Windows 7 – why redesign Paint?

Welcome to another one of my rants. This time it’s about Windows 7 and it’s about the redesign of applications like Paint and Wordpad.

Have a look at these two pictures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Win7paint.png and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Win7wordpad.png.

Isn’t that just the most annoying thing you’ve ever seen? Microsoft has decided to use the same horrible interface and GUI from Office 2007 inside Paint and Wordpad. Seeing who these two rather useless but oldschool programs are being raped by Microsoft’s design architects is outright sad! Paint has looked the same way since the birth of Windows 95 and so has Wordpad.

The Office 2007-look they’re about to get will decrease efficiency, usability (finding features is a pain), and overall popularity. Paint will lose it’s “oldschool”-status and Wordpad… Well Wordpad will still be the useless replacement for Word, but it won’t be just as cool!

I can imagine people already now taking copies of their mspaint.exe‘s to be sure to not lose them. I know I am, at least!