Dogfooding your own product isn't arrogance or complacency, it's common sense. If it's not good enough for you not to prefer a competitor, then it's not good enough to ship.
Arrogance is not doing any or ongoing competitive analysis.
I mean, dogfooding is good but not everyone has to make the pinnacle product?
If someone is selling something that's out of reach, financially, for most people, then making a cheaper and worse product available can still be good. Doesn't mean you prefer it.
I'm guessing Microsoft don't want to think of themselves as "the poor man's OS" however. And, they're not, it costs something like £120.
> I mean, dogfooding is good but not everyone has to make the pinnacle product?
This discussing thread is getting lost in the weeds.
We were talking about people <<designing>> Windows.
For sure they should be using it, <<day-to-day>>. They should feel the same pain as their users are feeling and they should want to improve it.
Anything else is a travesty and that's how you end up with enterprise software (designed for the CEO, used by the peons), or Android apps (designed for iOS by people with iPhones, used by peons on Android).
I think there is a case about using day to day the product they want to improve, but there is also a case about knowing how competitors are doing it.
The hardest part I think is working and sharing work 2 different systems at the same time. Not that the technical solutions do not exists, but muscle memory will always make that one system end up feeling unbearable and it might not because it is worse but by resistance to change.
> but there is also a case about knowing how competitors are doing it.
In the case of UI/UX, I don't want this.
I use Windows because it's not MacOS. I absolutely hate MacOS. Microsoft UI/UX designers using MacOS as inspiration is a critical bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.
I want my taskbar to show labels. I want multiple windows of the same app to be a separate item on the taskbar so that switching between multiple windows of the same app is a single click. I want each window to have its own menu bar, rather than a single menu bar at the top. I want a taskbar on each monitor, each showing only the items on that monitor.
Windows 10 has all these as an option. If Win11 is imitating MacOS, all those go away.
there's a bit of issue there: most of users don't feel the same pain, I think huge part of edge dev team uses edge daily despite it being basically unusable and they are happy and proud of that mess, the same goes for chrome, chropera, quantum... so dogfooding isn't the silver bullet either
> I'm guessing Microsoft don't want to think of themselves as "the poor man's OS" however. And, they're not, it costs something like £120.
"Whereas MacOS is free, it's included with the machine and Apple doesn't charge for it separately"?
But how much of the price you pay for that machine is because of the OS, that's an unknown. Maybe the actual development costs, distributed per device, are available somewhere deep in the bowels of Apple accounting, but that doesn't tell us how much of the (inflated) price you pay for the box is due to the OS. Microsoft's dev costs for Windows probably aren't £120 a copy either (especially considering what a tiny minority of users actually pays exactly that, as an explicit item separate from the hardware).
So I reckon Windows still actually is "the poor man's OS": You probably pay more than that for MacOS, only it's baked into the cost of the hardware so you don't know how much, exactly, it is you're paying.
But the OS has a separate price tag there. Just because gamers rich enough to blow ridiculous money on their rigs also use it doesn't make Windows "the rich man's OS"; that expression means something only the rich man can afford. Rearrange the sentence a bit, and "the poor man's [whatever]" means the only such thing the poor man can afford.
Ever since Lion or something, MacOS has been free. Not free as in free upgrade, but free as in free to download and install and use on any compatible machine (only Macs, of course).
Windows always had a price, even if that price was included by the OEM in the price of the device.
Arrogance is not doing any or ongoing competitive analysis.