Most new desktop applications have a really crappy interface. Mostly because they are trying to copy some new homepage layout and instead is missing lots of information and buttons and fading in/out text and buttons instead of letting me click them directly. Not to mention taking several seconds to load a form that on my 8MHz Atari would have loaded instantly. Yes I'm old, get off my lawn!
Desktop apps from the late 1980s to around 2004 or so were very usable. There were clear UI standards in place for most platforms, and thus a high degree of consistency between applications, even from different vendors.
Even Java's AWT, which came at the tail end of this and pretty much only targeted UI functionality that was common between different UI systems, could create desktop apps that were and are much more usable than the inconsistent web-inspired desktop apps we deal with today.
