Installed Microsoft Edge on my Mac. Don't know about you, but is this kinda a lot of UI to pile into the upper-right corner all at once?

One window is trying to get my email on a list in exchange for a $1.25 gift card—maybe that could have waited? (Forever?)

But there's more: Here's how the rest of Edge first run experience looks.

There are 3 big blue buttons on screen—they use different color blues and 3 different font sizes/weights.

The kicker: The middle window about "sleeping tabs" isn't even clickable.

It's not even UI. IT'S A PICTURE OF UI.

So there’s this whole conversation going on around the history of Windows 8 that @stevesi is publishing over on Substack.

Commenters have criticized the decision to join the tablet UI to the traditional Windows Desktop.

Here’s a secret—it wasn’t a decision, it was a precept. 🧵 By that, I mean the mission we were given wasn’t just to build a great tablet. Let me explain:

We started designing the Windows 8 tablet experience pre-iPad. But, of course there were always rumors, and so we weren’t totally surprised when Apple introduced the iPad. /2

The Start menu is Microsoft's flagship user experience. It should represent the very best UI design the company is capable of.

Today I searched for "chrome" in Windows and was shocked by the user experience. It's just really confusing.

The left side looks like it was created by a designer. We could quibble about some of the design choices, but that's not the story here.

The right side looks like my Internet Explorer toolbars did in 2008.

Remote work and distributed work are not the same thing. Let's stop using the terms interchangeably!

For starters, one is fundamentally way more inclusive and equitable than the other.

You better know which is which if you're out there looking for your next job! 🧵 /1 Remote work, by its very definition, is "remote" from somewhere.

Usually a headquarters (🏢) or, for larger companies, several key offices in different cities. (🏢🏙🏭)

Remote means that there is a center, and some people are "remote" from it. /2

We’ve all felt the anxiety of trying to choose a next job. 😱

Whether starting out in a career, moving to a new company, or choosing a new role/team inside of a megacorp, fear and confusion can reign.

Don’t despair! Here are 4 tips to make your decision easier: 1) Always, always, always choose the people.

The people you work with every day will be by far the biggest factor in your work happiness. This isn’t measured just by whether they’re good happy hour companions or quick with a witty joke, however.

(Though that can't hurt.) 🍹🤭

The concept of work/life balance is wildly outdated.

A holdover from the 20th century, in which work at home meant a briefcase full of legal pads or someone calling your landline, it makes no sense in today’s world.

Work/life balance has outlived its usefulness. Here’s why: The term “work/life” itself has a bunch of wrong assumptions baked into it.

First, that work is separate from (and not a part of) life. Two, that work and life together comprise the totality of human existence. Three, that achieving balance between them is important/desirable.

Many people working at startups change jobs frequently, while employees of big companies may toil in the same place for decades. 😢

If you work at a megacorp today, how do you know if you’re ready to make the big leap to the startup world?

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself: 1) Are you capable of working in an unstructured environment?

Here’s the thing, even in well-run startups, there’s nothing like the command structure, hierarchy, and clear roles of a huge megacorp.

Big companies thrive on deep layers of people and titles and information.

Product design best practices dictate that you should ask what customers need and build that.

But a product that you don’t deeply want to use yourself won’t have a soul. Most of the world’s great products were born of personal passion.

Build for yourself first. 4 reasons why: 1) When you are designing for you, the customer is not abstract.

So many bad products have been designed based on generic business plans or analyses of “unmet customer needs.” Yes, there are ways to get great customer signal but that is always one layer abstracted from yourself.

The “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) is the most well-known, admired concept in early startup product development.

Unfortunately, MVP is often misused in a way that actually harms early-stage startups, leading them to create needlessly bad products.

4 thoughts about better MVPs: 1) MVP doesn’t automatically mean “ship a bad UI.”

The word MVP can end up being used as a battering ram against people who argue to flesh out the product design more, to make the user experience more complete.

Instead, the barebones-ness itself becomes a badge of honor.

It seems like every company is tripping over themselves in a rush to say their software is “powered by AI.”

But saying “powered by AI” is like saying you’re “powered by the internet” or “powered by computer code." By itself, it means nothing.

Here’s how I think about it: 1) Most “now powered by AI!” is just a rebranding of the same heuristics and rules engines software has used for decades.

When your email program keeps track of what folders you use most often and magically offers to file mails to them, that’s a simple algorithm, not “AI.”

Startups are exponential. There's an enormous mountain to climb from founding to success.

In the spirit of the famous "Powers of Ten" film by the Eames Office, here's an exponential look at startups. Each step is a 10x increase beyond the previous one.

