The Darwinian Evolution of Microsoft Windows

This is a cool infographic timeline, showing the Darwinian Evolution of Microsoft Windows from version 1.0 in 1985 up through the current Windows 7 in 2009.  Although it makes for a really tall infographic, I love seeing the visuals of the startup screens and the desktops.

Art is credited to Richard Cavolo, and the project is from TestKing.com (even though I can find no mention of it on their site).  It was posted on BitsandPieces.us

Update on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 11:00AM by Randy

I found the release post from the future on Testking.com.  I say “from the future” because the post is dated October 10th, 2010.

Comments

[marco]

The look of this graphic is very pleasant, but there's no trail of data, numbers, you have there just technical facts, some screenshots and the version number. No comparisons, no satellite facts... this is definitely not an infographic

[Jim Rudnick]

Hello Randy...

dropped by this morning and found this wonderful infographic -- nice catch! and I wrote yesterday on my own blog about SEO and infographics and yes, I did mention this site as one of my own "authority" sites where I go daily to see what you've found!

so muchly appreciated!!

:-)

Jim

[Randy]

Marco, I would disagree (of course, since I posted it). The timeline is a visual representation of data, and the screenshots add additional context to each version of Windows. This could have been a boring White Paper analysis of the history of Windows, with all text and no graphics. Formatting the information along a timeline and adding visual references to make comprehension by the readers faster and easier makes it an infographic in my book.

[Randy]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your kind words, and the link in your article. It's much appreciated! ;)

All of my posts link to the original designer or article if I can find it, and they are all DOFOLLOW links. Part of my purpose is to help provide infographic inspiration to designers and help drive traffic to their sites.

[Changz]

This is an evolution alright, but not Darwinian. I also second that there's very little data visualization in the graphics, e.g. pattern or trend.

[curby]

I'd say that it looks more like someone pasted a bunch of (admittedly pretty) Powerpoint slides together. The end result is what marco noted: disjointed factoids without flow, or connections, between them. What about default file systems? CPU/RAM/disk requirements?

Why in dog's name are the bootup screens in widescreen, which requires some horrible cropping in some cases, and unused space on the sides of the logos? NONE of those images require 16:9 or 16:10 ARs, and there's plenty of vertical real estate in the graphic to accommodate the 4:3 ratio that the vast majority of those screens were created for.

In short: some form, but little function. IMHO :)

[Richard]

I'm with Marco and Curby. How about a little critical analysis of these graphics past whether they are pretty or not. The Jess3 one is a great example. Very impressive on the surface, but so many arbitrary and useless segmentation makes it quite annoying. It's a shame so many users, and client pick up on this stuff and find value in it. Not very discerning,

My recommendation is to be less concerned about your blogs advertising numbers and focus instead on critiquing things from a user centered perspective.

[erwin]

well that is nice
i heard that Microsoft's next project on which they are working right now is WINDOWS 8
which will be released in 2012 or 2014
anybody know about this????
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