Legendary UX Expert Says Microsoft Gave Up on Windows ⭐

Scott Jenson is a legendary user experience (UX) expert who created the User Interface group at Apple in the 1980s and worked on its Human Interface Guidelines, Mac System 7, and Newton before moving to Google where he led that company's Mobile UX group for 5 years. He's also a personal hero, though I've never met the man, thanks to two pivotal works, his book The Simplicity Shift and a late 2025 talk in which he discussed desktop computing user experiences at Ubuntu Summit. These are overlapping topics that really resonate with me, and I love how clearly he sees the problems and potential solutions in each case.

Well, Jenson is back. Last week, the KDE Community published a new talk called Scott Jenson: Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever? that's a follow-up to his terrific 2025 talk. It's marred somewhat by a bizarre time limitation--I would have just let him keep talking and it's unclear how or why that didn't happen--but it's full of good information and keen insights, as always. And it's also interesting because it turns out that Jenson once interviewed at Microsoft. And what happened there says a lot, I think, about how the software giant really views Windows and its role moving forward.

It's not just Microsoft. Jenson believes that both Apple and Microsoft have fundamentally given up on desktop computing, and he is a harsh critic of the former adding Liquid Glass to macOS and only adding features to the platform that "tie it closer to the iPhone, tying you into their ecosystem" and "building their moat higher" rather than "improving the desktop."

But Microsoft is even worse. The software giant is "just making one mistake after another," he says, cataloging abuses like its forced OneDrive usage, the Recall disaster, and "ads everywhere." That's all fairly obvious--what we might call "low-hanging fruit" in our industry, or enshittification--but Jenson's story about interviewing at Microsoft is, I think, more instructive.

"I interviewed there [at Microsoft] eight years ago to be the head of UX for Windows," he says, which really got my attention. If that timeframe is correct, that would have been 2018, so part way through the Windows 10 lifecycle and a time in which the software giant was experimenting with the mobile-inspired user interfaces that landed in Windows 11 in 2021. "And it's really not cool to kiss and tell and talk about that."

Oh, please. Do kiss and tell.

"What I will say is that when you go there, you go in with an agenda. You don't get a job like that kind of going, 'Well, whatever you want.' No, you go in saying, 'This is what I'll do.' And I was talking about this issue back then, that the desktop needed to evolve. It's not like I wanted to blow up Windows. I understand that there's hundreds of millions of users and you just can't change things. It'll freak people out. I mean, I'm I'm not a monster, right? I mean, I don't want to change everything. But I wanted there to be...