Startups by the numbers: 1

The number of chances you get to choose your founders.

Select right and you have a chance to make it big. Choose wrong, and no matter how great your idea or technology or product is, you will eventually fail.

As a founder, meeting with a VC can be intimidating. It can seem like the VC has all the power, your dream's future at stake.

Yet, it doesn't have to be this way; pitching can be respectful and mutually useful, even if it's a no.

Here's a Simple Guide to Being an Empathetic VC: 1) Offer constructive feedback.

In one of the first meetings for our seed round, a highly-respected seed VC (who passed on us and probably doesn't even remember this) asked what our go-to-market plan was.

We thought for a minute and said "well, I guess build it and sell it?”

There are certain behaviors in a job interview that cause automatic disqualification. Earlier in my career, I made several of these mistakes myself.

Unfortunately, I see these pretty much every week. Here are 5 of the worst behaviors that everyone should avoid when interviewing: 1) Don’t talk bad about all of your previous managers.

Yes, it's true: many managers are mediocre and some are outright terrible. I have no issue with someone relating that they worked in a hard or unstable environment, as long as they do so respectfully.

Whiteboard coding is a pretty broken way to gauge developer skills.

For years, companies have "proven" that they hire only the best and brightest by putting interviewees through rigorous algorithmic puzzle solving on the whiteboard.

It's kind of dumb. Here's why: 1) Whiteboard coding is literally never a skill you need in real life as a software engineer.

Judging a developer by their ability to code on a whiteboard is like deciding to draft an NFL quarterback because of how many points he can rack up on his Xbox playing Madden.

There’s no such thing as a “startup inside of a big company.”

This misnomer actively misleads both big company employees working in such teams as well as people toiling in actual startups.

Despite all best efforts to create megacorp “startups”, they can never exist. Here's why: (And, by the way, I ran one of these “startups inside of a big company” myself and at the time thought it was basically a startup.

We had a cool name. We were small, lean, and agile and dreaming about the future and had a $50,000 3D printer. This was not a startup. I was wrong.)

While Microsoft officially stopped putting "easter eggs" into their software around the year 2000, harmless little eggs still made their way into Microsoft Office.

Some of these were intentional, and some were not.

Here are 3 of the eggs that I know about in Microsoft Office: 1) The fountain in the Insert Caption tooltip in Microsoft Word.

In Office 2007, we added what we called "Super Tooltips", basically extra informative descriptions of the feature that could include an illustration.

We were excited about this, but hadn't planned it end-to-end.

Interviewing at a startup can be totally perplexing. Some startups pride themselves in having "no processes", leading to a confusing, inscrutable experience. Don't lose hope! 😕

Here are 4 warning signs that you may want to steer clear of the startup at which you're interiewing: 1) Repeated misfires on communication. This can be anything from the recruiter calling you Cindy when your name is Stacy (a mistake we made with a candidate early in our company) or making an appointment for a chat on the phone and then you never get the call.

When you're leaving a big company to interview at a startup, there are some hidden questions you might not know to ask.

Not all startup jobs are created equal; without the right info, you could make a bad choice.

Here are 4 questions you should ask in a startup interview loop: 1) How much money does the company have in the bank?

OK, yes: this sounds super crass... an embarrassingly direct question. But it is also incredibly crucial, because without this info, you have no idea what kind of situation you are potentially walking into.

As I detailed a few days ago, there was a secret, unsolved puzzle quietly embedded into default Windows wallpapers.

It was misinterpreted as an advanced "anti-leak" security measure by many users, leading to all sorts of craziness.

I also promised you the solution. Here it is: If you need to catch up on the original story, you can find it all here:

https://twitter.com/jensenharris/status/987544942938542080

Here's some puzzle solving fun for a Friday night.

As we developed Windows, one of the minor decisions we had to make was what wallpaper to use for various internal builds.

These builds always leaked outside of Microsoft, so we knew that the wallpapers would also end up public. Traditionally, these wallpapers included text embedded in them threatening to throw people in jail if they leaked the build, blah blah, substantial penalty for early withdrawal, not all coins go up in value (some go down!), etc. etc.

We wanted to try a more elegant tact.

Leaving a big company job for a startup can rejuvenate your career and make you love work again.💖

But landing a startup job requires relearning some things, especially if (like me) you logged years and years at Microgoogfaceforceazon.

Here are six things I wish I'd known: 1) At a startup, you will probably make less money at first.

Yes, if you join the perfect startup early enough, your equity may someday turn into a private island and 200 foot yacht. But, in the meantime, your take home pay is likely going to be a bit less than it is now.