Arguably, but I'm not sure. Usually, enshittification is when something starts out really good, but then the management tries to squeeze more "value" out of it by making it worse and worse in ways that make the company more profit, but makes the experience worse for the users. In the case of Windows, personally I don't remember it ever being "really good" in the first place; it's always been shitty, just in different ways. In the past, it wasn't shitty in this particular way, but it was shitty in other ways. They fixed some of the really shitty stuff (blue-screens all the time, bad vendor-provided drivers, etc.), but every time they fixed one shitty thing they added a new shitty thing.

If you squint? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Windows doesn't quite fit that definition in the way that the term is usually applied to marketplace platforms like Facebook and Amazon.

This is a misfeature but it doesn't feel like it's directly part of the intervention in the buyer-seller relationships Windows is mediating.

It's awful but not eshittification.

Eshittification is suddenly waiting 40 minutes on a drive through because the restaurant refuses or can't hire more workers.

enshittification is the cute fun name for the concept of becoming a nigh-monopoly by buying out your competition with private equity and destroying it, and then- because the free market has effectively been destroyed- resting on your laurels for the forseeable future because there's no longer any pressure to improve or fix your product.

you can basically let your product become garbage because any free market pressure, you know, the kind that capitalism purports to thrive on but actually seeks out to destroy, is gone. Why bother improving if there's nowhere else for your consumers to go?

We're so used to using substandard products, getting substandard service, using things that are old, busted, falling apart, inappropriate for the job we're using them for, and so on... I love seeing westerners go to other countries and go "whoa! they're living in the year 3000!"