Back in 90s there was a well defined menubar with all functions. Today you don't know where the functions are hidden - they may be everywhere on the screen, hidden behind visible or even unvisible graphical elements... This may be frustrating...
Quote from the article - "The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one.".
Is this the same old it compiles, ship it! Microsoft Spolsky talks about? I remember them in a totally different way, as a company which used paying customers as beta testers, where no single application used the same design language, where spurious windows with indecipherable error messages popped up randomly... in other words something close to the antithesis of what is written above. Part of this comes from Microsoft's focus on backwards compatibility which makes it possible for them to keep older parts around - just click through a few controls in Windows 10 to end up in something which looks like it started off in the Windows 3.x period - but another reason is probably the rivalry between different groups within Microsoft which want to push their own products based on their own toolkits.
Luckily they left all the keyboard combos the same. Even the ones that were navigating the menu bar. I never noticed the change, other than the slowdown...
