Is there any reason — other than "we're paying our graphic designers full-time salaries so we better get our money's worth" — why OSes have to change so drastically and can't be finished as well, only ever updated to add new APIs for apps and drivers to support new hardware features?
Security is probably the biggest reason. With attacks growing continually more sophisticated, it’s not enough to just patch holes as they’re found — you have to engineer entirely new systems to not be drowned in holes. This unfortunately has compatibility implications.
Look at macOS for example, which over the years has gained app sandboxing and mobile-like access permissions. Software pre-dating these additions that assumes that it has access to everything all the time will have its functionality impaired. Devs had to update their software to not make such huge assumptions and to handle no access cases gracefully.
So, how secure is "secure enough"? Android's security model is okay, and Google knows it, so they just keep redesigning the UI without substantial API changes because the updates have to be coming out with each lap the planet makes around its star.
> Devs had to update their software to not make such huge assumptions and to handle no access cases gracefully.
Sure. But at some point it will reach the "secure enough" state, won't it?
(Actually, macOS permissions work mostly transparently API-wise. Apps can request access explicitly so it better fits their particular UX, but the prompt would also pop up the first time the protected resource is accessed. No code-level changes are necessary to support this.)
> Android's security model is okay, and Google knows it, so they just keep redesigning the UI without substantial API changes because the updates have to be coming out with each lap the planet makes around its star.
Google is a bit of a special case I think due to their culture of using big projects as a means of climbing the corporate ladder. The only thing that could ever possibly result from that is endless churn.
> Sure. But at some point it will reach the "secure enough" state, won't it?
Maybe, I’m too much of a layman in the field of infosec to be able to say.
> (Actually, macOS permissions work mostly transparently API-wise. Apps can request access explicitly so it better fits their particular UX, but the prompt would also pop up the first time the protected resource is accessed)
True, but it’s still problematic if e.g. the user accidentally denies access unknowingly, which will result in the app producing seemingly nonsensical errors. For a good user experience the app needs to be able to tell the user what the real problem is.
The program's interface with environment won't change forever, when you write your program as a pure function which only touches exactly the thing it fundamentally needs to, you use a pretty much finalized interface.
> only ever updated to add new APIs for apps and drivers to support new hardware features
Sounds like it's not "finished" if it needs all these updates.
As for why change the window dressing, the market for style changes over time. Why do car companies change the look of their products? Why does the outside of a cereal box ever change? Do the inside of our houses today look the same as the 80s? The 70s? The 40s?
Are you arguing that Windows and MacOS should continue to look like it's 1.0 release?
> As for why change the window dressing, the market for style changes over time.
Software is a tool, a means to an end. It doesn't need to participate in fashion.
> Are you arguing that Windows and MacOS should continue to look like it's 1.0 release?
Yes. It should remain an option at least. Not the literal "1.0", but the version when a decent UX was figured out. For Windows in particular, that's clearly 95. I know people who used the "classic" theme in Windows 7 and earlier, which remained mostly unchanged from Windows 95, and are resentful of its removal in subsequent versions that they have to use in order to have support for modern hardware.
I wouldn't say that's very clear. There were still lots of refinements and redesign that happened as Windows started becoming more of a multi-user OS with NT and later XP. Just because there was a classic skin in 7 doesn't mean it was the same UX. Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI.
Maybe you find 95 to be the end-all be-all of design, but many don't. UI, and to an extent UX, is partially subjective and then also very different based on the user. Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine, would they consider it the peak of OS UI/UX design?
And as the product's target market evolves and changes so too should the software for what customers expect. Which brings me to...
> Software is a tool, a means to an end. It doesn't need to participate in fashion.
One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house. A house is just a tool, something to keep the environment consistent and shelter from the elements. A couch is just a tool to support a sitting human being.
It doesn't need to participate in fashion. And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.
Any piece software competes in a market of software. Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets. One looks like an ancient Java Swing UI and has bad colors and overall just looks ugly, meanwhile the other looks nice and pleasing (insert your own ideas of "nice and pleasing" here). One is probably going to hemorrhage users over time, can you imagine which?
> Even with the "classic" skin there's pretty massive changes in the behavior and usability of most of the UI.
The windows themselves, the taskbar and the desktop all worked the same in 7 as they did in 95. Many of the changes made over that time came with settings to revert them — like that new thicc taskbar with icon-only buttons and window grouping.
> Imagine a user who has only used an iPad gets dropped in front of a Windows 95 machine
I'm sick of perfectly good desktop UIs getting redesigns which are compromised by the existence of iPads and other touchscreen devices. This just should not happen, period. Windows 95 UI is straightforward enough once you get the basic principles, which takes all of one hour of poking around. Microsoft didn't conduct all that research for nothing, after all.
What frustrated people about Windows 95 (and 98, and ME) when it was current wasn't the UI. The UI was nice. It was the inherent instability of the system itself due to its architecture. Same for classic Mac OS, it doesn't matter how nice your UI is if the system itself can be trivially crashed or locked up by a single misbehaving app because of cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.
> One could make the same argument of a bed or a couch or hell even a whole house.
All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same. You know a bed when you see one.
All buttons and text fields and window titles used to also look largely the same and everyone was fine with that. But then the plague of flat design happened.
Imagine being exhausted after a long flight, walking into your hotel room only to see white, textureless walls, floor, and ceiling, and multiple white textureless blocks of different sizes inside. You get to figure out which one is a bed, which one is a chair, which one is a toilet, and which one is a sink! How exciting! This is what modern affordance-less UIs feel like. A good tool shows how it's meant to be used by its form.
> And yet people are pretty dang picky about their furniture choices and paint comes in thousands of colors.
That same classic Windows theme was extremely customizable for that very reason. You could change all colors and fonts to your liking, and some people did! You could make yourself a dark theme way before dark themes became mainstream.
> Say there's two pieces of software with identical feature sets.
You mean the control skins are the only thing different between them, otherwise all UI/UX being identical down to the layouts?
> All beds and couches work the same and look largely the same.
It's almost like you've never been in a furniture store. They come in tons of different sizes, shapes, textures, colors, features, and more. There's not just a single couch model that you can then change the color on.
> The UI was nice.
I highly disagree. The taskbar would get filled up quickly and get squished for me since there was no grouping. The notification tray couldn't hide things. No virtual desktop support. The start menu was incredibly basic in form. No search from the start menu. Editing the start menu programs list was extremely non-obvious and not self explained. Navigating the nested start menu shortcuts was a huge pain. Installers just threw everything in the start menu leading to a ton of clutter. UI elements are miserable at scaling, in that there is zero scaling support. The taskbar was only on your primary display. Difficult to change default sound output device straight from the taskbar. No central place to see previous notifications. No jumplists. No Win+Number shortcuts to quickly swap between things on the taskbar. Alt+Tab prompt doesn't have window previews. I could go on and on and on and on and on about what I perceive to be massive failures of 95's UI/UX.
I didn't really care for the overall icon design throughout the OS and generally see the overall style in the OS as pretty basic, bland, and boring. Changing the color or setting the title bar font to Comic Sans isn't solving that.
In the end though, you probably disagree with a lot of these things. I think your couch is ugly and uncomfortable, and you probably think my couch is ugly and uncomfortable. UI/UX has some subjectivity involved. Not everyone agrees 95 was the ultimate software design unable to be improved upon.
