What happened to Windows?
Or a short foray into the rabbit hole of OS history and design
I recently moved house and left my PC gathering dust for a few months. When I finally set it up again, I remembered why I’d been avoiding it. Every time you boot into Windows a fairy dies. Or that’s how it feels. It makes my skin crawl.
So I went down a research rabbit hole and emerged with a strangely human story about Windows.
When Windows NT launched in the 90s, it was technically very, very cool (or so I hear, I was but a concept in the God-Universe’s mind). Dave Cutler, also an auto racing driver, included in its design many features we take for granted today. I grew up with Windows XP, and I still have fond memories of that green home button, the cheerful, rounded blobject1 vibe.
But, to massively oversimplify three decades of complex history, fundamentally Microsoft has tended to cynically follow market pressures without sufficiently prioritising the aesthetics of building an OS.
The thing is: this has worked so well for them. A lot of people have gotten very rich. Microsoft dominates enterprise software, and more recently PC gaming. But as ever, this has been at the expense of shittier experiences in the markets they dominate. This is the trade-off. The ‘why’ always percolates into the ‘how.’2
We like to tell ourselves we can make purely pragmatic choices, but that’s a comforting fiction. It lets us off the hook for fully investigating why we do the things we do. At its core, every decision is subjective because we never have full information. This does not matter in the context of choosing what you will be having for lunch. Heuristics are useful! But this matters very much when you are a massive corporation creating the basic building blocks of a whole era of computing.
Which is kind of where we are now, too. When it comes to unknown unknowns, we are all, humans and machines, shooting in the dark. But when it comes to known unknowns people with experience, context, and intuition still have the edge. They understand the aesthetics of what they are building in a way I have never seen an AI agent do.3
For now, my PC still runs Windows. I’m planning to dual boot for a bit, then wipe and fully commit in a month or so, once I’m comfortable with my distro (probably Arch). Thoughts, prayers, and opinions welcome.
I miss blobjects so much. I think we have reached peak flatject design and we are now circling back, which is good news in my books. I see the new iOS Liquid Glass as ushering in this Second Wave Blobject Era.
Not to keep banging on about the same thing over and over again, but I was thinking about whys in my previous post.
Yet.