Yeah, I think you worded that a lot better than I did just now. It is damn hard, indeed. The user group is incredibly diverse too.
Yep, and given the huge number of professional and enthusiast users (and their overlap) there's a lot of reticence towards learning new modes of interaction - why change what works, after all? The issue is when "what works" for someone is what they learnt X years ago, but which has since been superseded by far more intuitive or rich modes of interaction in competing platforms. Someone like Apple has the benefit of near-total control and a small enough user/install base to just chuck out whatever they don't like without
that big of a backlash, while MS needs to try to please everyone from the IT tech who would prefer to use Linux but can't due to software needs to the near-retiree using Excel since the late 90s, to your grandfather who prints a recipe or woodworking tutorial every other week, to the 13-year-old grown up on smartphones, touch interfaces, universal search, fluent design, and all the other UX innovations that have pretty much revolutionized computer usage in the past decade or so.
This article delves into a particularly intriguing change in user habits, which to me is completely baffling, but also kind of makes sense in that computers really ought to be far superior to humans in organizing and keeping track of files - and doing that work manually is a real chore that really ought to have been automated away by now. (The problem is of course the lack of transparency and accountability in automated file management, where if a file is gone, it's
gone, and you have no mechanisms for looking into this - a crucial flaw in how these functions are implemented in software.)
Tbh, I think MS is doing admirably, all things considered. It strikes the near-perfect balance of not pissing off too many people too much - though definitely some people by some amount! - while still making progress and improving things overall. With a user/install base in the billions, that is pretty impressive IMO. But as enthusiast users, we also need to accept that habits can't be expected to last forever. Life doesn't work that way, and while learning efficient habits is a huge boon for productivity in many cases, staying nimble and being able to adjust is also a necessity.
