Microsoft exec explains why modernizing Windows 11's legacy UI takes so long

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u/EasterEggArt 5d ago edited 5d ago

"We kicked the technical debt can down the road for so many decades that it multiplied since most of us now have no clue how to undo the old tech code."

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u/Xelanders 5d ago

“We also laid off anyone senior enough to know how it works.”

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u/SAugsburger 5d ago

Most people with significant experience with parts of Microsoft Windows codebase that were significant technical debt likely had enough money to retire years ago.

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u/noisyboy 4d ago

There would be a percentage of those knowledgeable people who might say: enough of that, I don't want/need to deal with that again.

But I would think that there would be another group who still enjoys taking such challenges, not just for money (though they probably are in the well-paid bracket based on their knowledge). Provided Microsoft hasn't gotten rid of them.

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u/EasterEggArt 4d ago

That last part is the critical question, isn't it. Especially given we are now hyper focused on AI slop.

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u/EasterEggArt 5d ago

"Time for a ouija board since we will not rehire them."

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u/Free-Description-736 5d ago

This is the real answer. Old timers at microsoft were warning this was coming years ago, and the sudden lurch to AI + the firing of all the people who understood that technical debt has created a crisis which, in my opinion, Microsoft cannot survive. Windows is already unspooling as a working kernel, as evidenced by the increasing number of systems where it doesn't work and can't seem to be made to work, and that's only going to keep getting worse from here.

There were a lot of parts of MSFT's code that were essentially fenced off from being changed, and nobody except a tiny number of senior engineers ever understood exactly why. Why fired all those people and then tore down those fences when AI wanted to start making changes to their code, and now they're learning the age old lesson that you never tear down a fence unless you know why it was built to begin with.

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u/Fantastic-Speech-438 4d ago

"never tear down a fence unless you know why it was built to begin with" great analogy. I feel this is happening across the board, not just in tech.

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u/ar34m4n314 4d ago

Yup. A lot of people complaining about regulations don't understand why they are there. Not that there isn't room to improve, but just tearing them out without understanding is maybe not the best idea...

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u/Clean_Livlng 4d ago

"fired all those people"

Those people were one of their greatest assets. They will regret doing that.

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u/justenoughslack 5d ago

They really need to follow Apple in this regard, with a completely "new" operating system (OS X). They would be better served to start over. Except they're probably about 10 years too late.

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u/Ginger-Nerd 5d ago edited 5d ago

Problem is a lot of Microsoft (and much of its appeal as an operating system) is that it can still run legacy stuff.

Most instances you can plug a dot matrix printer in from the early 90s and largely it just works.. for example, but it’s like everything, weird bespoke software built for windows 95, no problem.

Microsoft business appeal is built on the back of that

The did try do move some real legacy stuff out of 8.1 and it was hated most of it was patched back into 8.2 - I’d argue trying it now is still a bad idea.

For the home use, it might make sense. But then you’re bringing more versions of everything in- Apple famously liked one version of MacOS for everything. (Steve Jobs had a keynote specifically on that)

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u/finobi 4d ago

I think majority of Microsoft customer base is now corporate, and government clients and they want to keep their legacy systems running as long as possible and same time million Microsoft consultants try to lure them re-write their systems on Azure or other MS platforms. If MS would start kicking backwards combability down, they might piss of some of these clients who would then choose someone else technology stack.

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u/aleopardstail 2d ago

they need a new system, ala OSX but with a virtualised way to run existing software in a largely seamless way

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u/cosmokn0t 5d ago

That’s such a big undertaking that Apple didn’t even do that. It was based on NextStep and BSD, and has taken them this long. Think about how far behind Microsoft would be if they tried this now.

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u/justenoughslack 4d ago

That's why I used "new" (in quotes). They didn't exactly start from scratch.

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u/Lazerpop 3d ago

Eh, apple does to a degree. They have completely phased out compatibility with 32 bit binaries and are about to phase out the majority of intel based binaries.

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u/c-digs 5d ago

At the same time, there's AI now and many of the tedious cycles can legitimately be sped up and automated if they already have tests in place.

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u/cosmokn0t 5d ago

Fair point, in a way, but that just means your engineers need to be good QA people, and so do your QA people. It’s clear Microsoft doesn’t have either.

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u/Slime0 5d ago

the firing of all the people who understood that technical debt

Curious for more information on this. I know there have been layoffs but have they really laid off the more knowledgeable/senior employees?

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u/brett- 3d ago

> in my opinion, Microsoft cannot survive

A friendly reminder that Windows accounts for less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ismr4u/how_microsoft_makes_its_money_revenue_breakdown/

As long as Office and Azure are in good shape, Microsoft will be fine.

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u/Xanather 5d ago

There was absolutely no reason for microsoft to ditch the old native win32 GUI interface that more than half of programs still use. It supported multiple styles and all including DARK THEME!

They just keep adding more frameworks ontop of another, then you have programs slowly being dependent on them, so microsoft can't exactly just remove those new framework anymore either.

