Business model diversification microsoft It led him to a series of decisions, which included, among other things, the introduction of advertising in versions 10 and 11 of Windows. This brought with it various changes to the design and behavior of the iconic Start menu, which many did not like, including some former employees of the Redmond giant.

Jensen Harris, a former Microsoft employee who worked as a designer for Microsoft Office, criticized you twitter thread in the Windows 11 Start menu. For starters, you mentioned that you were prompted to download Microsoft Edge when you searched for Chrome, Google’s web browser.

As for what the Start menu shows as a whole after performing a search in Chrome, Harris noted that the behavior seems confusing because the left part was clearly created by a designer, though there are things he finds questionable, but the right part directly reminded you of your “Internet Explorer toolbars in 2008”in a clear allusion to the time when many users had Internet Explorer and/or Firefox full of toolbars and search bars, the vast majority of which were of dubious use.

Jensen Harris also criticized other aspects such as bing wallpaper ad, which reminded him of the banners we could find in the era of Yahoo’s GeoCities service, during the site’s early years. And not only that, he added that the said announcement gave you the feeling that your computer was “infected with a virus”that “the text is misaligned and on a Windows Vista-era background” and that the top left corner is rounded and the right is not.

The former Microsoft employee seems to have been pleased, as he was apparently squeamish about pointing out things in the Windows 11 Start menu that are bad by design. Other points Harris mentions are that “a great user interface should help people complete a task with minimal friction” and other inconsistencies with the use of rounded corners.

The culmination of all his criticism is the first tweet in which Harris says that “The Start menu is Microsoft’s flagship product. It should represent the best user interface design the company is capable of.”

This is not the first time that a former Microsoft employee has criticized the company’s direction around Windows. Jerry Berg, another who worked for the Redmond giant, revealed three years ago the possible reasons why the update in Windows 10 causes so many problems, and the truth is that his explanation was quite plausible and according to not many users got to experience it.

We’ll see how Microsoft does with the future Start menu, which will likely be introduced in Windows 11 22H2.