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Comment by Cherian | Hacker News Reader

Watching Microsoft from the 90s adapt and to see Satya get to do what he wants is pretty amazing!

Win10 is still user hostile. A recent update on a computer I support for an older family member installed an uninstallable Edge, hijacked the PDF association, and with the first PDF opened through edge, used credentials stored in Office to log in to Microsoft.com “for convenience” without asking.

The monopolistic DNA still runs strong in Microsoft. They are behaving nicely only where they have no advantage.

I don’t buy the “new Microsoft”, not one bit.

Completely agree. Just started a new job and was issued a new laptop with the latest MS stuff. Everything wants to be cloud based. The browser regularly has rendering glitches when scrolling a pdf. Little ads pop up for no apparent reason. Installed apps are just temporary unless you pay. It feels like a desktop designed by Facebook.

Having said that, aside from the pdf glitch I'd say it works very smoothly, exactly the way they intended.

I thought it was rather smooth too the first time I used it. Then I rebooted and the start menu was all messed up. Searched (from a web browser on a different system; not much documentation when you use it offline but at least no ads) and reason was... I changed the time. Somehow that reverted some of my changes to the start menu. Maybe a year or a bit more later, after I had arranged a few hundred program icons, the start menu just stopped working entirely and none of the suggested fixes I could find would help (except the one to completely reset the start menu and undo all the customization). But at least that led me to discover the super useful start right click menu (that still worked). Plus some strange audio issues with some programs that got much better in 2004 but still occasionally present. Plus the text entry box to search the app list to uninstall takes several seconds to even let you enter text (if you start earlier it seems random if it appears or not). And I'm fairly sure a few more such issues as well, so you are luckly if it is smooth for you.

But yeah, it does have a nice streamlined feel to it that I apprecitate (way better than the default Ubuntu interface IMO) except for the obviously hostile aspects. And the streamlined feel does really enhance the feel of how intentional many of those hostile aspects are.

I see it differently. The awful W10 stuff to me is a byproduct of adopting the FAANG PM crap - everything's an A/B test, everything's about driving engagement (even if they drive it with a nailgun into your skull :). It is a "new Microsoft", but the new Microsoft is parity with the existing Google and Facebook.

Can you elaborate on this FAANG PM stuff? I am not super familiar with it but it seems interesting.

The acronym is for Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google ... project management, maybe?

Product Managers and the common philosophies this title seems to have adopted at those sorts of places.

I was more wondering what about these philosophies are bad.

IMHO when you're strongly incentivized to optimize for engagement stats attributable to you, you're pushing change for the sake of change with the darkest of UI patterns to ensure your changes are selected and "favored".

FAANG-like organisations like to use statistics to drive decisions. As others have mentioned, things like "engagement", A/B testing, percent of users using a feature, etc...

This often leads to absurd decision making or false incentives. Things like the GUI shifting around making people click the wrong button by accident will increase engagement metrics and look like a positive thing in the reports.

Take Netflix as an example. If you set your UI language to English and live in Australia, Netflix allows you to choose only five languages:

- English for the hearing impaired

- Italian

- Simplified Chinese

- Traditional Chinese

- Vietnamese

Note that that list is for a show that has alternate audio languages like French and Italian, but you can't select all of those languages for subtitles. But here's the thing: Netflix has the subtitles in about 100 languages for every show. They just refuse to let you select them.

My parents are immigrants and like to listen to shows in English but have subtitles in their native language as a fallback. Netflix says "no". My partner is an immigrant and she's not Italian, Chinese, or Vietnamese. Netflix says her language just doesn't matter enough to make the list. I sometimes like subtitles, but I hate the hearing-impared subtitles. I don't matter either.

What's happened is that some overpaid statistician at Netflix figured out the top 5 most common languages for each region, decided that 99% coverage is "good enough", patted himself on the back, and the 1% can get fucked.

That statistician is probably paid 3-5x as much as me, and his job doesn't even need to exist. Just show every subtitle language available! Easy! No need to pay some "smarter than you" person to decide what you can and can't have.