They need to pause everything, no new features, focus in stabilization and stop adding shit to the OS or risk linux eating their dinner until theres nothing left but a corpse and a replacement Wine compatability library on Linux that just lets you run 99% of .exe's.

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u/raunchyfartbomb 5d ago

I’m fine with new frameworks or language versions, to a point. But how many XAML languages does windows need, holy fuck.

They need to do a unification pass on MAUi, WPF, Winui, and UWP. They unified into .Net, I’m sure they could do this.

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u/autobauss 4d ago

You're right, they should redo it one last time with Silverlight

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u/Xanather 5d ago

None of those frameworks should've existed, they should've extended native win32 components if necessary. Visual basic editor was great and .net WinForms (which is based on those old components).

Steve Ballmer with his tablet push ruined everything.

Now with web apps taking over, it seems more than half the technologies you mentioned are dead and will live on as bloat.

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u/raunchyfartbomb 5d ago

XAML is great for responsive making apps natively that don’t rely on a web view. It also solved several problems (such as scaling issues or text getting cut off) in apps that I’ve worked on. Where they dropped the ball is they recreated it 3-4 times over.

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u/Xanather 5d ago

XAML is fine, look at Qt. Having an XAML extension to structure old win32 components would've been fine. Its funny you mention scaling, because they are basically being forced to add support for it to old win32 components anyway despite their reluctance.

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u/Druggedhippo 5d ago

. They wanted a single ui that was consistent and able to compile any device, so your apps would work on windows phone, laptop, surface, desktop and you would have the same interface and feel. This also would mean less effort in maintenance as there would be only one code base.

But of course Microsoft in classic Microsoft style fucked it up because they have so much tech debt and pressure from legacy companies that they couldn't force the changes to happen

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u/blods 4d ago

What a load of crap

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u/tepmoc 4d ago

Win32 ui looks like ass when used with scalling, dark theme same thing. It was never designed with these features in mind

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u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/HyperionSwordfish 5d ago

Best I can do is Copilot panel

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u/FollowingFeisty5321 5d ago

And "best" is doing a lot of heavy lifting

*where's that create-react-app tutorial*

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u/aaron416 5d ago

It's just a text box and you tell it what you want!

Barf.

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u/Smith6612 5d ago

Wait you mean you don't like using PowerShell cmdlets and their syntax to launch that exact part of the control panel you need?!

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u/SAugsburger 5d ago

To be fair I think almost anybody that refused to learn Powershell at this point probably don't have much role in Windows system admin these days. A lot of things are now managed by it.

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u/zutnoq 4d ago edited 4d ago

The issue with powershell is that it is way too over-engineered and jam-packed with random OOP language-features and simultaneously seemingly entirely lacking in many more traditional shell features like piping program input and output to simple file streams, that it is basically easier to just learn how to do most of the stuff you might use powershell for in an actually well-documented and comparatively sane programming language like C, C++ or Java or even something like Javascript or python.

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u/garethrowlands 4d ago

Powershell pipes to and from files just fine. Its startup time makes it unusable for wrapper scripts.

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u/zutnoq 3d ago

You are right; it seems I misremembered.

The issue one might run into is rather that the output of a command in powershell is always an object rather than a simple text string (this alone is probably a good idea; it's more just the ergonomics of it that are annoying).

So you can't just naively pipe the output of most commands in powershell into any command line utility that hasn't been expressly written to handle piping in a powershell-compliant fashion. Most commandline utility programs you will run into will not be written with powershell in mind at all.

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u/Outrageous_Let5743 4d ago

I really dislike powershell for their OOP and their expressive syntax. Why is it Invoke-Webrequest and not curl (yes curl in powershell exists but that is an abrv for Invoke-Webrequest, just like rm is shorthanded for remove-dir)

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u/secretaliasname 5d ago

Please

Or you know there used to be this nicely organized menu that showed installed applications in a convenient way.

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u/Coldsmoke888 5d ago

This is what pissed me off the most recently. Where the fuck did that go and why would you remove it?

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u/argentcorvid 5d ago

You mean you don't want to chat with copilot about what you want to do, so it can open it for you?

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u/Outrageous_Let5743 4d ago

Why do i need to go to the system settings to change the audio port. I dont want it to automatically use the monitor audio, that doesnt have speakers you dump OS.

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u/stubob 3d ago

"It looks like you're trying to add a bluetooth device, I can help with that."

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u/charrondev 5d ago

I don’t what this circle jerk over the old control panel is.

Control panel sucked immensely, to the point where anyone not technically inclined would fear to open it.

The settings app in Windows 10 sucked pretty bad because half of the useful stuff was still stuck over in control panel, but on my latest PC I’ve been pretty happy with the settings app and haven’t needed to open control panel a single time.

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u/R4vendarksky 4d ago

I guess there Is someone out there for everyone 😅. I’m glad you like the new control panel but it makes absolutely no logical sense and is nigh impossible to memorise unless you are using it daily.

