It’s hard to believe how despite all the telemetry, Microsoft still manages to be so out of touch with their users’ actual needs. It’s almost like there’s a hidden agenda somewhere.
Tribe A thinks Windows should appeal to people who use and love open source software. Tribe B thinks Windows’ ubiquity makes it a great platform to run ads on. So instead of what most companies would do, which would be to figure out how these goals line up against a broader strategic vision of what Windows should be, at Microsoft they just let both tribes do their thing simultaneously until the leader of one tribe rises up high enough in the org chart to raze the other tribe’s villages and scatter its people to the four winds via a reorg.
This of course results in a deeply schizophrenic product, but that only matters to customers, and Microsoft gave up customers as a false god long ago. Now the only god that matters in Redmond is the God of Battle, and every PM sees his peers as obstacles that need to be cleared away for him to meet his destiny in Valhalla.
About the camps and their goals, the open source one is to some extent present, obviously, but the ad one I don't really see because I run Pro. There is a third camp that unquestionably won, though:
The "UX/UI designer" camp. I assume all the garbage running in the background behind obscure registry toggles (because real configurability is bad for UX) that's meant to make it easier for grandmas and end up making it worse for everyone else, like your computer isn't really fully yours (neither the resources of it or the freedom to decide to not run these daemons) comes from misguided UX designers who think they know better than you how a computer should be used and that they can earmark a fifth of your CPU at any time to do whatever they want.
The UI designers also won. Everything is a soulless black or white with one contrasting color. They managed to make this "There are two places you can modify settings with two disparate styles" because somehow that's better than one older looking but consistent place.
The whole thing feels like a beta version. In fact, even Whistler betas were more polished than this.
OS cannot afford to break things, which apparently is MS modus operandi now.
It takes about 5 minutes of playing in settings to hit broken functionality. Bonus points if the breakage is forced by unchangeable domain policy in company.
I mean, it's obvious when I write it like that, but I think we have this platonic ideal of a company (or a government, or the military) somehow being this omniscient creature when instead it is filled with flawed humans who are seeing the world through various soda straws pointed in different directions.
There's also the issue with power users generally turning off as much telemetry as possible. To Microsoft we're much less visible than the average person who leaves everything on the default setting.
It's not so much as a hidden agenda as sacrificing their primary product to be advertising for a different product and concept that consumers soundly rejected, and Microsoft's been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Ads and telemetry were just things that their new features supported, but weren't the driving force behind those features.
Wind the clock back to 2011. Desktop and laptop PC sales are declining and tablets are the new consumer hit. People are buying iPads (and to a lesser extent Android tablets) at an alarming rate, and this might be the end of a reliable revenue stream for Microsoft if people are replacing their old desktops and laptops with said iPads.
So, Microsoft comes up with the vision that their products will do more than an iPad can. Instead of having a standalone tablet as the home's primary computer, you'll buy a Microsoft tablet- which will not only be Just As Good as the iPad, but it'll also function as your main computer when you need it to. They even went so far as to create their own brand of tablet, but the extra hardware that needed to be provided for Windows to run smoothly (and the keyboard) meant that it would cost twice as much as the iPad (there was a neutered version that was comparable, but had no applications and outside of Office wasn't a suitable desktop replacement).
But there's another problem. Windows isn't a good tablet OS- the interface has been designed for a mouse and keyboard. So they come up with Metro and the brand new WinRT API with which to create applications, and spend a lot of time getting it ready.
Of course, since the entire vision of the future is "one Windows for everything", it made perfect sense for any system running this new version of Windows to use Metro. After all, they had just spent millions of dollars developing it and didn't want it to turn into another dead product.
So they made the fateful decision to deprecate the (already very much existing) desktop UI support in favor of Metro. It didn't matter that the interface was wholly unacceptable for desktop use, though it was Good Enough for the majority of the userbase- because people would be using Windows tablets and touchscreens in the near future anyway, in addition to their new Windows Phones (which would get quick application support because WinRT was a cross-platform solution).
That didn't turn out so well (Windows Phone is no more, UWP won't see further support as far as exclusive features go, and the only noteworthy Windows convertible tablet remains the Surface Pro) but it took a few years for that to become apparent- cue Windows 8.1 and later Windows 10 (the return of the Start Menu being a token gesture, since it lacked most of the functionality of the old Menu out of the box). There have been no major UI redesigns since, and everyone there's probably just trying to pick up the pieces until the next version arrives, if it indeed ever does.
My dad rang me once said that when playing solitaire it kept playing ads. I said he can buy it so the ads go away or find another app that doesn’t have ads. He’s like “ah what ever I’ll watch the ads”. He’s happy and content. Just wants solitaire.
Would he not be happier without the ads, then?
I mean, if I gave you a script that would patch up Solitaire executable to remove any and all ads and telemetry with a single click, wouldn't your dad want it if you offered?
It is as content as they'll get unless they spend $$ to remove the ads. Clearly it isn't worth the upgrade so they must be okay with their decision.
Hell if push came to shove you could probably get GNOME's solitaire running which at least has the advantage of supporting something like 100 different solitaire games.
Lastly I was curious how much the Microsoft solitaire costs and OMG. They want you to pay an ongoing subscription for it. Wow.
Seriously, though, I don't think you can avoid a lot of complexity if you build a product such as VS.