xkcd breaks the news on the new Windows 7 user interface

Date:January 12, 2009 / year-entry #13
Tags:other
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090112-01/?p=19523
Comments:    9
Summary:Last week, Web comic xkcd covered the new Windows 7 user interface. Unfortunately, they got the wrong operating system. It was Windows XP that had a picture of Hitler (according to a few of our beta testers).

Last week, Web comic xkcd covered the new Windows 7 user interface. Unfortunately, they got the wrong operating system. It was Windows XP that had a picture of Hitler (according to a few of our beta testers).


Comments (9)
  1. johnstok says:

    I had assumed the cartoon referred to this recent post by Tony Morris?

    http://blog.tmorris.net/%E2%89%A0-%E2%87%92/

  2. Rick C says:

    Is this perhaps the most timely post ever by Raymond?

  3. zbychuk says:

    What some people find obscene? Our website http://dancesportinfo.net is completely about ballroom and latin dancing and as part of it has a search for a dance partner. One obviouos question about partner is its sex (gender), i.e. combobox where you can chose male and female. As result of it this page could be found on the list of porno(!) pages. Someone, very "wisely",  put together words ‘Search for partner’ and ‘sex’ on the same page.

  4. CDarklock says:

    I’ve always wondered if Microsoft Usability has a secret list of easily-offended people that always find things like this, so they can run the "insanity check" on products nearing RTM.

  5. Not johnstok says:

    johnstok:

    I imagine he used the comic as a segue, rather than believing that XKCD actually though out more of a joke than "WINDOWS IS RUBBISH" :)

  6. Not johnstok either (Medinoc) says:

    @Not johnstok: You seem to be assuming that the blog post is posterior to the comic, or that johnstok himself implied this. You are mistaken.

    The blog post is a month old (Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 7:30 pm) and johnstok implied that the comic is posterior to it and took inspiration from it.

  7. patrick says:

    Raymond Chen has always been a pathetic whiner.

  8. Dean Harding says:

    patrick: Unlike you, who clearly seems to be pretty good at it.

  9. Igor Levicki says:

    Raymond said: >>But it makes me wonder about the mental state of our beta testers…<<

    I keep wondering about that all the time, especially when a new product with retarded UI design decisions gets away from Redmond.

Comments are closed.


*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. If you are the owner and would like it removed, please contact me. The content herein is an archived reproduction of entries from Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing" Blog (most recent link is here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

<-- Back to Old New Thing Archive Index