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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

If it's your taste the WP8 interface might be more pretty; I find it annoying to work with and the jury is out on 'normal people' (non tech crowd); I still know zero non-tech people in my vicinity who actually like metro (or whatever it's called now). And as far as the phones go; non-tech people downright hate them. Not sure if it's the interface, but in the local pub it's clear; people get passionate about their hate for the devices. And these are people who never heard of HN, so they are not just trolling. I'm talking about lawyers, builders etc; most brought them back and have S2/S3s now.

MS has the one of the best (or the best when it comes to language research) R&D department; there are too many brilliant people doing brilliant stuff there. And they are only just starting to use that power. That should give them their edge (besides a monopoly on the desktop and billions in the bank ofcourse), about their design skills i'm not so sure.

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I'm convinced that Microsoft is an amazing technology company that's utterly and truly terrible at product. They have a tremendous amount of impressive R&D and capability that seem to fall flat every time they try to ship it for, well, actual users.

I'll believe Woz when he says MS is more innovative than Apple, but I think Woz makes the classical geek fallacy that more innovation is the end goal. The end goal is innovation that people actually benefit from, and that involves more than paying a lot of people a lot of money to conjure up new amazing technology and then ship them in boring, poorly implemented products.

I believe that at some level MS realizes what it needs to do, but corporately it has trouble getting there. The core problem here is that the company simply doesn't sweat the details, and continually, severely underestimates how critical details are in today's market. They developed a no-frills, cheap-plan device that taps directly into our social network addictions, and then failed to actually ship the "cheap plan" part.

They released a new, innovative smartphone OS where performance was a critical differentiator from the competition (Android 2.x), and then failed to ensure that 3rd party apps had access to the same performance abilities.

And now they've released an innovative new desktop OS that bets the farm on touch interactions being the wave of the future - and their own first-party apps are in many places poorly designed for touch interaction. Major parts of the core OS are also not touch-ready.

The details matter, and MS never, ever gets the details right.

> MS never, ever gets the details right.

What about Windows 7?

Well, that's getting the details right-er, or closer to right.

Isn't Windows 7 in a large way a refinement of Vista where they did get the "details" right? It's probably overkill to say that Microsoft never gets the details right, but I do agree that their first version product which introduces their inovations is generally rough and unpolished to say the least.

I loved metro when I first saw the build videos in 2011, but that's because I looked at the demo apps as early and unfinished examples of the direction they were taking. Now over a year later I see almost nothing has changed and the same level of quality I saw back then is what is being released now. A lot of things are unintuitive, apps have awkward layouts, the icons are downright awful, etc.

There was a lot of promise for Windows 8 back then, and to some extent I still expect them to refine the UI and make it into a better user experience by the next version of Windows -- but by then the feeling of "innovation" will be gone and they will have missed their chance to make the big impact that they needed and would have otherwise gotten.

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