The GP's comment - that we have to upgrade our hardware because devs are "anorexically obsessed with lean code, and find complex dependancies too confusing/bothersome" - is surely the exact opposite of reality? We have to upgrade to faster hardware because the bloat slows everything down!

I see this mistake very often from people whose UI learnings came via Visual Studio, because it didn't have a separate UI element named "dropdown menu" or similar. You instead had to add a combobox and configure an option to turn it into a plain drodown list (e.g. set editable to false in VB6, or change dropDownStyle in VB.net).

They do everything in their power to distract from the real issue - that the landscape of television has changed beyond recognition since the tax was brought in.

It's completely clear to everybody that the TV licence is an outdated model that makes no sense in today's world of competing commercial streaming services, but they're desperate to control the narrative to avoid losing their income stream. Which is understandable I suppose, from their narrow point of view. But for the country's point of view, we need a politician with balls, to step up and reform the system. But I'm not sure those even exist anymore.

The need for instructions in that Search dialog is appalling from a usability perspective.

When Win95 was released, it was widely seen as Microsoft finally catching up with its rivals. They had at last added features that Mac, NeXTSTEP, Amiga, etc had had for years.

Team bloat is a real issue but I don't think this case is relevant.

> UIs that are barely usable... like Windows 2000

Words fail me.

Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.

Parts of those blog posts were unintentionally revealing of the groupthink of an enclosed bubble of people who couldn't see the wood for the trees. A great example is this piece about moving menu entries around so you couldn't build muscle memory, and had to take the time to look for what you wanted:

> First, remember that we're analyzing this with 20/20 hindsight... there was a lot of excitement (not just at Microsoft) about "auto-customization"... to present exactly the right UI for the person at hand. Now, it's easy to say that today people are generally against this idea... but we know that mainly through trying... the adaptive UI in Office 2000

As I recall it, the vast majority at the time - users, reviewers, UI/UX writers - considered its downsides to be completely obvious and were firmly against it. Its designers were apparently the only ones who needed 20/20 hindsight to see that.

> I remember thinking that the thought process behind the ribbon was very solid

I agree, the historical research, and the work on identifying the problems, was very solid. But the massive criticisms of the ribbon suggest it was not an entirely successful attempt at a solution.

I've seen it said that there's no way Microsoft would have neglected to carry out major usability studies on such a major UI change, and that the fact that nothing's been published, after all the blogposts and talks beforehand, suggests they chose to bury a bad result. No idea whether there's any truth in that of course, but it does sound plausible.

Microsoft did those usability studies on the versions of Office that were current before the ribbon. The ribbon followed those studies as their attempt at a solution.

A few times over the years I've tried to search for usability studies of the ribbon interface because I've never got on with it myself. I find plenty of others asking the same thing online, and everybody points them to those same earlier studies from before the ribbon, while wrongly telling them it's a study of the ribbon.

Those studies are unable to tell us whether or not MS's attempt at a solution actually fixed the problems.

I believe the ribbon was a downgrade in usability terms (but people expect it in office suites, purely because it's seen as looking more modern). And I'd love to see real intensive research to tell me whether my belief is right or wrong.

I'm in the UK and it's geoblocked for me.

Upset Girl isn't "natural sounding". It's a voice I feel I've heard in AI demos before.

Indeed, this reads as a case of somebody forgetting that the news doesn't report what's absolutely normal to everybody. It reports what's unusual. (Plus all the articles that misrepresent people's opinions either deliberately for clicks, or accidentally through lack of understanding, sometimes due to being given a quota of articles to rush out per day.)

Perhaps the universalizing mistake is going a little bit in both directions here.

There's a huge current trend where people love to tar an entire generation with the same brush. When a person a generation or more removed (in either direction) says something we personally disagree with, it's become the norm to put down that entire generation as though they share the same viewpoint. It's a very unfortunate trend IMO because it often comes across as arrogant and/or patronising.

For some it's distracting and frustrating, even increasing aggression and thereby increasing the risk. For others it breeds complacency, a "boy who cried wolf" scenario such that the alarms become meaningless. Either way, it doesn't work as intended.

Interesting to know ships have followed the same pattern, apparently to a worse extent. I wonder how many more walks of life, and industries, are suffering in the same way.

There are phone deals that include unlimited SMS messages, but not MMS.