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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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'.
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" = 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. :|
A 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
They had some cool form factors too. I remember I had one of the phones with a landscape slide-out physical keyboard.
And the Windows Phone 7 had a hard realtime kernel!
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?
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 :/
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 (:
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
Can confirm, I worked on MoPho. It was a weird time.
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.
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.
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 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.
https://xkcd.com/3089/
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!
I wonder if they also made a modern system to handle 'hosts'.
I thought Metro was appropriate. As in, the name fit the design style.
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'.
Honestly, the "modern" UI (Live tiles) was unironically the best part of Windows 8.
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.
As is ”simple”.
It doesn't fit now and it won't work later.
No. Modern like 1950's modern. Unadorned, functional.
"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
I wish violence on every one of the people involved for the pain they caused
You would, wouldn’t you?