No matter what you think of Microsoft’s new Windows 10 icons, they do nothing to solve any problems with those apps, the underlying system, or the massive design inconsistencies that are found all over this platform. This new design is, in fact, the most superficial change that Microsoft could possibly make, and rather than celebrate this inanity, we should be troubled by the arbitrary style of this new design, which inexplicably casts most icons as blue or orange. For some reason.

As I’ve noted many times, Microsoft has long used the phrase “lipstick on a pig” to describe the arbitrary design changes it’s made to its products so that you could tell one version from another. In the late 1990s and 2000s, for example, Microsoft would subtly change the look of the toolbars and then ribbons in Office for this very reason: A support person looking over the shoulder of a user could tell the version they were using at a glance, which could help them solve problems more quickly.