I came across an interesting article by Terry Crowley discussing the context and design choices made which led to Windows Vista becoming a fiasco the moment it was released: ( What Really Happened with Vista | HackerNoon ). He was leading the Office development team at the time Vista was being “designed and build”.
Making abstraction of the Microsoft context and its leadership at the time, there are a few pearls echoing some of the discussions which have been held about Haiku’s past, present, and future.
In particular, I found the following passage quite to the point:
An important part of what was happening here was a deeper problem — the basic sufficiency of the desktop form factor for the jobs it was being asked to do. The basic use cases — productivity (mostly Office), communications, browsing (including search, web sites and web applications), custom internal line-of-business applications, front ends to custom devices (think of your dentist’s x-ray machine) had mostly stabilized by 2000 and have not changed much since then. Microsoft could continue building new APIs but mostly the devices already did what users needed. The improvements desired by users — better manageability, stability, performance, security on the software side and longer battery life, lighter weight, faster processors, faster communications, bigger screens on the hardware side in many cases needed less software, not more.
At first, this appears idiotic by ignoring all advances made since then. However, thinking about it, the function of the desktop metaphor has only incrementally changed since the early 2000. It is the form of the metaphor, its implementation, which has been the most dramatically evolving.
In the end, it appears that it all comes down to distinguishing what the users need, wants, and wishes and doing/implementing well what the users need.