Windows boss Steve Sinofsky exits Microsoft Steven Sinofsky, who since 2009 has served as president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live divisions, has left the company less than a month after launching what Steve Ballmer called the most important operating system in Redmond's history. "It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at …
The problem here is that the world stage was exactly empty and in need of someone with more charisma than a road accident, which immediately excludes Ballmer. Ballmer would not even be able to inspire a convention of extroverts if he paid them, so MS needed a better front man.
Which they just sacked.
Applaus..
This post has been deleted by its author
So he oversaw the worst UI MS have foisted on users since MS Bob and miraculously he leaves just after it sinks, erm, launches.
The underlying OS is good enough, a moderate improvement on Win 7. The UI shell on the top is spectacular in it's ignorance of UI practices, general ugliness (subjective, but common) and inappropriateness for anything other than a small touch screen.
So far I haven't heard anything other than complaints of disgust from uses who have had it foisted on them. Naturally, the complainers are going to be louder than others and there's always a distrust of "different", but this is markedly worse than the step from XP to Vista/Win7.
@Nick
Not saying I agree but who have they partially replaced him with?
"Stepping up to lead product development for all future versions of Windows will be Julie Larson-Green, who has led various projects at Microsoft since joining the company in 1993. Most recently, she was responsible for program management, <u>UI design</u> and research, and internationalization for Windows 7 and 8."
So we will have more and better TIFKAMs in future!
True, but in the end if he's responsible for it then he should control the actions of his teams, not let them produce UIs like TIFKAM. There's a certain amount of delegation, then there's common sense.
It's makes you wonder if Julie Larson-Green is blind, colour blind, or has tentacles instead of hands and arms. Probably deaf as well as she can't fail to have heard complaints. To be fair, it may be the case that Julie Larson-Green was just putting in place what she was told to do from above and she does have a clue about UI design. Unfortunately given the management and working practices in Microsoft, there's no way she could criticise in any way anything coming from above.
To be fair, it may be the case that Julie Larson-Green was just putting in place what she was told to do from above and she does have a clue about UI design.
She has a clue, but her preferences may not match yours, or mine. She was the lead on the Office Ribbon UI redesign, for example.[1] (I find it curious that she identifies modality [she refers to it as "context"] as the strength of the Ribbon. I generally prefer modal interfaces - I'm a long-time vi/vim user, for example - but I hate the Ribbon. Maybe the modes they chose are a poor fit for my mental model of the Office applications.)
That said, her degrees are in software development (or computer science; I found conflicting information) and business administration - nothing specific to design, UI/UX/UIM, HCI, etc - and I haven't found any record of her publishing any research in the area. Apparently she gave a talk to the Stanford HCI group in 2006, but the video links don't work, so I wasn't able to view it. There's a pull quote about "results-oriented design" and a quotation from Jakob Neilsen,[2] which again might be worrisome depending on your UI preferences. (Neilsen's a bit of a controversial figure in software design.)
This "results-oriented UI" stuff doesn't appear to have caught on. David Sturtz loves to mention it, and it came up in an article in Applied Ergonomics, but Google Scholar doesn't show much else. Again, I find it interesting that this was an explicit goal of the Office redesign, since it sounds from the theory like it should represent a move away from the flawed WYSIWYG concept toward "semantic markup" systems like LaTeX (which I much prefer). But that's not at all how eg Word 2010 feels to me.
Anyhoo: I don't think, from the available evidence, that JLG is an idiot, or entirely unaware of UI/UX/UIM/HCI/etc theory. But I also don't think she's a bona fide researcher in those areas, or the sort of designer who will produce designs that appeal to me. Whether they appeal to a significant portion of the market is another question entirely, of course, and one much more interesting to Microsoft.
Apparently before she came to Microsoft she worked on PageMaker at Aldus.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/julie-larson-green.aspx
[2] http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/speaker.php?date=2006-01-27
"So he oversaw the worst UI MS have foisted on users since MS Bob and miraculously he leaves just after it sinks, erm, launches."
Yup, very unlikely to be a coincidence. I expect the Microsoft board has finally cottoned on the what an utter dog the Win8 interface is for PCs - ie Microsofts cash cow whether they like it or not - and needed the scalp of the idiot who was responsible for it.
WTF? I use Bob every day. IE for Bob is hands down the fastest, easiest and most reliable way to surf the net, and IE for Kin the best for mobile bar none. Android users can only weep at the news you never hear of viruses for that handset. Anyway, just because *you* don't like them, doesn't mean everyone doesn't. Why, I was just given a lecture here recently after mentioning WP8 market share when the ms astroturfers told me market share is no measure of quality, quoting the Sun as an example. Unlike the rapidly-ending decades of desktop OS dominance they enjoyed, for some reason.
