The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern"
devblogs.microsoft.comA bit off-topic but I super enjoyed the UI on the Windows Phones at the time. Only topped by the WebOS from Palm even before it I recall.
It was a great UI for mobile. It just was a terrible UI for a real computer, so people reacted badly to Microsoft trying to force it in there. Mobile devices and normal computers have very different UI needs, and you can't simply paste one onto the other - something Microsoft should've learned from their failed attempts to make a tablet with the older Windows UI.
Yeah. The Windows Phone was an amazing piece of technology. It's a tragedy it did not win at all in the marketplace.
In particular, it was pretty easy to write apps for, unlike the other two big giants.
My first smartphone was a Windows phone with half a gig of RAM and it's still the best phone I've ever owned in terms of software
What made it so great?
It was as though MS actually built something amazing and Nokia was back to its roots of building solid, well designed phones.
UI was very forward thinking in the right ways. Buttery smooth, etc.
Of course it flopped because a bit late (arguable) so it lacked apps.
No idea why this couldn’t have been brought to android at least as a launcher or provide some kind of support to run Android apps. Just MS being MS —ordinary users/consumers aren’t their primary target in general.
The OS was smooth and worked well, and the design philosophy across basically every app was extremely coherent. Everything worked well, and everything felt like it fit together. Really its only problem was the lack of apps due to companies intentionally not supporting Windows Phone (Microsoft had a YouTube client that Google made them kill off, and Google never bothered to release a replacement IIRC)
Same here. I had a window's phone at some point. Would have loved it with a stylus.
Did that have any real-world effects/benefits?
I think you could build most Linux desktops with RT enabled, but I don't think you'd gain anything UX related
One of my high school friends had a Windows phone around this time, the one with the giant camera bit. I thought it looked super cool but he hated the thing. No apps.
And the Windows Phone 7 had a hard realtime kernel!
They had some cool form factors too. I remember I had one of the phones with a landscape slide-out physical keyboard.
Ditto. Metro was the best graphic UI I ever used. I liked even on the laptop.
Same for me. Windows Phone was super smooth even on budget phones with 1GB/512MB of RAM while Android would have been choppy as hell on such hardware.
Also, the Windows 8 tablet mode had better touch and swipe UX than the current Windows 11 when put in tablet mode. What a joke Microslop has become.
Nadella needs to clean house or step down. The only thing he executed well was the cloud/hyperscaler side of the business because he caught the period when everything was moving to the cloud and MS was well positioned to take advantage of that as big companies were already invested into the on-prem MS ecosystem, but on the consumer facing side he fumbled everything, all consumer products are worse than how they were under Balmer: Windows - trash, Office - trash, Xbox - trash, Bing - trash, Copilot - trash.
It's a major problem. As present trends continue, eventually nobody is going to need any Microsoft products anymore. I'm already watching clients gradually shift away from Office to simple using Google Workspace, and eventualy they'll do the same with Windows.
AWS is the dominant player in cloud hosting. What, exactly, does anyone need Microsoft for anymore?
> As present trends continue, eventually nobody is going to need any Microsoft products anymore.
People have been saying this for about 30 years now. Just like IBM, Apple, Adobe, etc, MS will probably outlive all its haters.
>What, exactly, does anyone need Microsoft for anymore?
Brand recognition? Why do people still buy Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW when a Hyundai or Dacia does the same thing for cheaper?
Inertia and complacency? Most (non-startup) companies in Germany and Austria are Microsoft shops because that's what they've been using for 20+ years and MS has big customer support and sales teams here that wine and dine them regularly, but unicorn focused HN is oblivious to that.
Hardly anyone is still using IBM OfficeVision, though. Or, for that matter, HCL Notes.
Who said anything about that? IBM does consultancy like nobody else.
Also IBM still makes PowerPC CPUs and mainframes and those are still selling to niche customers who don't trust the cloud.
Microsoft will have its niche too if it flops.
I had a Lumia with 512MB of RAM. The OS ran great, but the web outpaced it. I couldn't open a lot of JS-heavy sites without Internet Explorer crashing.
> The ListView control? It started out with the more tedious name “modern collection control”, which got shortened to “MoCo.”
A missed opportunity to call it "MoCoCo" which, if you ask me, has more flare and personality to it. What a waste :/
Microsoft must have an unwritten rule to avoid anything that might appear to be even slightly tasteful on their account.
Way more fun than JaCoCo (which I actually like): https://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/
My name for the Windows 11 experience is "Linux Mint"... ;-)
I spell it KDE but it might be regional variance (:
I read somewhere that the visual design of Windows 8 was based on the works of Mondrian, because they wanted a design that didn’t just look like the Swiss School that Apple had adopted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl
I don’t know if the idea of calling Windows 8 modern stemmed from that, or if they decided to pick Mondrian having already decided to go with modern.
