this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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Yes, Win2k, WinXP, and Win7 were all major leaps forward in various areas. Imagine if 8 had been just a major cleanup of Windows 7 and unifying the various settings paradigms, how much better that would have been.
But alas, Windows 8 was the 'oh crap, tablets and phones might eat our lunch' release and the focus was throwing the desktop/laptop experience under the bus to try to cater to sensibilities of markets they were never going to capture. Also, to have their own 'app store' to try to wrestle a google/apple like revenue model for applications running on the platform.
If MS had put any focus on allowing skins/themes for Windows, the touch market would have just been an extra feature. There is no technical reason they couldn't have, as evidenced by the third-party apps that allowed legacy skins on previous versions, such as 8 and 10. But they needed that lock-in and forced experience, rather than giving people the choice.
I will confess that I think making windows UI appropriate for tablet or phone has to be more than a skinning exercise. E.g. software interacting with a mouse pointer unable to deal with more vague and multiple touches. UI elements needing different spacing for the form factor. A different scheme for switching full screen tasks and recognizing that traditional windowing isn't going to be very helpful in a smaller than 9" format.
Unfortunately windows basically favored touch at the expense of traditional desktop, when their home turf was very much not touch enabled.
Windows 8 was actually a big cleanup over 7. We got a much improved task manager, Explorer got a ribbon, copy operations now showed a graph, and performance was very similar to Win7. It was just that Microsoft overshadowed these improvements with the UI disaster and telemetry.
We'll have to disagree with the ribbon being an improvement, but the rest definitely count.