this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
1074 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59974 readers
3693 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But alas, Windows 8 was the 'oh crap, tablets and phones might eat our lunch' release and the focus was throwing the desktop/laptop experience under the bus to try to cater to sensibilities of markets they were never going to capture. Also, to have their own 'app store' to try to wrestle a google/apple like revenue model for applications running on the platform.
If MS had put any focus on allowing skins/themes for Windows, the touch market would have just been an extra feature. There is no technical reason they couldn't have, as evidenced by the third-party apps that allowed legacy skins on previous versions, such as 8 and 10. But they needed that lock-in and forced experience, rather than giving people the choice.
I will confess that I think making windows UI appropriate for tablet or phone has to be more than a skinning exercise. E.g. software interacting with a mouse pointer unable to deal with more vague and multiple touches. UI elements needing different spacing for the form factor. A different scheme for switching full screen tasks and recognizing that traditional windowing isn't going to be very helpful in a smaller than 9" format.
Unfortunately windows basically favored touch at the expense of traditional desktop, when their home turf was very much not touch enabled.