And it's only going to get better - Microsoft Bob Cloud Enterprise 1.0 (Professional) is due early next year - we'll see who's laughing then!
This post has been deleted by its author
Ballmer can't watch everything and trusts people to a very large degree to get things right... the products launched, huge problems were hidden, promises were not kept, deceit was rampant, Sinofsky had to go. The fact that it was immediate with no " spend more time with the family" meant the issues were substantial and a huge miss from plan. The incoming four knocker team is about partners and money and that should tell ya something right there....Surface may have problems that are going to cost a ton of money to resolve ... Sinofsky may have fumbled a very important ball.....
Sinofsky may have fumbled a very important ball.....
... maybe ... but was that ball ever really playable?
If I may mix a stronger metaphor, it does rather look as though Sinofsky was handed a poisoned chalice in the form of a requirement to bring Metro (from WinPho7) and the Windows desktop together, and having drunk as deeply from it as he could he failed to find a pearl at the bottom. It certainly looks to me as though he's the unlucky guy who was asked to do something that could never work, did his best, and got sacked because it wasn't perfect.
OTOH this may not be the real issue at all: the New York Times article someone else linked to suggests that Sinofsky got the blame for the fact that the EC-mandated Browser Choice disappeared for a while, and that error will cost Microsoft dearly. It could be that Sinofsky was kept on until Windows 8 was out of the door, and then sacked for that.
Either way, this is his icon for now (but still with too much hair)
Bringing NOTRO and Windows 7 UIs together would have been very easy. A start menu item "switch to NOTRO mode" and a tile in that mode "Switch to Windows 7 mode". Maybe they could still do that, depending on how badly they've smashed up the underlying code.
I'd have expected desktop NOTRO to have attracted less than 1% of desktop users, and could have been unceremoniously dumped from Windows 9. Unfortunately, certain people's egos were too big to allow a billion users to choose for themselves ... and now the recriminations have started. Good luck, chaps, you'll need it.
I'd say Microsoft has about two years to return to the Windows 7 interface on the desktop and send NOTRO to Vista-land. If they haven't fixed it by then, MS is doomed. (Might last another decade, but still doomed).
This is bad news, Sinofsky will be replaced by Larson-Green. Shit, this is the woman that was reponsable for Program Management, UI and Research. Well, we all know what her research into UI did, TIFKAM ring a bell anyone.
Now we are going to have the Monkey Balmer being seconded someone that probably appears to be a little bit "confused".
Share prices will take a hit, Balmer will blame Larson-Green. Larson -Green will follow Sinofsky and Ballmer replaces yet another chief bod..... There is a connecting element in the affair but the sweaty chair throwing monkey always remains in the same place..
Maybe it is time that the Shareholders stepped in a removed Ballmer once and for all. He must have some good qualities but once thing is for sure, we never get to see any of them.
He may just be knackered after all the work on a big new release or have just been hanging on to see it out the door. Conspiracy theories without substance from people who hate the company don't really carry any weight. Though there will be plenty here who don't like this comment and think conjecture without evidence is worth more.
Old-skool desktop-wallah Sinofsky replaced by "forward-thinking" TIFKAM creator..... I'm willing to lay money that Sinofsky is the reason there is still a "desktop" under TIFKAM, and that Larson-Green and he were at loggerheads over the whole interface design - but despite his seniority and experience Larson-Green had Ballmer's backing - and that he stayed long enough to see the barstard lovechild shipped and then thought "I'm too old for this shit" and walked. Good on him for sticking it out that far. Whether he's right and TIFKAM dies a death remains to be seen. Without 2 people pulling in different directions it may work out. - *may*.
As sad as the fact is, I have to agree.
It's easy to blame Sinofsky for TIFKAM, but if anyone read that leaked Powerpoint presentation around half a year ago about the Microsoft products of the immediate future, from that it's glaringly obvious how TIFKAM was promoted to be part of the global company strategy of unified interfaces (and Ballmer is to blame for that, if I had to guess). TIFKAM in Windows 8, at least in the form that it was ultimately included, was a decision Sinofsky likely had little influence in.
Thus, with his departure, I'm afraid things will only get worse at Microsoft.
Seems I'm exactly wrong! - reverse the two names maybe?
As "Short Bob" said elsewhere.....
"So, it turns out this Sinofsky is pretty much responsible for everything I have disliked about Microsoft for the past 10 years including but not limited to the ribbon and Win 8 / Metro.
Fuck that guy."
Apart from TIFKAM she was responsible for "internationalisation"?
Does that means she is the person I have to ask why we have to buy and support 8 different versions of windows 7? The SO has a Mac, and there is just the 1, then you go to settings and tell it which language/region settings you want.
Oh and don't get me started about some apps changing short-cut keys between regions and some not. Or Excel functions changing their names, except in VBa where you have to use a different name (the English one).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
