Reply to post: Re: Alienating support

Weird garbled Windows 7 update baffles world – now Microsoft reveals the truth

Terry 6 Silver badge
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Re: Alienating support

Yeah, the Microsoft knockers will find any number of grumbles. That's no surprise. BUT, this is about the fact that those of us who have actually quite liked using Microsoft for a few decades are now being kicked by their really unhelpful or plain stupid design decisions.

The only reason to remove the Win 7 type start menu was that it was a bit clumsy to manage, with every new bit of software adding a whole bloody folder of crap, as if theirs was the only programme on there. So it needed to be made simpler to control.

Instead, first they removed it in Win 8, then when they brought it back in Win 10 they kept all the bad bits and all but completely took away what there was of the good part, the ability to manage it to make selecting a programme easier and quicker.

Which is what they did with the "Ribbon". I think the excuse was that some users weren't able to find items they'd moved in Office 2003 (should they suddenly want to do so), or some such nonsense. But they couldn't just write a "show all" or "find" switch. No they, to all intent and purposes, removed the ability to hide the vast number of largely unused menu items that cluttered up the interface, or regroup the menus to fit a user's work pattern.

Then there was the matter of where documents are stored ( by default). Was there anything wrong with having a folder that a user could navigate to directly?

Was it really difficult to control access to these for machines with more than one log-in?

Of course not. But they decided that users' documents would by default be buried deeply inside the OS' innards, alongside the settings, with only an indirect pathway to them. Which is great if you only want to open and close a document with its associated programme, and in its default location. But not so great if, say, you want to share,copy or move a document.

But more to the point, WHY?.

Why make things bloody complicated when they can be kept simple?

Why have hidden "charms"?

Why have the controls in lots of different places.

Why stop people organising the Start menu.

Why make creating a restore point hard to find?

And of course, why keep updates secret and compulsory, even for savvy users?

And so on and so on.

It's the sheer bloody-mined pointlessness of these decisions that rile me so much.

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