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Microsoft's Forgotten Mistakes
seattlenerd writes "In light of all of the hype about how much cash Microsoft is sitting on, it's good to be reminded that they do fail. A lot. This piece in Seattle Weekly points out some of the many failures -- from ActiMates Barney to Microsoft at Work to pending disasters in smartphones and interactive TV (despite recent PR-worthy announcements). But like most litter, the failures are swept under the rug in the hopes people don't remember that many 'new' Microsoft ideas are recycled from its own history." Of course, like any big company, Microsoft is not a monolith.
in the hopes people don't remember that many 'new' Microsoft ideas are recycled from its own history."
Microsoft's try-try-again philosophy and focused determination are why it is at the top of the heap of software companies and why they are sitting on the 45 billion in cash now.
This being Slashdot, people will say that the reason Microsoft is so big is because of its monopoly position, but that is a (rather silly) chicken and egg argument. They'd have no monopoly if they weren't big to begin with -- they certainly weren't a government granted monopoly like AT&T once was.
UI design isnt about putting important stuff in order, it's about making important stuff easily accessible and putting unimportant stuff out of the way.
How about the crap that MS pulled by placing the minimize/maximize right next to the close button (whereas in previous UIs the close button had been on the left so that it would be nearly impossible to exit an app accidentally while trying to minimize)? I would hardly consider that an improvement in ordering and accessibility.
And it takes a monopoly to be able to survive such stunning blunders like missing the emergence of something as powerful as the internet.
Without MS monopolistic cash income stream they would have suffered serious blows screwing up like they have. That is why I wish that part of the settlement MS would have been prevented them from buying technology but force them to "innovate" from scratch and compete.
OS X's close and minimize (and zoom) buttons are all separated by several pixels, so you're much less likely to hit one when you mean to hit another. Windows, on the other hand, has no separation between the buttons, so if you miss the maximize button by one pixel, you close the window.
Consequently, I have accidently closed windows in Windows numerous times (even though I use Windows rarely), while I have essentially never done so in OS X (which I use all the time).