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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

I find it amazing that Microsoft can be doing this sort of thing, mean while, at the windows team they decided to change that windows taskbar sound control tool so that you now need to do “start->control panel->soundoptions” to change your primary source, rather than just right clicking the damn icon. One in a long range of terrible designs for windows.

How can a company simultaneously be so great and so terrible at usability?

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Not sure what you mean, but you can change your primary audio source by clicking the right corner arrow on the little window that pops out when you click the speaker icon. EDIT: PIC https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/img_57d...

Also this literally doesn't have anything to do with the subject of this thread.

Hmm, well I guess my stuff is broken, because I only have the option to buy a headset when I do that - disabled btw.

But then, my windows still keeps turning down the brightness automatically unless I reboot after logging on the first time, so maybe it’s just a little incompatibility with my old ass laptop.

Yep. They actually made it MUCH easier to change your default audio source in Windows 10 (not sure which particular release this change came in).

From working with their products all the time, my suspicion is that there's some really great people working on a lot of the lower level stuff like the kernel, driver model, CLR, etc, but they're surrounded by an ocean of morons who can't even make a menu work reliably and a lot of executives who really wish the desktop was a smartphone.

In the same vein though, the Windows team added in an Eye Control accessibility option [0] allowing users to control the OS with just their eyes. So the answer here would just be that the teams are so large that they can make phenomenal decisions and also plenty of bad ones.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/wall-of-fame/eye-cont...

By being big.

Apple is big, their usability hasn’t gone to shit.

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