Microspeak: North Star – the Old New Thing (2015)

Does anyone have a better term? “Guiding vision” or “target state” don’t really convey the same intuition.

Here are some things that should be North Star for Microsoft:

- Innovate Office instead of copying competitors. Teams and Loop largely mirror Slack and Notion. Focus on real innovation, especially in long-stagnant products like Word and PowerPoint.

- Stop coercive UX in Windows. Don’t nag users to switch to Edge, Bing, sign in with a Microsoft account, or adopt Copilot.

- Make search foundational everywhere. Searching in Outlook or Teams should be as fast as searching Hacker News.

- Move beyond Flat UI. Flat design is unintuitive and unattractive. Interfaces like NeXTSTEP from decades ago remain more usable, not to mention prettier.

- Retire SQL Server in favor of PostgreSQL compatibility. Provide a first-class SQL Server compatibility layer on Postgres rather than maintaining a separate database.

- Fix display scaling on Surface laptops. 100% and 200% should be the only supported modes. Fractional scaling causes visible artifacts and should not exist on premium hardware.

"guiding star" is what popped into my head, search notes that the North Star can be called that, and sailors don't just head towards the North Star, so I guess it kinda works, but "guiding star" has what that phrase means in the name, something to be guided by rather than toward

I also thought "blue skies", but that's more open-ended, just a (nice?) space

(this makes me think of cybernetics vs systems theory, and the "relational turn" with society, but that's enough half-baked thoughts)

((which made me think of https://www.halfbakery.com but this is tangential to the point))

So, this is cynical trolling, but what's Microsoft's current "north star"? Trying to use their OS and work suite (what is it called now, Copilot 365?) to capture a bigger slice of the "attention economy"? Use those tools to capture and track users' behavior to get a bigger slice?

Hey, why haven't you logged on to OneDrive? Buy OneDrive, now!

There were references of "North star" as a personal/business objective/guide before 2015. I Googled the term "My north star" and there were a book "Finding Your Own North Star" published in 2001. So it was definitely something back in 2015. There was another book published in 1997: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66140.Finding_Your_Own_N... but I think it is the same book and Goodread might got the year wrong. But I'll take 1997.

I found another webpage from 1987 that took "North Star" with the same concept. https://reprieve.org/uk/our-history/

> This mission is our North Star when it comes to taking on new cases and moving into new areas of work. We continue to fight for justice and save lives,

Another one from 1978: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/j-thomas-fyans/prophet-north-...

Anyway, I do agree with Raymond (if he did think so) that business slogans are annoying.