Nowadays it's all about the prettiest farkle and the most novel interface. Where friction actually means "more time eyeballs spend looking at my design", and consistency has zero value.
Teams, I'm looking at you. Every election app? You suck at usability, and my laptop is too hot. Windows metro? You obviously sucked and no one misses you. Ribbon instead of menus? Thanks for making me move my mouse and eyes ten times as far just so I can enjoy your pretty icons.
I would argue that a step up the size of what we saw from Windows 3.1 to 95 hasn’t been seen since, certainly not on the desktop.
Discoverability. It seems increasingly hard in modern UI to know what is something I can interact with and what is just a text label.
Add Wine, and you'd have a lot of compatibility with the original!
Windows 95 must also be one of the better marketing campaigns for any software product.
As I was reading this I had flashbacks to their TV commercials showing the start menu and started humming “start me up” to myself :)
