Dear everybody,

Are you paying attention? This is how you build a portfolio. Did microsoft ask this person to do this?

No. But he did it, and it's brilliant, and now he can put it in his portfolio under "speculative work".

And then he gets a job doing this.

I can't tell you how many people I talk to (I live in a college town, and frequently go to bars and strike up conversations with people) who just finished, or are working on, some degree in "design", but have an empty portfolio, and are waiting for their "big shot".

Good job, Andrew.

Totally rebranding the window to the "slate" is incredibly ambitious, but it certainly looks good.

You're telling me Apple is unresponsive to support requests from their developer ecosystem? Really? Get out of town! I don't believe it.

Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform. Apple will continue to treat their developers like second class citizens until there is a financial incentive to do otherwise. Right now, when one pissed off developer leaves or goes bankrupt because their app was yanked from the store or wasn't approved for some BS reason, 50 developers replace him.

We could debate whether this would "work" on a practical level as if this was a Powerpoint presentation for Steve Ballmer and we're supposed to predict how he'd react. But I'm really just finding myself appreciating the "space/science fiction" metaphor for technology.

Steve Jobs has often quoted Apple as "advancing the human race." I feel like this takes it to the next level. I felt myself wanting this company to exist just on pure principle. Whenever I read older science fiction, occasionally I'll recognize the story is supposedly set somewhere between 2000-2100 A.D., and yet we wear spandex and zoom around with FTL travel and fight aliens with lasers and make food with replicators, etc. And I'll smirk and think, "heh, he was way off," but beneath that cynicism, there's just a bit of regret that we just didn't actually evolve in that way. And I guess this is why the branding here resonated with me so much -- it touched that part of me and convinced me that this company could make all that reality after all.

As an engineer I feel like I have a hyper-literal mindset where most branding and advertising just washes over me. I live in a world where it matters what things "do," not how they "feel," so some guys playing volleyball with girls in bikinis while drinking Coors Light just washes over me as a bizarre way to stay hydrated while at the beach. But as I said earlier, I wanted this company to exist. I wanted to feel the things that this branding made me feel. I wanted to strap myself into this spaceship that this company was building and fly wherever it would take me. Practically speaking, that company probably won't be the one we all know as the bloated monopolistic entity that makes most of its profits from boring office productivity software.

But this made me wish it was.

I suspect many of the people reading HN these days aren't old enough to remember the "golden age" of Microsoft (or simply of "of age" at the time). Back in the 80s and 90s Microsoft was an unstoppable behemoth that people would describe as a battleship that could turn on a dime (IIRC this referred to Microsoft reinventing itself in the mid-90s so that everything was about the Internet).

Three things happened to Microsoft (IMHO):

1. The DoJ suit in 1997 was a serious blow to Microsoft inertia. Speaking as nothing more than an observer, it seemed that Gates lost his way. He simply didn't know what to do. From this I get the distinct impression he really believed Microsoft wasn't doing anything wrong and things like bundling a browser with the OS were just "innovations";

2. Microsoft became too hierarchical combined with more B and C managers. Once you don't have A managers in a software (or any tech) business it seems like it's all over. Nothing rots from within so deeply and completely as poor management; and

3. Ballmer had and has no business being CEO of a software business. This isn't simply due to him being a manager rather than an engineer but that certainly doesn't help. Gates was a programmer and actively participated in tech reviews in his heyday. Ballmer is the Carol Bartz of Microsoft. It's simply taking longer to kill Microsoft from within than it took Yahoo.

As far as stack ranking and these other things go: on the face of it I consider them symptoms rather than the root problem. The root problems are:

1. Microsoft, as an organization, is deathly afraid something will kill the Windows/Office golden goose;

2. Everything Microsoft does is done from the perspective of furthering the Windows/Office cash cow. It's why you hear Ballmer describe tablets as "just another PC form factor". He sees them as simply a means to an end and that end is selling licenses;

3. Microsoft is at the mercy of hardware OEMs that are shortsighted enough to run themselves into the ground taking Microsoft with them;

4. There doesn't seem to be any central strategy (beyond sell more Windows/Office licenses) or innovation; and

5. The "backwards compatibility" crowd lost out to the "breaking changes" crowd, which hastened the switch to Web-based applications.

Regarding all the suggestions to change search engines:

Deleting the Google search entry is not an action that can easily be undone, and it will have drastic consequences, such as permanently disabling suggestions and instant for omnibox searches. Creating an alternate entry with the same URL does NOT suffice -- you can't manually enable any of this functionality on the alternate entry.

If you're having this bug, I suggest NOT doing this. Either sit tight until we fix, or if you do create a different entry, KEEP THE ORIGINAL so you can switch back once the fix is out.

--Peter Kasting, Chrome team member and owner of the Omnibox

This is great.

It will never work.

A brand has to reflect the culture of how a product is made, sold, experienced, etc...

Microsoft is not about simplicity, it's about feature creep. Microsoft sells software and licenses to big companies. Big companies don't want simple, they want value for their money - features!

A better brand promise would be Microsoft - It Does Everything!

Look at Windows 8. Is it going metro only? No, Metro is a feature on top of the existing mountain of features. Instead of one UI, it's now TWO UI's!!!

Putting this kind of branding on Microsoft is like putting the geeky kid with oversized glasses and suspenders a new wardrobe. Sure, the kid will look cooler, but it won't stop him from playing Magic: The Gathering in their basement.

Microsoft has built their company on saying "yes" to just about everything. The simplest Windows ever sounds like they are saying "no" to things and that's not what Microsoft does.

I love the design, but it's not Microsoft

MPAA "lobbying" the VP of US, and then the VP ordering the shutdown of a company from another country on behalf of MPAA (illegally it seems, from recent news).

I think this would be called "corruption" in any other country but US.

This is of course interesting and will lead to inevitable comments about disruption being needed in event ticketing.

Let me save you the trouble as this has been rehashed many times already: the problem here is Ticketmaster's exclusives on venues and the entertainment's willingness to let Ticketmaster be the "sacrificial anode" and focus of ire from both audiences and performers.

There was a deal done some years ago--I forget the name--whereby performers would get 90% of ticket sales.

The way around that is not to increase ticket prices but to add "fees". Online transaction fees, mail fees, processing fees, booking fees, you name it. The fees in some cases are approaching the ticket price. Ticketmaster does this, splitting the proceeds with promoters and venues while the artists get a 90% cut of an ever smaller part of the pie.

Ticketmaster has multi-year exclusive deals with venues such that none can really afford the attractive cuts they get to "go it alone".

IMHO this situation has reached the point of requiring government action as this is now an antritrust issue (the ticketing market basically cannot function now).

Until that happens any ticketing disruption is doomed.