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Comment by mrbigbob | Hacker News Reader

can someone explain to me why Microsoft is so incredibly slow in implementing what i see as relatively simple changes? it reminds me of everyone begging microsoft for tabs in file explorer and they finally did it... after close to 15 years!

they have said they are going to depreciate the control panel for at least 7 years and it still isnt done. I dont understand how a company this size moves to slow in implementing what seems to be fairly straight forward things

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If the CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet corporation I work at is anything like Microsoft, employees are given too much different work that causes needless mental context switching while you go off and do something else while waiting for PRs to be reviewed over weeks because the reviewers are also doing too much different things. Or maybe that’s just the way it works for the massive tech company I work at, but I see things taking a long time to get done for, presumably, the above reason, among many other process and people related reasons. I see lots of fluff around me, not that I claim to be a bastion of sanity in any sense.

The Windows ecosystem is at its core about backward compatibility and minimizing training costs (path dependence). There are billions of employees who have to be trained button click by button click. Even their IT support is often trained on Windows only.

And yet Microsoft pushes through all sorts of arbitrary changes that only benefit Microsoft like Candy Crush, Cortana, Copilot surveillance, can't be uninstalled OneDrive, mandatory TPM, and a search that depends on Internet connectivity.

> The Windows ecosystem is at its core about backward compatibility

It was. A long time ago.

> The Windows ecosystem is at its core about backward compatibility and minimizing training costs (path dependence). There are billions of employees who have to be trained button click by button click.

If this was their core they must've butchered it by releasing Windows 8, Windows 10 and most recently , Windows 11. And I'm not even counting thousands of minute stuff they've changed versions before these.

Because drivers and other hardware related software have the ability to add things like tab pages to the Control Panel dialogs. All of those would need to be rewritten to work with the new Settings interface, and with over 30 years of drivers, that’s just not going to happen.

I hope to know that too. And what about enhancing the UI a little bit. What about the windows that show up in light mode while dark mode is on. What about making Explorer a little bit faster.

Meanwhile Apple rewrites System Preferences to Settings in a single release ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And it's worse than Microsoft's Settings app and everyone hates it.

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