Discussion on:

My first Windows 8 application: Performance problems

just wondering if anyone else agrees, and i will state up front this is a guess on my part, i dont have any real evidence for it... but it makes sense to me... I notice that in a lot of microsoft applications & even in parts of the operating system, they keep getting the same things wrong, and they might just be little things, but it is this attention to detail that is lacking, and potentially causing issues for not just users, but also coders. For example: the way that their systems deal with language is i think pretty weak. When you install any flavour of Windows, you have to tell it where you are located, and what language you want as well as keyboard layout... yet, having given it this information, it still has no idea what language i want when i install MS Office, and by default sets it as English (US) instead of English (Australia), and even then what it does is give me the wrong dictionary, because what it thinks is our Australian spelling of words is completely incorrect, we are closer to the UK than US on spelling (officially), and to some of us this matters. But, let's go deeper... why doesnt it just treat English as a base language, and then let me choose dialects to add to that dictionary, and then allow me to prioritize my spelling & grammar accordingly? ...and I think the answer to that is that they havent developed their object heirarchy in such a way that would allow it.

...now that may seem like a little thing, but i think it is a big thing, because if your object heirarchies are unsophisticated, they will also be inflexible from a coding point of view, and anything innovative anyone tries to do will thus lead to problems.

but there is another example of this too, with MS Outlook, and how it deals with signatures in HTML email... If I copy & paste MS Word formatted stuff into the signature design area of outlook, I lose all my formatting, and I cant do half the things I could do anywhere else... sometimes it wont even accept stuff from the clipboard (from memory)... so why is that? Surely that little design space for a signature should just use some common elements from word & share the clipboard & the formatting as everything else seems to? ...but no, it doesnt.

...now again this may seem like a small thing, but that's not the point about how big or small each issue is, the point is that there are HEAPS of these, ie: no consistency & no sophistication at this level of detail. So it seems like Microsoft develop these really amazing potentialities, and then fail to keep their focus in the minutiae.

I may be wrong about all this, it is just the impression i get... but i would like to see MS stop trying to develop a new Win8 interface & all that BS, and instead focus on getting all of these little bits of detail sorted out... and I think what they would find, if they bothered to do it, is that it would translate to more sales way better than a new interface would... because this means stability, flexibility, and sophistication, not just in Windows & Office, but in everything else that is developed for it... and that is the kind of thing that gets noticed, when you bother to fix this stuff instead of just looking for another way to bill people again for a new edition with some fancy bells & whistles on the front.