Statistically, a good deal of you are reading this sentence on a machine that runs on Windows and if you’re old enough to remember the wonderful days before Windows 8, you may recall that the old Windows looked kind of like a flag. So what the hell was going on?
As you can see in the image above, older versions of the Windows logo clearly show a waving flag. We don’t care if Microsoft say that it’s still supposed to be a window, windows don’t bend like that unless they’re in a hurricane or made by Apple. What makes this weirder is that the original Windows logo and indeed the one they use now is flat, you know, like a window.
We’re not being facetious here, as detailed in the image macro above, literally the first question a professional graphic designer asked Microsoft upon being asked to help redesign their logo was “Why are you a flag?”, much the chagrin of a flustered Microsoft representative. Well, the answer, according to Microsoft is that the logo “makes sense in the context in which it was created“, which is corporate doublespeak for “we thought it looked cool and didn’t think anyone would notice.”
The only reason the logo went from being a simple collection of squares to a garish pixellated flag that looked like a reject from a Gay Pride parade was because Microsoft wanted to show off all the fancy new things their new line of computers could render. As the machines running on later versions of Windows became increasingly more powerful, the logo used to represent them similarly became more and more complex.
You know, even though it doesn’t make sense at all when you realise what the logo is supposed to represent, a fucking window! It wasn’t until a graphic designer sat down with a representative and straight up asked them why they used a flag that Microsoft decided to change their logo to something more simple. Or, if you want to operate on their logic, they realised that Windows 8 sucked a bag of dicks and wanted a logo that represented the huge step backwards they’d taken.
*Disclaimer: The author recently bought a new laptop that runs on Windows 8 and he really doesn’t like it.