Notes:

Apple TV shows every subtitle language, so there can't be any arguments saying that this is impossible or difficult or whatever.

If you call Netflix support, they will gaslight you and say that this is a copyright issue. It isn't, Netflix hides subtitles even for shows they produce themselves.

It's possible to do some combinations in any region. E.g.: setting the UI language to something other than English will make other subtitle languages show up. Some combinations are impossible though. So if there's some random couple like an Italian guy with a Filipino girlfriend, they can't do Italian language audio and Tagalog subtitles ever. Netflix has decided that their relationship is statistically unlikely and excluded them as outliers.

I find it frustrating because it looks like there are two sides of Microsoft. One helming Windows 10 and another doing the impressive Visual Studio Code, PowerShell Core, .NET Core work etc. where they go like "Hey maybe we should build a Rust projection for WinRT, OK here you go!"

Windows 10 should have been so much more and so much easier for Microsoft to rapidly evolve in a more beautiful fashion. But I guess there's just so much enforced backwards compatibility within it that their hands are almost tied behind their backs. Everything is ran in the same system on equal footing, from Windows XP era stuff to whatever the latest "app" trends are. Unsurprisingly it becomes a mess.

Windows 10X looked to be the right way forward where they finally decide to just run everything Win32 in light weight containers to shed all that dead weight for a more maintainable system, but it's sure taking a while to see anything and I hear the ARM edition that will be essential isn't going all too well. We're looking at a completely different, really troublesome, performance in 10X for x86 on ARM than macOS Big Sur and Rosetta 2 on Apple M1 that is already about to ship/shipping.

> They are behaving nicely only where they have no advantage.

This. Just look at gaming. Xbox is losing, so they champion pro-consumer cross-platform multiplayer. Minecraft is popular, so they kill GNU/Linux support with Bedrock Edition.

Bedrock Edition is primarily targetted at the consoles (where running the Java-based Java Edition was difficult). Java Edition is still worked on (and runs on Linux) and they are trying to achieve parity between the two versions.

Bedrock Edition was based on the C++ rewrite for Pocket Edition and has better performance and crossplay.

> Win10 is still user hostile.

Maybe MS could catch the wave of "old-school" versions that are all the rage (e.g. WoW, Runescape), and release a Win95 flavour of Windows that runs on current hardware.

I miss the "old-school" GUI conventions and simplicity of - gulp - 25 years ago.

Honestly, I cut them some slack on the MS account integration (you log in to MS on one app and you're logged in everywhere) because Google and Apple both established it as good practice on their mobile OSes. In this case, MS was the last one to the party to make Windows integrate with their cloud accounts like that.

My biggest problems with Win10 are far more mundane - the incomplete/buggy touch interface, the explorer bugs that are old enough to drink, the new signed-executable security model that is very OSS-hostile (but again, imported from mobile OSes). The fact that half the configuration screens are in the new Settings system and half are in the old Control Panel, where you'll even bounce back and forth to tweak a single component.

I use Firefox because I'm not cutting that slack for Google/Chrome either (and I've never seen it happen in Safari, though I'll take your word for it that Apple does that sometimes too).

Not cutting them any slack.

There are different divisions in Microsoft and these do different things. The division gave us F# (that I am eternally grateful for) is not the same that gave us Windows (that I am never going to forgive). These things can coexist.

You could say that about a democratic country. But Microsoft, like any corporation, is a dictatorship.

F# is public relations and research - so you get to enjoy the fruits. But the day it gains any strategic importance, it will be used and abused for that purpose.

Yeah, one side is doing great work - the Win10 story still sucks a bit / lot.

The "new Microsoft" is useful for the time being. Once they are positioned to, they'll drop the hammer.

With them sunsetting IE what's the alternative? Surely there should be a browser that cannot be uninstalled right? I agree with the rest of your issues, but if Edge is ever to completely replace IE it should remain installed no?

First, they haven't sunset IE yet. If the same update uninstalled IE, you might have had a point.

Second, putting the icon everywhere in your face is monopolistic behaviour. In Europe, for a while, Windows came without a browser installed, and let you pick one to download upon install. This is the non-monopolist way to make sure the user has a usable browser.

