For the last year or so all orders from leadership have been "build more AI, show AI usage" even above things like stability and reliability.

There was no recognition from leadership over what use cases worked or not, and they appeared to believe their own hype.

To complement this, there is near to no long-term accountability for upper leadership for failure, so even as features underperform and strategy turns out to be a flop, they will continue to make millions a year, having layoffs every 6 months, and then acting surprised pikachu when morale is down and top engineers are looking to the door, since salary is barely competitive even if you are a top performer getting special stock awards.

I realize he can't even open Steam without getting bombarded by ads from MSN in the start menu.

I'm angry at Microsoft for this. Instead of being good stewards of "computing", they provide an environment that's poorly designed and exploitative.

Shame on the people at Microsoft responsible.

What Microsoft did do was make is super-confusing to people about what they changed and what is called what.

See: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...

Half of the people are just talking about layoffs and other are keeping thier mouth shut. There is sense that execs are making one bad decision after another. Xbox division knows this very well, the trust in that division is near zero, but now it has spread to even the orgs which were doing decently well.

Product quality is also completely dogshit/dogslop, we have done nothing in last 2 years except making our products worse. We do hear reports of boomer companies moving to Apple every now and then, and these rumours are increasing. Windows 11 is a disaster, Copilot is an convenience no one asked for. Users are contacting support every day asking how to disable all these features but execs keep ignoring users. The consensus among top guys is that customer is wrong and we need to teach them.

Trusting stock market more than the customers is now the industry standard.

1. Saying "AI" makes stock price go up

2. Make all things AI

3. Stock price will go even more up

As for everything else, subordinated to the aforementioned.

Since last year? Burning themselves into the ground has been their M.O. for the last decade and a half, at least.

I'd argue enshitification started in earnest with Windows 8.

AI just enables them to speed up the process dramatically.

Windows is utter ass.

They don't even use their own browser, languages, or OS half the time because they're so bad.

I don't use it but stuff like VS Code is a point of light but they run it like an internal project, and will drive it into the ground, just like GitHub.

The sooner they drown the better for everyone and the industry.