This presentation by Microsoft designer Jensen Harris at UX Week 2012 — dug up by Long Zheng — is largely made up of Harris justifying the radical user interface changes in Windows 8, recounting how users have, time and time again, adjusted to stark changes and liked it. "Familiar, usurped by modern," he explains. Whether or not that'll eventually be true of the new Windows design is a question for later, but in the presentation Harris shows off some mockups of Windows 8 from 2010, the same year the iPad came out. It's strikingly similar to what Windows 8 looks like now, two years later. The original designs have been tweaked — the proportions of the icons in the Start menu feel off and the original sharing interface looks kind of disgusting — but the core ideas didn't shift much during the development process. The vision of what a modern Windows looks like was clear from the beginning, in other words, even if the execution of that vision is ultimately a little muddled.
