Why isn't Microsoft good with design consistency?

Question

With every major release of Windows, MS seems to just add a new UI design language to the previous ones, making Windows ever more cluttered and inconsistent.With Win11, there was room for MS to finally get rid of legacy designs that have plagued Windows for over 2 decades!! But unfortunately, Win11 is just a new skin on top of a pile of inconsistent design languages from before. Sure, there are improvements to the desktop and the settings app, but anything more serious and you're faced with windows dating back to Windows 95/98.This doesn't seem like a problem that MS would be unaware of. But as much as I'd like to justify their actions by assuming that they still follow their backward compatibility philosophy, they have long crossed the line. Win11 design looks like a slap in the face of the customer. At the same time, MS could easily afford to hire better designers (which I think is not the main problem) or invest in consistent design across their Windows products, and yet they're not doing that.I'm happy that many are now switching to Linux just because the alternative (Win11) sucks so much. But frankly, I wish MS would fix this decades-old mess asap.

phendrenad2 · Accepted Answer

My guess is: it's a lot of work, prone to cause bugs, most users don't notice or care, and highly-paid FAANMG programmers could be working on other things.I've noticed this effect happen with websites too. Click around on Facebook enough (such as the ads platform) and you might suddenly get a page with an older circa-2010 look.

crate_barre · Answer

Mostly because they lack design conviction. When Apple moved off skeuomorphism into the flat realm (in a sense copying a lot of Microsoft’s Metro design), they really believed in it. Microsoft is without a doubt having an existentialist crisis with the fact that their design is just not on par with Apple, or even Google, and that’s leaving room for various elements within the company to constantly attack what should be the overriding design language. It’s an inferiority complex of epic proportions, especially when some of their first tried ideas are just being executed better by other companies.
Take Xbox UI for example, that stuff has been wholesale copied by Nintendo and Sony.
Sometimes you really have to believe in your ideas, and iterate on your own ideas. Microsoft at the moment (and the past) is coming up with their own ideas, and then iterating on outside ideas, in an adaptive manner. In art, this dilutes your expression. Such a method is only effective if you very clearly know where you want to go, and apply a coating of adaptation (iOS going flat).
Unfortunately for Microsoft, they seem to only know what their minimum base design is, that is to say, a modern enough design that sits next to Google or Apple. What they don’t know is where they want to go. So, you’ll see good ideas and concepts from them initially just to meet the ticket price for entry, but once they get there, they don’t have any idea how to proceed. So they take their expression and adapt, adapt, adapt to what others are doing until we all go like ‘the fuck is going on here?’.
Case in point, decades later, windows 11 now fundamentally has a Dock like MacOS lol. Zero conviction or understanding of what the Start Menu could be.

rdtwo · Answer

The kind of standardization you would want is basically impossible at the scale of Microsoft. It requires the styling enforcement to be done at the highest level of leadership. Usually those folks are not interested in that minute of detail and care more about financials strategic organizational planning. An organization of that size would have to have a much different leadership and org structure to have consistent styling.

zelon88 · Answer

Because they keep wrapping old UIs with new UIs. The top layer of the onion is nice and smooth but peel it back a bit and.....

wizwit999 · Answer

It seems organizational cause I'm seeing 3 ways to do authentication in Azure. In AWS, everything uses IAM.