I sort of like the term “early Modern” in history. Putting the “early modern” period 250 years ago causes us to reflect on how much life has changed over that time, which is useful because it’s so tempting to imagine what life was like during the Renaissance or Middle Ages. Of course, every period has massive change, so the experiences of people on either end of a period are as different as somebody in the early modern and… actual modern… eras!

The solution to Windows 8 UI issues was aptly named, Classic Shell

This. I don't see the point of constantly changing UI as an end-user. The old one just work. It works perfectly. Now that you changed it and thing breaks. :|

Adding "fast" is similarly fun, it's probably true when you came up with it, probably won't be true in the future anymore.

No. Modern like 1950's modern. Unadorned, functional.

It doesn't fit now and it won't work later.

Modern in the art & design world is actually quite retro.

I spell it KDE but it might be regional variance (:

You would, wouldn’t you?

And the Windows Phone 7 had a hard realtime kernel!

Same here. I had a window's phone at some point. Would have loved it with a stylus.

Same for me. Windows Phone was super smooth even on budget phones with 1GB/512MB of RAM while Android would have been choppy as hell on such hardware.

Also, the Windows 8 tablet mode had better touch and swipe UX than the current Windows 11 when put in tablet mode. What a joke Microslop has become.

Nadella needs to clean house or step down. The only thing he executed well was the cloud/hyperscaler side of the business because he caught the period when everything was moving to the cloud and MS was well positioned to take advantage of that as big companies were already invested into the on-prem MS ecosystem, but on the consumer facing side he fumbled everything, all consumer products are worse than how they were under Balmer: Windows - trash, Office - trash, Xbox - trash, Bing - trash, Copilot - trash.