Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers. Please. (Premium)

With the announcement this week of macOS Big Sur, Apple has once again embarrassed Microsoft and Windows 10.

We often discuss the different ways in which Microsoft and Apple solve the same problems. In the recent discussion about Apple transitioning the Mac to its own ARM-based silicon, for example, I contrasted Microsoft’s scattershot history of inept and incomplete public releases over time with the way that Apple waits until its ready and then releases a complete solution. It’s clear that Apple’s approach is not just better but correct. And I’ll further that notion by describing Apple’s approach as more responsible. Not just for itself but for its customers.

You can likewise see these different approaches in how each company modernizes the look and feel of their respective desktop platforms. Microsoft announced its Fluent Design System three years ago, but it has only rolled out new Fluent experiences haphazardly across Windows 10 and its other products since then.

What we’re left with is what we’re always left with here in Microsoft-land: An inconsistent mishmash of user experiences that, let’s be honest here, will never be fixed. Windows 10 contains UI that dates back to Windows 3.x and Windows 95, for crying out loud. And don’t get me started on the many different menu styles that you see throughout Windows 10 and its laughably bad Dark mode implementation.

Apple does things a bit differently. Sorry. Quite differently.

Apple toils away on its innovations internally, out of sight from its customers. It only releases something when it feels that it’s truly ready.

For example, Apple added Dark mode support to macOS with its Mojave release in late 2018, and it was widely ridiculed for taking so long to implement such an obvious feature. But unlike Dark mode in Windows 10, which is scattershot, incomplete, and inconsistent, Dark mode in macOS is elegant, consistent, and beautiful. It’s correct.

This week, Apple announced a sweeping user experience update to macOS, starting in the Big Sur release, that on the hand provides an iOS/iPadOS-like look and feel, and on the other is analogous to the modernization that Microsoft is still attempting with Fluent. But there’s that one difference: Apple is getting it right the first time around. So while you might argue that it should have provided this modernization years ago, Apple instead didn’t treat its own users as beta testers and simply waited until it was really ready.

Again, Apple’s approach is mature and responsible. And correct. It is what we should expect of the maker of the platform that we use every single day to get work done. It is absolutely not what we get from Microsoft. Not ever. Not now. Not in the past. And not, I wager, in the future either.

So I’ll just do it again. I’ll ask. I’ll beg. Microsoft, please.

Please stop adding superfluous new features to Windows 10. Instead, point your focus and energies and massive resources at the very real problem of making this system elegant and consistent across the board. Make Windows the most efficient and usable desktop platform that it can be, and something that is worthy to be housed in the gorgeous hardware that you make.

Or, just do what you always do. Make big promises. Start down some path. Partially implement some changes over several releases and then quietly give up. Pad Windows 10 with more and more inconsistent user interfaces. And then just start all over again.

Mr. Panay, to you I say this. You can be another Steven Sinofsky or Terry Myerson if you want, and you can make the same mistakes your predecessors did. Or, and hear me out here, you can do better. You can do right by Windows. And by Microsoft’s customers, your users.

It’s your move. But know this. Your customers and fans are watching. And we’re going to make decisions and spend money in the future based on what you do. And I for one am tired of the same old same old. I don’t just want different. I want better. And the time is now.