Design gripes about operating systems...

In light of recent reading from Ambient Findability, I need to gripe a little about Windows. Today I was chatting with Lisa, who I work with, about school (she's in my program, but opted for the online tech course this summer over 840--so we're trading knowledge back and forth in the practice of good information sharing for universal benefit). Anyways, she asked me about where to find the add/remove programs list in Vista, and off hand all I could remember was that they stuck it somewhere different from where it was in XP. I had to come home and look at my machine to figure out it's in Control Panel->Uninstall Programs.

Why Uninstall Programs? Why not Manage Programs, or Program List, or something else? You don't just uninstall things when you're there, so why call it that?

I'm guessing this is part of what I like to call Windows Intuition. There's regular intuition, and then there's W.I. W.I. is what people have developed in response to the fact that Windows really isn't that intuitive. You have to push start to turn the thing off. Things need to "download" to "update". You need to go to a highly specifically named place "Uninstall Programs" to do anything with your programs. People have come to accept these things and hardly give them a second thought because the have become so ingrained...hence Windows Intuition. Of course you push start to stop using your computer--makes total sense because that's the way it's always been.

Now, when Microsoft discovers that 90% of the time people are removing programs when they visit the program list, they think "hey, let's just call the link Uninstall Program." This actually works counter to Windows Intuition, because we've all developed the tendency to look elsewhere for this link (say, under "Add or Remove Programs", as it was in XP, or "Add/Remove Programs" in Windows 98). Another fantastic example are the personal settings. It used to be difficult to change the personal settings on your computer because it involved a few well-placed clicks to get to the right screen; when I updated to Vista, I just about lost my mind when my husband explained that in Vista, you just right click the desktop and click "Personalize."

"Personalize" makes sense. So easy; so intuitive. But not Windows intuitive.

Windows isn't intuitive. Now that they are trying to correct their design flaws, I find myself getting lost, ironically. I understand that they want to create a better, more intuitive and useful architecture, but the years I spent building Windows Intuition resist. Why go changing things around after your audience has already learned the nuances? Is anyone else confused by the simplified operating systems, or have I just been hanging around too many engineers lately?