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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Why is Win11 such a pain though? I don't get it. You had Win10 that worked just fine and they went on and fucked it up to what gain? Did they manage to sell more of other products in their lineup? And you do all that when Apple has its own silicon and produces superb laptops that could lure a lot of people in their ecosystem. I understand that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be, they've moved to greener pastures like Azure, but still why mess up your main trademark product and piss off so many of your users? What's the end goal here?

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The data they collect for the AI and the advertising opportunities enable more profits and more revenue to keep infinite growth happening. Even with Azure, even with Github and everything else. If you're not using all the profit opportunities, you are not delivering enough. The economic system doesn't reward or demand stable profits or sustainable growth, it demands compound growth.

This, exactly. Things will only continue to get more shitty as long as the expectation, and often requirement, for businesses with investors is to make infinite money, forever.

That has been the expectation the entire time computing has existed. It will always be the expectation. There is no future where that isn't going to be true.

What actually happens is a cycle. Things rise, things fall, things die.

On the initial upswing things tend to get better while profit and growth are aggressively pursued. Once market dominance is achieved, things tend to get shitty thereafter until someone topples the stagnant product.

This is a legitimate opportunity for Linux + hardware partners, if someone can finally realize they need to build and market to average consumers, rather than expecting average consumers to skill-up / knowledge-up just to use their software.

Or until republicans ruin the earth and make things bad enough that even they agree to introduce legislation relegating what businesses can do to the extent other developed countries have.

At least the version number increment is probably necessary because of the "breaking change" of requiring TPM, so they can move into a locked-down ecosystem like the iPhone, which I'm guessing is MS's goal within a few years.

But the terrible UI/UX? I guess they saw they had to entice users to move by changing the look and feel, but didn't give the programmers enough time, so it was mostly unfinished garbage when it was released, and maybe still is the case.

On that note, I have Win11 and Office version whatever at work. I really fucking hate new Outlook, it's a garbage web app, the whole "NEW" label on the icon makes me always think "Oh I've got some new emails. Oh no, it's just Microsoft being fuckwits". Also, the UI for modifying email signatures is a confusing maze of unfinished UI.

Microsoft painted themselves into a corner with Windows and backwards compatibility.

They do crap like UI mixing (old and new versions existing together) because backwards compatibility is what got them the marketshare they have in the enterprise (well that and anti-competitive practices). At some point, to improve their products, they are going to have to break compatibility and just push forward, and yet they can't because that would immediately alienate a significant portion of their enterprise customers that rely on that compatibility to run old software from vendors that no longer exist, that are critical to operating some niche equipment - hell, it's not uncommon for me to see air gapped windows XP machines still in production running some critical workload.

So they're stuck because they both simultaneously need to move forward but also can't break the old stuff without screwing over their customers.

Presumably, the Windows team has various targets to meet in terms of ARPU and things of that nature.

Oddly enough, it's not an unusual pattern for Microsoft, other motivations aside like data collection. Generally, only every other version of Windows is good.

98 good, ME - bad, XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 10 good. Par for the course, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a bunch of refinement, and some changes rolled back for Windows 12.

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