It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money.

I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.

Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine.

When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug.

Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.

Last weekend I finally started dual-booting Arch Linux as a trial. Yesterday I deleted my windows partition.

Too late, Microsoft.

Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.

If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.

Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.

You had gadgets in Vista & 7, but they could easily be disabled. 8 had live tiles for things like the news (effortlessly removable) and introduced the Microsoft Store (which increasingly needs an account). 8.1 added Bing Search to the start menu (requires Regedit to remove nowadays), 10 added news & current events to the start menu, and in 11 they want us to register Microsoft accounts to use the OS.

It's ridiculous how much control we've lost over Windows so that Microsoft can tell shareholders more people are doing Bing searches and signing up for Microsoft accounts than ever before.

For instance, almost none of the useful settings from win32 apps sync - migrating to a new PC is painful, your apps don't move, your settings are all missing. It takes weeks, you don't just login to it. So this idea that it makes all your settings sync is maybe 10% true.

The argument for this online account (vs just a container for apps) is that you think a few Windows appearance settings must be synced always, or that you want to save things like your BitLocker keys in the cloud (which probably makes them visible to FBI or whoever else). And the security implications need to be spelled out in plain language. And in the end, it's a pretty bad argument - Grandma doesn't need BitLocker, but the people who do want a clear explanation. A lot of the rest could live in a "Microsoft apps" credential layer: Edge, OneDrive, Office, etc.

I want to feel like I can login to a recovery console and fix a bad partition. I want to keep using the same username across Linux and Windows. I want to recover a router with the old laptop that has actual ethernet, and who knows if it has cached credentials? My Microsoft account is my least used one, and who knows if it is secure?

One last thing: logging in with biometrics is amazing, but why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password?

Please fix it all.

Windows had a good thing going (if you ignored some bad releases), but them pushing it too far with 11 and the Linux desktop making great strides, sort of put the nail in that coffin for me.

Not sure what they can do to make me reconsider. It's a trust issue now.

It's such a small niche right now they do not even care if they're in their cloud. Enterprise users are the absolute majority of their user base revenue-wise.

However dropping the requirement might force them to change some things. Like in Azure-related stuff such as OneDrive where you have to design/build/test it behave differently if the user is not constantly logged into the Azure account. This means that they might decide to continue to force the Azure account and if they lose more of the end consumers so be it.

Unless they decide to separate Home and higher versions of Windows even more and drop the requirement for the home version users. But it might be more trouble than it's worth.

Enterprise is where the money is.

I can buy a thinkpad and install linux on it without once creating a microsoft account. I can buy an android phone supported by GrapheneOS, and use it as a perfectly fine phone without ever creating a google account.

I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account, without getting ads shoved in my face by apple, without them deciding what I can and can't install on it, and them charging me for the privilege of writing my own software.

Microsoft doesn't deserve as much shame here as Apple does since MS isn't requiring their hardware vendors to lock down the hardware to only be able to run Windows (even though they very well could). Apple, with iOS, is.

2026 is the year of the Linux desktop. It's time - Linux has never been better or easier to use than it is right now.

It's just better without Microsoft.

It just doesn't make any sense. Starts off the user experience with a kick in the nuts and a slap across the face. "You don't own this machine"

This is the minimum peace offering acceptable to your long suffering users.

Much like politics, you want sane, healthy competitors. Microsoft enshittifying as much as possible might bump up the Linux numbers in the short term, but I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term. You want a major power like Microsoft pushing back on some of these trends, which completely opens the door for small players to benefit from that pushback.

I hope the folks at Microsoft can roll back as much of the slop as possible.

I look back fondly to the time I had using my Dell XPS when WSL first came out, they had me hooked. I've been using MacBook Pro for about a decade now and I can't even fathom going back to windows. Every time I open the start menu I feel personally attacked.

I used to obsess over reading xda developer forums and playing around with my android phone. I would laugh at the "sheeple" using apple products for not being customizable and giving away their freedom.

At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision.

"Ya I hate that. Working on it." - Could mean anything, which I would argue in this case, is equivalent to being meaningless. Does this mean Hanselman has a team with tickets lined up for the next sprint to allow offline accounts as a first-class workflow? Or does it mean he sent an email to the relevant stakeholders asking, "Hey guys, what can we do about this"?

I am not encouraged that we will see a change in momentum from Microsoft on this issue.

I'm still on Windows 10. Fuck you Microsoft for making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10. The simple fact I can't stop them from updating my Windows 10 machine and it reboots my machine makes me so angry that's one of the main reasons why I will never upgrade. Microsoft Recall is a non-starter for me, even though they made it "better".

If they force me to upgrade, I'll move entirely to Mac and install Linux on my current Windows desktop.

requiring an account for basic stuff might make sense internally but from user side it just adds unnecessary steps

For giggles, I just logged into my charity's Outlook account. I tried to log out, but it's showing me a "Your privacy matters" popup explaining why my privacy doesn't matter, and the "sign out" menu item stopped working, presumably until I agree to let them hoover my data. (Aside: the "To adjust your optional connected experience, go to Privacy settings." link doesn't take me to my privacy settings. It takes me to a page telling me how to get to my privacy settings.)

You cannot convince me that anyone at MS actually uses their public-facing auth system for anything ever. MS gets love for backward compatibility, but I see it as laziness. Instead of making one system that "just works", like Google and Apple and AWS and every other large vendor on the planet has managed, they half-ass support all 537 different auth systems they've ever deployed, driven by what I imagine must look like a giant nested switch/case behind the scenes. "OK, the user didn't have an "@" in their username, so call `legacy_pw_auth_23(form.password)`. It did have an "@", and also a "@minecraft." in it, so call `minecraft_v1_real_pw_authorizerer(form.password)`, unless it also contains `foo@minecraft.`, in which case call `minecraft_migration_2014_null(form.password)`, except in February, which has 28 days most of the time, where we call..." Heaven help you if it guesses wrong and sends you down the wrong twisty passage.

I'm far from a Google fanboy. I use their stuff for work, and it's alright, but it does not spark joy in my day. Still, I bet if the Microsoft Account login worked anywhere near as clearly, reliably, and rationally as Google sign-on, then Windows wouldn't get 1/10th the pushback we're seeing. If I couldn't authenticate to my own desktop any more reliably than I could auth to Outlook, I'd want nothing to do with it, either.

For that to happen, people have to be pissed off enough that it starts affecting metrics. Then, that needs to be detected, a decision to do something about it has to be made (we are probably somewhere around here), then that decision needs to be implemented step by step by removing all the enshittification... and in the meantime, the reputation as a terminally enshittified product keeps growing.

Even if most of the enshittification is removed, the reputation will stick for a while, just like the product was able to initially keep being successful despite the enshittification.

One has to wonder if this change will occur, that is due to these state laws requiring various levels of age verification. I can see MS stating you need to have this account because of the Age Verification Law in your State.

In a way, California's law is a huge gift to big tech, and now it is being replicated to other US states with additional requirements.

That sounds more like they were ok with it at the time and now they are seeing how much it actually backfired.

Windows account login provides decent value: Bitlocker recovery, device management, Onedrive sync (even the free version), simpler RDP & remote RPC authentication.

You won’t even defeat telemetry with a local account. Windows TOS grants telemetry consent.

Why do you guys care so much about this? It feels like a bikeshed – something easy to complain about with little nuance. What will be won if MS concedes?