It was bad because they did research studies about the UI and then lied about the results of those studies so they could push the terrible Win8 UI forward.
I had friends who worked on the UX team for 8 and they reported general malfeasance all around. Microsoft was very scarred that tabled were going to take over the world (that was common wisdom in the trade presses at the time) and iPad sales used to be absurdly high. Win8 was the result of a scared company that needed to release something.
No, it was bad because of the duality. Windows 8 was actually pretty good on touch first devices like the Surface RT and was IMO considerably better than the iOS and Android alternatives at the time. It only really got awkward in mouse land.
They ARE terrible. They used to be very good at it. Microsoft advanced GUIs more through the '90s than anyone else. Tidy, efficient, and still innovative. Windows 95 through XP pretty much nailed down most of what a GUI needs.
Microsoft has since abandoned essential practices that make GUIs work, in addition to abandoning taste and organization. Windows is a sorry shitshow of defective design and defective function.
Don't agree? Then back up your objection instead of anonymously downvoting, crybaby. So tiresome.
Pretty much everything Microsoft did in the 90s with GUIs was just playing catch up with Apple.
My first job in 1990, we had a load of PCs running DOS, and one Mac with a GUI and which also played sound and could read laserdisks (as I recall). Changing the error sound to "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" never got old.
Windows 95 just about got to feature parity with the Mac 5 years later. It was really nice, but not exactly massively innovative.
I worked at a small software store (offshoot from WaldenBooks) sometime around 1990, and I remember a guy coming into the store asking whether a PC was “multimedia ready”.
I didn’t know anything about PCs, having grown up with Apple, but every Mac I’d used had sound and graphics, so I told him as far as I could tell it was all marketing crap.
Never occurred to me that PCs couldn’t do multimedia out of the box.
Yeah, the 90s and Windows wouldn't exactly be the time range I'd associate with Microsoft and innovative GUIs (although Windows was mostly better than its reputation IMO).
Where MS actually did groundbreaking UI/UX work was in the 00s, ironically for most things not Windows - Media Center, Xbox 360, Zune/WP.
And of course they had to ruin it with botched product management and their bulldozing Metro/UWP everywhere strategy. The Windows 8.1 UX on a tablet was actually pretty good. Too bad it a) sucked on everything else, b) app integration was spotty due to relegating Win32 to second class.
