this video was sponsored by cheddar
three years after its release parts of
Windows 10 look like they're taken
straight out of Windows 7 which came out
nine years ago while other parts look
like they're made for touchscreen
tablets the Windows 10 UI can be
frustratingly inconsistent and
understandably I hear many of you
complain about it all the time but in
the 37th episode of the story behind
series I'd like to argue that much of
the inconsistency is a direct and
inevitable result of their business
model rather than just a product of
their incompetence Microsoft give us a
glimpse at what they would like their
visual interfaces to look like in an
ideal world they called this design
language fluent design and gave us a
really cool demo reel a bit over a year
ago there's a focus on light and shadow
depth motion materials like acrylic
scale lots of 3d stuff and so on it's
all quite futuristic looking but very
little of it is actually present on
Windows 10 more than a year later there
are some apps which follow some fluent
design guidelines and have elements of
frosted glass a reveal effect that
highlights UI elements around your
cursor and interface that responds very
well to scaling they support a light and
dark mode and so on but Windows 10 is
also filled with very prominent apps
which haven't adopted any of these new
design trends and instead have a
decisively Windows 7 feel about them
there are even multiple apps like
control panel and settings that are
basically the same app twice once as a
classic edition and once as a modern
this split personality seems especially
frustrating when we compare Windows 10
to its closest competitor Mac OS or even
mobile operating systems like iOS and
Android which all seem to have much more
consistent interfaces but comparisons
like these are a little misleading and I
think noting that Microsoft doesn't
deserve criticism at all it certainly
does and it will receive plenty of it
from me in this very video but Microsoft
situation is unique in
two ways first is hardware complexity
and Apple hasn't the easiest here since
they only have to support a few devices
while Windows runs on a much more
diverse set of hardware second in line
would be Android which has a similarly
complex Hardware ecosystem but unlike
Microsoft Google doesn't actually make
the OS run on all of those devices
Google really only makes a standard
version of Android and then puts the
burden on manufacturers to take that
customize it for their device and
maintain it that's why the Android
ecosystem is so fragmented in the
meanwhile Microsoft actually directly
supports and maintains all 700 million
copies of Windows 10 that are active
right now which run on everything from
business laptops to cheap tablets for
schools giant collaborative whiteboards
phones Xbox consoles Poland's and
Windows mixed reality headsets POS
terminals that you would see in stores
and hotels and who knows what else
designing an OS that looks modern and is
functional and doesn't break backwards
compatibility with all of these existing
devices is just not the same level of
complexity as say making Mac OS or
Android consistent every time Microsoft
wants to modernize any part of their OS
and cut out an old piece there is a huge
push back they can't get rid of Internet
Explorer even though they have the much
more competent edge browser because some
enterprise solutions in some corners of
the world rely on it for some
interactions they tried to replace paint
with the new paint 3d and half the
infinite went to war protecting this
program from the 90s many of their users
just hate changing their workflows and
since Microsoft makes most of their
money from the enterprise customers who
rely on legacy code so much and which is
couldn't care less about modern design
trends Microsoft adjust can't push any
radical design changes through the
second source of inconsistency is this
thing called Windows as a service which
basically means that instead of having
one major Windows version updates every
three years or so which brings huge
changes to the OS like we did in the
past
Microsoft adopted continuous development
with frequent but small updates
coming to windows down there will be no
windows 11 or 12 and instead we're just
getting multiple updates a year going
forward which means that the OS is
always in transition now it's never
quite done there is no finish line to
cross and the interface is therefore
never really consistent either instead
of moving all of it to a new design
language at once like before updates are
now done app by app and teams go back
and forth on their designs based on
real-time user feedback this iterative
approach that focuses on early feedback
should ultimately lead to individual
apps being better designed and big
blunders like that terribly received
Windows 8 UI being shut down before it
is too late but it also leads to you've
guessed it inconsistency so those two
approaches put Microsoft at a massive
disadvantage when compared to Apple and
Google at least in terms of UI
consistency I mean Microsoft has to
support a much more complex set of users
directly and they have to update their
OS bit by bit none of that helps with
consistency but it does help keep nearly
old 700 million Windows 10 users up to
date and frequently updated and it helps
get rid of the sort of fragmentation
issues that Google has with Android in
the end it's all a sort of trade-off now
while I am willing to give Microsoft a
break for the above-mentioned reasons I
do think that they have no good excuse
for the inconsistencies in the apps that
they did finally modernize with fluent
design like for example dark mode and
some apps means a completely black
background while others means a dark
gray one navigation menus are sometimes
on the top next to each other and
sometimes on the Left hidden behind the
hamburger menu the back button is
sometimes in the title bar and sometimes
just below it title bars are sometimes
transparent sometimes have a solid color
and sometimes just have the same color
as the background context menus look
completely different depending on where
they are some have icons some don't some
have underlined letters some don't their
width and height are different so are
there dividers and so on the reveal
effects are all over the place I mean
some
apps don't have them at all others have
them on some elements but no others and
even look slightly different in
different places and I could go on but I
think I've made my point clear these
apps should be consistent as Microsoft
has just redesigned them but
frustratingly enough they aren't so the
summit on calling out Microsoft's modern
apps are being inconsistently designed
as I think perfectly fair and warranted
I do it myself all the time but claiming
that all of Windows 10 is inconsistently
designed because Microsoft either
doesn't care about consistency or simply
can't produce high-quality consistent
design is I think just not true
the fact is that Microsoft simply
prioritized other things above design
consistency now before you go there's
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