I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.

Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice

It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved, developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows because they "got the best of both worlds".

And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is, the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit phases.

This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.

And the whole process will repeat.

PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior leadership, they are still spewing the same platitudes about agentic computing and software. So what's really going to change long-term?

But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.

Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.

The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.

This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.

To add insult to injury, it always displays terrible gossip, sports or far right news.

If any developer that works in MS news service is reading this message, please know that I hate you.

- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;

- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.

- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.

- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements. But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.

Its the curse of the power user.

1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of control to begin with

2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again

Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3 years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.

Hopefully they stop but I recognize these steps from Windows slippery slope.

I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.

My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.

All because it has some AI stuff on it that I don’t want.

[^1]: https://www.winehq.org/

Saying that here as someone that isn't fond of the Windows experience these days, but the two are not relatable.

sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.

am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?

as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.

mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.

X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.

1. Ship something user-hostile 2. Wait for backlash 3. Roll it back partially 4. Get credit for "listening"

It's remarkable that computer users are paying $139 to give data to Microsoft through an ad-supported "operating system"

Back in the day (generally) only OEMs paid

What is the $139 for

98 good

ME bad

XP good

Vista bad

7 good

8 bad

10 good

11 bad

When 12 comes windows will be tolerable again.

They absolutely can't help themselves but make their product more and more user hostile.

A step on a thousand-mile journey, perhaps, but it's a step.

Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?

Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.

Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.

Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.

I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like this in companies.

I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.

I will have to use Teams and Outlook at work because I don't have a choice. But that's it Microsoft.

I am customer and I absolutely hate it that they have restricted the machine that Windows can run on.

If they don't fix this sort of anti customer garbage then all their words are pure horseshit.

Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.

For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.

Swarming, as in locusts, or else flies on shit.

They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.

Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!

They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.

It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.

Either way, it's too little too late for me. I'll be trying to get into Linux again after Windows 8 times cause I've had it with Win11.

I don't know how it is for Windows 11, but for Win10, activating it is super-trivial, even without downloading some crack .exe. With that in mind, I never bought Microsoft's claim that it hates "pirates". In particular one work around that is even published on github - which is owned by Microsoft - so there is no way Microsoft does not know about it. Why does it not take that github site down?

Clearly Microsoft does not have anywhere near as much as a problem with pepole using Windows as such. I switched to Linux more than 20 years ago so I don't care much about Microsoft anymore. I do have a secondary computer run Win10. I don't see why I would want to switch to Win11 ever though - it only has drawbacks. And Win10 was already really bad. Microsoft used to be objectively better; all that trend to AI or ads, lowered the quality. It seems that corporation past a certain size, become super-lazy.

And local accounts, all the methods required following a guide, using a hidden hotkey like shift-F10 and typing in an obscure command. Nobody did this by accident, or was coerced into it. These were sophisticated users who did not want to login to a MS account. Microsoft not only didn't care about their users' preferences, they actively fought us. It's downright offensive.

And like a battered spouse, we lived with it, we took the hits, because we wanted to play videogames. Well, now Windows is no longer required, thanks to Valve's work on WINE. And suddenly they're apologetic and conciliatory. No thanks, Microsoft.

And these apologies they’ve been rolling out - to whom? For what? Gabecube is going to eat their gaming market share, servers are already predominantly Linux. I’m sure they’ve got tons of enterprise customers. Fuck ‘em, they can keep them.

Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.

Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.

Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.

Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.

Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.

Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.

I mean I guess there is no reason to care, since their main products work in a browser, powerbi users and gamers can endure anything and old people will just get their grandchildren to fix their windows.

I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.

But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.

reduces focus on AI, better performance, more stable updates, etc are all already here with windows 11 LTSC, why the hell would i move back to the GA release and deal with their crap?

If you don't use Linux or MacOS yet, why?

How many of the people pearl-clutching in this thread actually use Windows?