Also, that user already had a self-updating Firefox, self-updating Chrome, and manually-updating Safari on the same machine.

> Surely there should be a browser that cannot be uninstalled right?

No. You should be able to uninstall everything that isn't needed for the computer to boot.

I mean who's supposed to be the "good guy" then, Apple?

Apple is the “least bad” guy at the moment. They are not “good”. But all the big guys are bad to some extent. (And since you brought them up - Apple’s cloud push is bad, though not remotely as bad as Microsoft’s cloud push)

I am not saying Microsoft is exceptionally bad in any way. I am just saying the “new, good Microsoft” is a mirage. They are as bad as they had ever been, except they have been beaten into submission in some sectors, so they behave in those.

Apple is the worst with their initiative to make their devices irrepairable, monopolistic practices on iOS and extracting value out of their target audience ruthlessly.

Apple does not have a monopoly - Android outsells them significantly in just about every market. Microsoft still has a PC monopoly. That makes a huge difference.

And yes, Apple making their device impossible to repair is evil, but their value extraction is opt-in (buy buying into their ecosystem) because they are not a monopoly.

What we have is an unregulated duopoly and Google and Apple are filling their boots.

The App Store is where they hold a monopoly.

I was referring to the legal concept of monopoly, of which they have non, and Microsoft does (and was in fact, convicted for abusing it, independently in the US and in the EU).

(The kind of monopoly Apple has on the appstore, much like the Sony monopoly on the playstation, and Microsoft on the Xbox, is not AFAIK an antitrust target because non of them command a significant part of a market without alternatives; whereas Windows on a PC was an antitrust target because it does have that hold on a market, AND microsoft abused it to enter other markets).

And Apple is the best (of those companies) when it comes to privacy and not spying on your every single digital move.

It is an open secret that Apple is doing all these privacy things for two reasons: PR and for setting themselves up as the only choice for ads for iOS users (which will soon include Mac). How anyone can just look past this (and that they jumped into NSAs arms and shared everything) baffels the mind. Apple is in no way less evil than Facebook or Google.

They're much less evil than Facebook in my book.

w.r.t google, it seems like Apple is the lesser evil - as far as I (and anyone I know) can tell, if you turn off location tracking, it actually stays off.

But there is definitely no "good guy" among the big player. Right now, Pine64 and Puri.sm are the only not-yet-proven-evil guys around, and they are both minuscule.

The evidence for MS being bad in the post I replied to is them forcing Edge on you. Well, can I uninstall Safari, or install any other browser on iOS that isn't a reskin of Safari? Not so far as I'm aware. The integration is much tighter than what MS offers.

Why does there have to be a "good guy"? Can't there just be a bunch of different bad guys?

If Microsoft is supposed to be exceptionally evil then surely we can see other actors in similar position who aren't as bad.

> Why does there have to be a "good guy"? Can't there just be a bunch of different bad guys?

Narrative tropes demand that there be a protagonist, so one of the bad guys must be cast as an anti-hero, at the very least.

Huh. I just realized that to many of his supporters, Trump is an anti-hero. No wonder pointing out his flaws doesn't work.

The FSF.

IMO decentralization and competition are the only way to get the bad actors to occasionally do good.

I think they're optimizing for a different use-case/perspective: > uninstallable Edge Alternative: The person has a browser that is auto updated and doesn't need to fiddle around

> hijacked the PDF association

Alternative: The person has an in-built PDF viewer without scouring the web for "PDF viewer" and downloading malware or a sketchy app

> used credentials stored in Office to log in to Microsoft.com “for convenience” without asking

Alternative: "Wow it's cool how all my Microsoft things are working well together"

I think there's room for grace about the experience of 99% of users who don't want infinite customization but something that works well with helpful defaults.

No, that person already had a PDF viewer installed, more capable than the one built in to edge.

There is no excuse to replacing that on a forced update without notification.

Seriously, you can explain anything this way: “all files deleted” alternative: “Microsoft just helping you free up space” or “the files weren’t backed up so they weren’t important”.