They were so busy trying to create modern that they forgot what made things classic.
The solution to Windows 8 UI issues was aptly named, Classic Shell
The final name was also called Modern. I know this person worked on Windows 8, but as a member of the public we definitely knew the Windows 8 UI was called 'Modern'.
Can confirm, I worked on MoPho. It was a weird time.
I thought Metro was appropriate. As in, the name fit the design style.
I sort of like the term “early Modern” in history. Putting the “early modern” period 250 years ago causes us to reflect on how much life has changed over that time, which is useful because it’s so tempting to imagine what life was like during the Renaissance or Middle Ages. Of course, every period has massive change, so the experiences of people on either end of a period are as different as somebody in the early modern and… actual modern… eras!
Hot take: I liked Windows 8. It used less memory than Windows 7, increased battery life, the file manager and task manager were much improved, I could mount ISOs without third party software, among other things. In truth, I didn't even mind the start screen. And I certainly liked Metro as a UI paradigm much more than Aero.
Of course it was still Windows at the end of the day, but 8.1 was my last Windows. The laptop I ran it on is slowly bitrotting in a storage locker somewhere on the other end of the country. I didn't like the look of Windows 10, several aspects of it were hard dealbreakers, so I never swapped to it. Eventually I just changed over to using Linux as my primary OS and haven't really looked back.
I was one of the few people that thought people would like it. That is, why shouldn't it be better to have a bunch of tiles on your desktop that have the most important information and then you choose the one you really want to concentrate on full screen? Well, of course the problem is you aren't using a tablet. It's trying to fix something that never needed to be fixed.
But yes, Linux is great now and most people on the site can easily debug potential problems they run into on it and not look back.
It also suffered from a lack of relevant applications. The apps I used were a terminal emulator, a web browser, Word, Excel, Project, and a few other old Win32 type apps - none of which were going to become "modern" apps in any useful way.
I ran Windows 8 and the 8.1 on a Surface Pro 2 for about two years as my daily driver. It was great for travelling with since it was so lightweight and easy to use in cramped airplane seats. However, I never bothered using any of the "modern" applications at all.
Windows 10 was certainly an improvement.
I didn't care for the UI at all which is the most common complaint about it. But it was the least offensive complaint to me, the existence of the Microsoft Store was had me looking for the exit. I guess I overestimated Microsoft's competence because the store remains an irritating tumor that hasn't yet metastasized.
Unpopular opinion: Windows 10 is worse. You could still control updates and uninstall or never install the telemetry packs in 8/8.1. And the UI problem could be solved with 3rd party tools. Windows 10 had the spyware baked in and got more annoying over time. But poor adoption of 8 and Microsoft abandoning it meant that in practice driver and software support for 8.1 often disappeared before even Windows 7.
My converse hot take is that I actually really liked Aero, I've always had a thing for translucent UI elements and glowing things.
I wonder if they also made a modern system to handle 'hosts'.
When you put "modern" or "new" into the name of a thing, you're basically announcing to the world that it was designed for the short term, and when it is no longer new it will no longer be relevant.
Modern in the art & design world is actually quite retro.
This is from the same company that brought us Windows NT (New Technology).
Adding "fast" is similarly fun, it's probably true when you came up with it, probably won't be true in the future anymore.
What do you mean? Fast Ethernet is fast, and it'll stay that way forever! It's in the name! 100 Mbit/s!
Or USB:
- USB 2.0: High-Speed USB
- USB 3.0: Super-Speed USB
The marketing names are often deficient, but at least there's a clear version number attached to it. Microsoft doesn't like version numbers at all.
I do find it funny how Full-Speed USB is 12 Mbit/s.
As is ”simple”.
No. Modern like 1950's modern. Unadorned, functional.
1900s: Noveau - plant shapes. 1940s: deco - geometry. Windows XP: gradients, color. Windows Vista: semitransparency.
1950s, Windows 8: 'modern' - strip away unnecessary decoration.
Honestly, the "modern" UI (Live tiles) was unironically the best part of Windows 8.
"Modern" = something that ruins perfectly good stuff in the never ending pursuit of "progress". UI doesn't need to change every few years. It should have stopped changing almost 30 years ago.
This. I don't see the point of constantly changing UI as an end-user. The old one just work. It works perfectly. Now that you changed it and thing breaks. :|
It's still broken to this day
> [UI] should have stopped changing almost 30 years ago
In some ways it did, modern CLIs haven't changed that much fundamentally from their older counterparts. You can do more things but someone using a CLI 30 years ago wouldn't be phased by modern ones; the interaction model has barely changed.
They're all emulating the video terminals of yore too, which themselves were descended from even older teletypewriters.