Windows 8 it was a very controversial version due to the great changes it introduced at the user interface level. That interface, first called Metro and then Modern UI, ended up taking its creator ahead, Steven Sinoskfy, who left the Redmond-based corporation through the back door. Now, ten years later, Steven Sinofsky has given an interview to Ars Technica to explain many of the decisions made around Windows 8.
At Ars Technica the interview began, or at least it’s the first question one sees written, asking if Apple’s iPad wasn’t the main reason Windows 8’s quirky interface was created. Here Sinofsky exposed the preponderance of the iPhone first and Android later in the consumer computing market, with sales already in the billions and many people using them instead of an x86 PC.
Furthermore, Sinofsky said that “if there was any hope of increasing PC usage, it would come from having a more smartphone-aligned experience. This applied to the basic user interface (launchers) and metaphors (touch), as well as fundamentals like cloud storage and all-day battery life, and also the way mobile hardware platforms ran beyond PCs, such as with sensors.”
In short, the design team’s intention with the Windows 8 interface was to modernize the system to better fit the forms of use that were spreading at the time, all in order to “take the essence of a PC and take it beyond smartphones.”
The former Microsoft employee has claimed that the Metro design language was “itself an evolution at Microsoft, going from Expedia to Windows Media Center and Windows Phone.” Despite acknowledging that there were alternatives, he said that the company saw that the combination of the start screen and the tile mosaic solved many of the deficiencies that they saw in the start menu, the taskbar, the system tray , devices and notifications.
When asked about his opinion of how Windows 8 has evolved or changed in the last 10 years, Sinofsky has insisted on the current preponderance of mobiles over desktops: “90 percent (that’s a rhetorical statistic) of computing now it’s done through grids of apps, which launch on touch and fill a screen. Mobile browsing dominates desktop browsing, with total screen time on mobile vastly outpacing desktop. Desktop computing is on the decline. That assumes desktop computers aren’t used at all, and a few billion people will never see desktop computers as traditionally imagined.”
Other details said by Sinofsky is that Windows 8 and the division of Surface computers were created in parallel in order to offer a specific experience on a modern hardware platform. On the other hand, he has highlighted features like “contracts,” which he thought were an incredible innovation in connecting apps together to offer things like more user-friendly and integrated search results.
The interview granted to Ars Technica goes much further, but the main conclusion that can be drawn is that Steve Sinofsky is still convinced, at least to a significant percentage, of the vision he wanted to print in Windows 8, despite acknowledging also that the proposed changes were too many and too quicklywith the result that “Windows ended up stalling and today retains its secure footing, albeit that in a shrinking desktop world.”
Like it or not, the paradigm that standardized Windows 95 is still very much in force and most users are very reluctant to radically change it, hence much of the rejection that Windows 8 received. start, although in a somewhat particular way, in Windows 8.1.
On the other hand, Sinofsky is not alone when it comes to trying to change the paradigm of desktop computing, as GNOME, desktop for Linux, has tried to do the same, with the result that most use extensions to get a more user-friendly experience. classic.
