Lipstick on a Pig? (Premium)

One of the more common reactions I’ve seen online to the Windows 11 leak is that it’s just “lipstick on a pig.” This view is misguided and incorrect. A Windows user interface refresh is overdue, and while I understand that looks are subjective, and that some are unimpressed by what they see here, my appreciation of Windows 11 has only grown over the past week. And this isn’t even the final UI, obviously.

Before getting to that, I’d like to address that phrase, “lipstick on a pig.” Like so many things Microsoft, “lipstick on a pig” didn’t originate at the software giant. But I do feel a certain responsibility for popularizing its association with Microsoft, since I’ve brought it up regularly on Windows Weekly on my websites, the SuperSite for Windows and, now, Thurrott.com, for so many years. And I feel qualified to explain what it means in the context of Microsoft, even as an outsider, since it was explained to me by Microsoft insiders who were around when the phrase was first introduced.

“Lipstick on a pig” was used by the Microsoft Office team to describe the arbitrary user interfaces that they would introduce in each major product edition. Don’t confuse that with the non-arbitrary UI changes that this team made from time to time: With new UIs like command bars and, later, the infamous ribbon, Microsoft really was trying to create more efficient and useful interfaces than had been available in previous product versions.

But for those many Office versions that weren’t going to bring major UI changes, especially to the toolbar/command bar/ribbon area, Microsoft would always still make visual changes. And while those changes felt arbitrary to most of us on the outside, they were made very purposefully to aid those IT admins and support staff who would be looking over the shoulder of a user who needed help with something. They would need to know which version of Office they were using, and because every version had a different UI, there was no need to dive into menus and About boxes. “Lipstick on a pig,” it was called.

This phrase could very easily have been applied to different Windows versions too, at least for a while there. And maybe it was, I don’t know or remember. (The Windows team did introduce a fun term called "lipstick on a chicken" at one point, but I'll write more about that later.)

But here we are, so many years later, with a Windows 11 leak. And people are dismissing the UI change as “lipstick on a pig,” an arbitrary UI change designed to help one quickly visually differentiate Windows 11 from its predecessors.

That’s not what this is. And even if Windows 11 should somehow offer no other advances---which is impossible, obviously---this new UI, which, again, hasn’t yet been shown in its final form, is an exciting and modern update to the stale UI that over 1.3 billion people rely on every single day. It is a breath of fresh air.

More to the point, this UI change...