> my current windows app STILL WORKS ON VISTA, i don't have to do ANYTHING to
"stay up to date" with Windows, cuz they support backward compatibility, and
don't force changes on developers.
> Meanwhile, our Windows version hasn't needed any work since 2000.
Microsoft's impressive backcompat is a blessing as much as it is a curse, and is also the cause of the [subjective opinion incoming] awful User Experience and complete lack of UI and UX consistency, and it remains the number one reason I don't wish to go back to Windows.
Win32, WinForms and WPF desktop applications are all able to follow the OS theme. With Metro there's been a departure to a visually incompatible paradigm. This is to say that the lack of UI consistency is a political problem, not a technical side effect of keeping old UI technologies running.
I made the Windows -> Mac transition in 2008 and recently played around with a modern Windows machine. I was pretty stunned to find the Control Panel experience... not unchanged, but still eerily similar to Windows XP.
Windows' Control Panel is a trainwreck of UX compared to OSX System Preferences. Being such a core part of the OS, I really expected to see, well, something new and better. But then I remembered how countless programs embed themselves in the control panel via DLLs, so Microsoft probably can't make major changes to the UX without breaking binary compatibility with ancient software packages.
Yeah, but they're all separate from any other preference pane. Everybody gets the same framework to create completely independent prefpanes, not hijack Apple's existing ones.
There are no hooks, for example, to modify the Displays prefpane; if Apple decides they want to update it, they're free to do so. On the other hand, a lot of graphics card vendors still needlessly add their own little tab to the display adaptor control panel and the desktop's context menu.
Decisional or organizational, if you prefer. This is about teams at Microsoft fighting, top levels failing to come up with an agreed upon way forward and quality control departments lacking any standard for design coherence.
Their UI inconsistencies (i find the UX perfectly fine myself) mainly comes from their insistence on creating new toolkits left and right due to their internal power struggles. They have improved existing stuff several times, but they most likely have a Google-like situation where new stuff is rewarded more than keeping old stuff running (though unlike Google they also manage to keep old stuff running, so perhaps things aren't as bad).
> Meanwhile, our Windows version hasn't needed any work since 2000.
Microsoft's impressive backcompat is a blessing as much as it is a curse, and is also the cause of the [subjective opinion incoming] awful User Experience and complete lack of UI and UX consistency, and it remains the number one reason I don't wish to go back to Windows.