

I'll have you know that my grandmother, for one, is fully capable of using Windows.

As an aside, we really, really need to protect the future from the tyranny of past generations.

This sounds like a statement out of 1985. It's belied by simple facts: penetration of smartphones and tablets into the "general population" is no better than it was for web browsing and general desktop computing 10-12 years ago. It's selling more devices, mostly because they're cheaper but also because they're inherently personal. Kids that would have shared the family PC in 1998 now expect their own 4S to carry.

And that's not to say that there aren't usability enhancements in the new devices that are worthwhile. But don't pretend that smartphones are "opening computing to a whole new world", becuase they aren't. Like the desktop PC before them, they are the tools of the middle class.

Is it what the populace wants?

Well, given that there's been little to no innovation in native Windows applications in the past five years, I think it's fair to say the populace doesn't want the status quo.

Microsoft has to do something. I don't like what they chose to do (I worked on Win8 for a while before quitting, in part because of their direction), but it's clear to me that they had to take some risks or be faced with an inevitable slow obsolescence.

Maybe desktop computing is a solved problem and we don't need more native apps for Windows, and we can enjoy teaching fruits of decades of labor.

Maybe we are seeing a second system effect for Windows - now that they're committed to taking a clean slate, they're going nuts and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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