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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

So much of Windows 11 is great, but then they keep doing things like this. I don't understand it. Why are people pushing things like this still employed? Do they not see the negative press every single time? It's not like Windows is on the position it was 20 years ago.

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Microsoft appears to be transitioning to a cloud services company, but they have lots of legacy products that still have too much value to abandon. My guess is that the all-stars in the company are working on cloud products while the lesser skilled are relegated to legacy products. This is probably some ambitious product manager trying hard to push a cloud revenue advertising product into Windows so they can leverage it to get moved into the growing cloud services side of the company and out of the decaying legacy side.

There's probably also a good bit of internal pressure on the managers of these legacy products to find ways to make them fund themselves. When looking at what Microsoft has been doing with dotnet over the past half a decade, helping to support legacy Window's place in the world doesn't appear to be one of their goals. Everything is going cross-platform with a distinct push towards cloud deployment, which supports the cloud services goals.

Who gives a shit about press when you have a quasi monopoly and people are dependent on your products.

Likewise, the new Microsoft Edge (Edgium) started strong, but they keep adding more and more feature bloat.

And now website notifications from Edge are integrated at the OS level. While I like the web as a platform, I am already dreading the amount of notification spam that is likely to happen.

Alongside all the other strange features and extra toolbars. Why is there a new vertical sidebar? Who asked for this?

> So much of Windows 11 is great, but then they keep doing things like this.

What positives do you have in mind?

My impression of windows 11 is "WSL GUI plus a bunch of obnoxious UI changes".

And GUI for WSL is super niche and was originally announced and developed as a windows 10 feature.

Edit: Oh I think explorer tabs made it into mainline. But you can't pop them out or drag them between windows?

Oh, I remembered a second notable feature.

Windows 11 supports 6GHz wifi networks.

And by that I mean: there is an old intel driver for windows 10 that supported them too. But that feature got removed in later versions, and the official answer is to change OS if you want it.

Same complaint about the uncloseable, unminimizable Win 11 advert that I woke up to on my Win10 box this morning. Who thinks this is a good way to push upgrades? Do they not understand how much that pisses people off?

If their focus is on the cloud, getting people to not use Windows may be a feature not a bug. How much revenue relative to Azure does Windows deliver?

Microsoft isn't going to intentionally kill their OS. Windows is still a billion dollar+ business. It's just sheer incompetence.

My guess is that they're working to condition you to accept ads and accept the idea that MS can do whatever they want on your(?) computer because eventually they want everything in the cloud so they have more more control over what you can/can't do, they can more easily access/mine all your data, and they can charge you a monthly fee to access windows (and by extension your files). There's a ton of money to made from it even before they start to paywall off common OS features you've always had access to (like Solitaire)

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