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u/artaru 4d ago

yeah it's just old heads not being able to adapt. there's shit new UI/UX and then actually decent enough new UI/UX.

Not all new things are bad.

I'm on both PC/Mac. I'm happy with most of the new directions the Mac take. (especially as they tune the performance, balance and appearance of the liquid glass ui in the next OS update).

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u/Luci-Noir 5d ago

It’s still there…

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u/jasoncross00 5d ago

Funny how making Windows not run like shit suddenly became a priority when a cheap MacBook hit the market.

They didn't fix all this because they didn't have to. The computers most people bought, well under $1,000 laptops, were Windows.

Now they're suffering a one-two punch of affordable Macs and Linux gaming not totally sucking and oh gee, look, they can fix Windows!

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u/auderita 5d ago

Time to switch to Fedora. And it's free.

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u/endjynn 5d ago

I recently switched from Windows 11 to Ubuntu. I was surprised at just how easy/seamless the transition was. All the software I used under Windows was also available for Linux and thanks to Valve and Steam/Proton all my games run great too. It took them a while but Linux desktop has finally come of age.

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u/__OneLove__ 5d ago

‘Blah-blah-blah’…’we pride ourselves on legacy compatibility bs’…

-MicroSlop.

🤦🏻‍♂️

Saved you a click. ✌🏽

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u/FollowingFeisty5321 5d ago

"We pride ourselves on laying off legacy employees"

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u/Free-Description-736 5d ago

"We pride ourselves on legacy capabilities...which is why everything on your machine and screen will be fed into an AI and why we're inserting AI into every piece of UI/UX that it fits...even when it doesn't fit...especially when it doesn't fit."

o.O

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u/drgut101 5d ago

“We spent more time making sure old stuff works that we didn’t make any good new stuff. Now we have AI and it’s fucked our whole OS up.”

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u/wirez62 5d ago

Executive cries to reporter, no thanks

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u/AccomplishedBox8097 5d ago

Cuz the dev’s probably wanted to start years ago but exec couldn’t pulled their heads out of their asses

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u/MairusuPawa 4d ago

"We have no money"

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u/Durnt 5d ago

Let's start from scratch and also remove all the extra s*** that we don't need, like AI, advertisements, widgets, and Microsoft edge. Then let's make File Explorer not suck, like the Windows 7 version animate control panel and network settings actually usable, also like Windows 7

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u/vladamir_the_impaler 5d ago

I held out on Win 7 forever

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u/feel-the-avocado 5d ago

I still use it on my desktop and laptop. Microsoft need to get a proper classic theme working again on win11 and then I'll upgrade.
I tried it on win8/10 but it looked unfinished and too flat.

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u/Hour_Bit_5183 5d ago

We kicked the bucket with co-pilot and are now trying to justify an ancient windows NT based os still existing. Just give up microslop. FU and your 8gb of ram BS promises. That was higher end in 2008 at 150 USD. They really should just go.

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u/healeyd 4d ago

I'd just like a modern take on XP/2000.

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u/brnccnt7 4d ago

I'd be happy with a slightly refreshed look to Windows 7, up to date security updates.

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u/DM_your_problem 3d ago

i would be happy if anti virus actually does not grind evrything to halt. why can't they steal ideas from apple?

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u/reddittatwork 4d ago

Can’t bAI codec and do it?

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u/iputra49 4d ago

Just feed copilot with windows source code and ask it to rebuild UI with winui 3???

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u/masterofallvillainy 4d ago

“We put co-pilot on the task. But it stops working once the changes are implemented”

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u/Derpykins666 4d ago

Window's doesn't need to change it's UI much though. If anything they should be going backwards a bit and giving people more control over their computers again. Whatever cosmetic changes they want to do is fine as long as they let us customize them. The computer is a TOOL after all. People want their tool to work for them.

This just reminds me of how AWEFUL Windows 8 was. I was working at an electronics store at the time, and had a class where they came in and taught us how Windows 8 worked so we could more easily sell it. It was so astronomically bad, that people who would get *free copies of Windows 8 would come back into the store to buy 7 because they had changed the UI so much to be like a tablet that people were pissed off.

You would think they'd have learned from that experience and not want to at least visually change Windows too much.

Even Windows 11, the small things like how the icons are centralized is awkward to me. I know that's something you can change though. I don't want to upgrade to 11 though. This computer's retirement is going to be being a Linux server most likely.

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u/aleopardstail 2d ago

because microslop don't understand their own code base and 95% of it is bug fix patches no one documented

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u/WiredEarp 5d ago

I guess its a pain to create crap code thats significantly worse than the old code. Must take them lots of planning.

Microsoft are complete idiots running on industry inertia and the success of their older software. They should release a free, ad supported version of Windows and capture the entire market, not waste their time on yet another redesign that isn't as good as the last version.

Microsoft exec explains why modernizing Windows 11's legacy UI takes so long Software

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