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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Windows 11 is that it's not meant to be a better Windows but a worse MacOS. Why is it so hard for even Microsoft employees to understand that people with complex workflows actually benefit from a task bar where all the open windows are visible at all times, and no launcher can replace this?

Competing for a segment that it can't win while losing the segment it owns i must be some business school cases study in the works. What's the point in being a slighlty less tall giraffe when you were a rhino before?

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

     I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.

     I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.

It's a "Tyranny of the Marginal User" problem.

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

Microsoft execs believed nothing could drive Windows users away, because they're addicted, but changes -could- potentially bring in Mac users. So everything was designed by and for Mac users.

They could make it configurable. You can have your cake and eat it too in this situation.

I don't like KDE's default settings but it took me a mere seconds to get the desktop I like.

Of course this is not a new idea and how it used to be on Windows. The real question is why removing user choice has become so fashionable in UX design. Maybe it's just a phase and will pass.

It's not Microsoft employees who make these calls, but the Microsoft organization itself. Organizations make decisions that nobody by themselves would want to make. The larger an organization gets, the more true this becomes. Think of them like meta organisms, or schooling fish.

That sounds about as reasonable as "the devil made me do it" excuse.

It totally makes sense though. Win11 mainly seems to be a career advancement vehicle for Microsoft's anonymous middle management caste. I bet that if you point at a single bad feature in Win11 it will be very hard to find a single person who would take responsibility.

For good features it will be "I made the decision!", for bad features it will be weasel words like "we heard our users loud and clear" or "we modernized" or "we streamlined", etc... basically as if the bad feature was caused by some external force or by a committee decision.

Everyone in a big org has their own incentives and they don't match with what makes a better product. People are looking out for themselves and there's no accountability for the end result. Checkboxes get checked and that's all that matters.

That is a good analogy though.

Slow AI.

They are terraforming our planet into a less habitable one, making many people miserable and turn useful things into abominations. One usually can't point at a single person deciding that it should be so, but at the end that's what's the output is.

The paperclip machine is here and it's optimizing for GDP growth.

Wrong, there is always somebody responsible. It may not be an explicit decision but somebody let it happen.

I've personally witnessed this at work and for lack of better terms call it "leadership by weakness". Initiatives to change a situation will be either ignored or actively undermined by lack of support from the one in charge.

Outsiders get the impression that "it just happened this way" or "things just are like this" but it really was a conscious decision by leadership. As an employee I found it insulting because of course our customers blamed us developers.

You may be able to pinpoint a few people who signed off on the decision, but it's rarely a decision they would have made outside of the context of the organization. The organization provides the incentives, shapes the data used in the decision process, and determines the set of decisions which can be made. For instance, an executive may sign off on a feature after viewing data that says its a good idea, but the data was prepared by another part of the organization which is trying to advance their own agenda. And for-profit organizations being as they are, options which don't increase or even decrease profit are essentially off the table, unavailable for real consideration, so the person signing off on the feature already had their options winnowed down by the organization itself.

> The organization provides the incentives, shapes the data used in the decision process, [...]

Exactly! And who sets those incentives?

Imagine if Satya Nadella was an avid Windows power user that thinks having a vertical tab bar is the best invention since sliced bread. Would he really fuzz around with StartAllBack etc.? Because "it just is like this now"? Or would he be able to influence the Windows team to simply implement it? Of course he could. He just doesn't care about vertical tab bars.

As a side note, I see the blaming of bad situations on "for-profit organizations" as if management had no other choices just because somebody made a spreadsheet as an easy excuse for them to not stand behind their decisions.

If this "profit-uber-alles" theory was true executives would reduce their compensation to minimum wage. It clearly is more complicated.

> Exactly! And who sets those incentives?

The organization.

Executives like to think they're in charge, but they're selected for their alignment with the goals of the organization and if they stray far from that they get replaced. Satya isn't the kind of man who would put good taste in software design first, and if he was then he wouldn't be in the position.

> As a side note, I see the blaming of bad situations on "for-profit organizations" as if management had no other choices

They have one key choice, they can walk away. Whenever they realize the corporation is going to do something they don't want to be involved with, they can and should walk away. Sometimes they do, but when they choose comfort over good aesthetic sense, ethics, morales, laws.. they can and should be judged for that. The worldview I am advocating for (viewing organizations as organisms, or Slow AIs as others have put it) is not about absolving individual humans of responsibility. As long as they continue to participate in the organization, they're responsible. Rather, the point of the mental model is to remind people that organizations, particularly in this case corporations, are inhumane monsters which lack an innate understanding of human values.

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