Microsoft GUIs (was: The end to all language wars and the great unity API to come!) (OT)

[Andrew Berg]

On 2011.07.05 09:31 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> I've said for a while that Microsoft could do far worse than to turn
> Windows into a GUI that sits on top of a Unix-derived kernel. They
> won't do it, though, because it would be tantamount to admitting both
> that Unix is superior to Windows, AND that Apple got it right.
In my experience, it's been the GUIs that are awful and the backend
stuff that's been good in Windows. Yes, the NT kernel still has some
long standing bugs, but MS has done well with things that matter to
sysadmins. chkdsk, for example, has been around for ages, but I still
don't know of anything that really beats it. It's certainly saved my ass
on several occasions. MS also bought the Sysinternals suite of software,
and those programs continue to be very good. I've only had a small
amount of experience with it so far, but Powershell seems to be an
excellent tool for admin scripting since it interfaces with WMI so well.
When it comes to things that interface with your average idiot, however,
MS consistently drops the ball. The new interface design they've imposed
on their office suite and Explorer is not only just plain bad, but it's
infectious (and it's the reason the Firefox and Thunderbird default GUI
configurations look horrendous). Another area MS fails it is sensible
defaults. They put tons of effort into increasing security in the
kernel, but don't use the security features (I'll try to come up with
more detail on this later). Explorer /still/ hides known extensions by
default, which /still/ makes it easier for bad people to get their
victims to execute malware. What I think is that MS should focus on the
kernel and encourage others to do their GUIs.