Microsoft is squarely in the “monopolistic bad guy” corner here.

Edit: Said person also had a self-updating Chrome, self-updating Firefox, and manually updating Safari on the same machine, for the record.

Changing existing defaults is def a no-no. I thought it was a fresh install of Windows you were complaining about.

Yeah, I love the new Microsoft, especially because of the forced telemetry and updates. Not to mention making it impossible to create a local user account on Windows 10, unless you disconnect from the internet.

UWP is wonderful too.

Paradox of Microsoft's new image is that software development & tools has never been better as it is today, but the desktop experience is one of the worst in Windows history, the opposite of the old days. Seems that you can't have them both.

Yea I love this brave new world where frontend development feels like ASP.NET. Love me some TypeScript, shipping features quickly was getting old. Say it with me now, noImplicitAny! We're Engineers now, thanks Microsoft.

Last time I tried (4 months ago) you still could create a local account while connected to the internet.

They're making it more obscure, though

Just did so successfully two weeks ago, Win10 Pro on T480s, Version 2004 or 20H2, can't remember. The latest of what the Media Creation Tool gave me, anyway. Others said Win10 Home does not work anymore.

Ironically, I installed Win10 coming from Manjaro, which even on a T480s (probably one of the laptops to have for Linux compatibility) broke after every other update, so like twice a day. On the other hand, Debian/Ubuntu has been too far behind on software versions for me. Both had terrible compatibility with my Thunderbolt 3 dock. Hopefully in the future, we will meet again!

Until then, it is ridiculous how much more Win10 Just Works.

I'm surprised you didn't try one of the more mainstream stable-but-current distros, like Fedora or openSUSE.

Perhaps they didn’t try due to the difference in package management?

Fedora/openSuSE are RPM-based distros while Ubuntu uses Debian packages.

For Win 10 Home, the only way is to create a temporary Microsoft-connected account to install, then create a local account after installing, then delete the first account.

"Not to mention making it impossible to create a local user account on Windows 10, unless you disconnect from the internet." This is false. I've done this a couple of times recently on Windows 10 and it's no problem at all - just requires clicking a link on the create user account page. In fact, I always prefer to create a local account first and then tie my MS account to it afterwards.

> impossible to create a local user account on Windows 10, unless you disconnect from the internet

This isn't at all true. Accounts > Family & other users > Add someone else to this PC. Took me 20 seconds to find this setting.

I've created local users several times. It's not super clear I agree, but definitely doable in the last month or so.

It's not impossible to create a local account without disconnecting from the Internet.

Since Windows 10 1903 it's impossible, at least in the Home version.

https://www.howtogeek.com/442609/confirmed-windows-10-setup-...

Microsoft should really improve their unattended process. This is where Linux really outshines Windows. I can configure a Linux installer with all my favorite software integrated, user accounts, configurations, etc—but with Windows I essentially have to install Windows, install my apps (leaving tons of randomly scattered files and registry entries all over the system), and then sysprep the WIM.

The unattended setup on Windows is very confusing, there are like 3 different ways and 6 steps to configure, and the tools are mostly designed with GUI in mind. Could you imagine being able to configure, install drivers and apps using a single YAML file for Windows?

I when’s through creating and deploying a Windows image last year. It’s a really painful and convoluted process and the tools don’t help much.

I think most of the more serious ones require an Active Directory setup, which kind of reflects their traditional focus on enterprise users.

Can confirm; recently configured a Surface tablet for family, and no workarounds were possible.

Ironically they are still the same old Microsoft in most ways.

I was thinking the same. I spent many of the formative years of my career (late-80's, most of the 90's) HATING microsoft but to see them now and all the relatively "open" stuff that they not only embrace but can't really extinguish is refreshing. I think some of that attitude put Satya in place, but he's run with the ball under the same ethos.

They only open that which they have no advantage in. Operating system is as closed (and as hostile) as ever, so is office and sqlserver. Xbox requires an always on connection.

It is their right, of course. But I don’t buy the “new Microsoft” ethos.

Adopt, adapt, annihilate.

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