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@NeatNerdPrime You have no idea how serious the font industry takes itself.
Lot of companies doing well for themselves on font licensing.
Even with the thousands and thousands of free fonts out there.
A good font can make or break a design. -
@Wisecrack oh i am totally aware of it. I remember the day that , for certain printers you could buy extra hardware font cartridges that were purchased from Adobe. Those cartridges costed 15000€ in pre-2000's money... this for an entire commercial font family (i forgot which one) to be able to print the stuff marketing designed of.
Worst investment for that company at the time.
The only really influential product Microsoft ever created is Verdana. Yes, the typeface.
It was the first typeface designed to be displayed on a screen rather than in print. Before that, there only were monospaced typefaces like we saw in terminal, or digitized typefaces like Helvetica Neue.
More than that, its looks were partly generated by an algorithm, hence the odd, alien looks. But because of it, Verdana works amazingly good in small labels. The 8pt Verdana is more readable than 10pt Helvetica.
I still use Verdana in all of my projects, religiously.
All the other Microsoft products: Windows, Xbox, Surface, Office, Azure, all that stuff — is mere garbage compared to the influence Verdana made on how our interfaces look now.
rant