Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows division at Microsoft, wrote this piece about the design of Windows 8, which mixes Microsoft's new "Metro" design style for mobile devices with the regular desktop version Windows. He says, 4 times in 4 different ways, "Our goal was a no compromise design." But there is no such thing, becauyse all design is compromise. Joel Spolsky wrote this great article in 2006 and he explains it very simply, with an example of designing a trashcan for use on a city sidewalk:
It has to be pretty light, because the dustboys, er, sanitation engineers come by and they have to pick it up to dump the trash in the garbage truck. Oh, and it has to be heavy, or it will blow away in the wind or get knocked over... It has to be really big. People throw away a lot of trash throughout the day and at a busy intersection if you don't make it big enough, it overflows and garbage goes everywhere... Oh, also, it needs to be pretty small, because otherwise it's going to take up room on the sidewalk... Ok, light, heavy, big, and small. What else. It should be closed on the top, so rubbish doesn't fly away in the wind. It should be open on the top, so it's easy to throw things away... Notice a trend? When you're designing something, you often have a lot of conflicting constraints. In fact, that's a key part of design: resolving all of these conflicting goals.
Steven Sinofsky:
Windows 8 brings together all the power and flexibility you have in your PC today with the ability to immerse yourself in a Metro style experience. You don’t have to compromise! ... you can seamlessly switch between Metro style apps and the improved Windows desktop.
When he says "no compromise", what he means is "we left everything in", which is very much a compromise. How can he not see that he's already made a ton of compromises? More features means more complexity. More disk space is used by the system. More things running at once hurts battery life. Putting in more battery to bring the life back makes the device heavier. Etc etc etc. He is, quite simply, 100% wrong. Design is nothing but compromise."No compromise" design simply doesn't exist. It's like non-wet water.