I love the whole direction of Microsoft's graphic design these days, and I've had Macs at home exclusively for at least 10 years.
I think Microsoft is doing a great job of trading on the emotional value of colors. Apple rebuilt their company by bringing color to computing (remember the iMac and iBook), but then went away from that in almost every way, sucking the color out of all their products except for a few iPods. It's very sleek and elegant, but let's face it, colors are fun too.
> made money by the truckload when other companies
> could barely survive
The other companies would probably have fared better of Microsoft wasn't dominating the market. This phrasing makes it sound like the market wasn't a zero-sum game.
Microsoft's domination was achieved by making passable-to-excellent browsers in the beginning and putting them on the desktop, which made the web more accessible to millions of people, boosted commerce, and pushed feature development forward much more quickly than Netscape (or any company) would have done absent competition. Bigger market, bigger pie, more investment, more jobs, more consumers.
Netscape died, of course. But it didn't have to be that way; and Microsoft won far more than Netscape lost.
This isn't how I remember the 90s. I remember Microsoft shipping several versions of laughably bad browsers, while their operating system completely dominated the market. They finally shipped a better browser than NS with IE4, but that has just as much to do with shipping a usable product as it does with NS failing to ship a good product.
That said, in those days the web wasn't yet a big deal, and wouldn't be for another couple of years. I don't see how MS "boosted commerce" at all during this timeframe, either. By the time the web became accessible to the multitudes, and was being used for commerce MS already dominated the browser market.
As I recall, IE3 was passable, not laughable. IE4 was better than usable; as much as I clung to my Netscape Communicator 4, it was better than NS's offering.
IE3 started Netscape's decline, but it really picked up in the couple years after IE4's release (1998-2000).
All that competition, the proliferation of features, the new ecosystems of dev tools, new jobs as companies saw the Internet taking off with MS's weight behind it, the press about the browser wars, being able to click the desktop "Internet" icon on your new computer and see well-rendered and fast websites... to state that none of that actually grew web usage and that MS just took NS's users 1-for-1 is unbelievable to me.
MS made a better browser and put it in front of everyone's face while simultaneously convincing lots of companies to join the fray. The pie exploded.
> The market wasn't then, and isn't now, zero-sum.
How many desktop operating systems are normal people going to use? Operating systems don't tend to be complementary (people running multiple OSes and desktop VMs are the exception, not the rule... especially back in the 90s).
That's not what zero-sum implies; you don't have to run two browsers, or two OSes, to refute it.
The marketshare numbers you see are percentages. Say Netscape has 80% of the market of 1M people, and IE4 is popular enough that NS's share dwindles to 30% as IE's rises to 70%. If we're still dealing with 1M total users, the market is zero-sum in that NS's losses are exactly MS's gains.
My contention is that IE4 was so good for its time that it grew the overall internet market; instead of 1M casual users, we have, say, 5M. If NS's marketshare fell from 80% of 1M to 30% of 5M, their user base actually went from 800K to 1.5M. IE4 killed them in share, but helped the overall market and Netscape in particular, by users and revenue.
To assert that it was a zero-sum game is to assert that the market was inelastic relative to the available browsers, which seems ridiculous. Better browsers = more users.
For desktop, probably only one, but who uses "desktop computers" any more?
Now that your phone, your music player, your computer, your notebook, your tablet, your game console(s), your television and your video playback device all need an OS, I'm guessing the number of operating systems people use on a daily basis is higher than you think.
I don't like it. I like mimimalism but this clean minimal look that's virtually everywhere (as people try to outdo each other in simplicity) is just a fashion. You know already that there is going to be a backlash against this as there always has been in the past (how long did the Bauhaus last?) and then this will be outdated. Also the primary colours are a bit sixties'ish and shortly will look just as dated as anything from that time. Its just the wheel going around with some hailing each revolution as, well, a revolution!
If it was minimalism for the sake of minimalism, then maybe. But, minimalism in the case of Windows Phone and 8 serves the purpose of bringing content forward. So, I think it will have lasting appeal.
How is the top menu[1] ok? Grey background with clear blue icons? I would understand with skype because it's not their logo, but even their own blue icons look terrible with that background.
Also, the controls on the carousel[2] are off.
This is not just fanboy hate, but for a company the size of Microsoft, their homepage should matter. These two examples show that they just don't care.
Unrelated to this, I find the metro style interesting for touch devices, but adopting it as the look of the whole company dumbs down their entire product. Also, the font looks to me like a futurist Comic Sans.
