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Comment by stalfosknight | Hacker News Reader

WTF is wrong with Microsoft? No one is asking for this.

Nothing. MS decision makers are fulfilling their duty to maximize profit by utilizing Windows to funnel users towards their most profitable, revenue generating, services of Azure and Office Copilot 365.

How do these changes help to funnel users towards Azure and Office Copilot 365?

Folks could have used those services even if Windows itself wasn't getting clanked, right?

That's like asking how installing a default browser helps boost that browsers market share.

Does that answer your question

No, because of course I want to use a browser, so I will download one if there isn't a default.

Not the case for Azure or Office

It's simple advertising. People have a higher chance to use a product if it is advertised to them. I don't think there is a microsoft app these days that doesn't have a copilot logo visible in it at all times (even Paint).

Despite what non lawyers may have told you, corporations are not legally obliged to chase short term profit at the expense of everything else!

In a sci-fi world that sounds nice, the tweet makes it sound like you could get a computer which Captain Picard can ask "Computer, scan all ship systems for information about Spot the cat" and the AI can talk to different systems (Windows apps) and ask it about information relevant to Spot (i.e. which has been tagged with metadata like subject=Spot).

In reality, it's Microsoft. Click this popup now to get 12 months free of 1TB OneDrive, and Copilot 365!

My answers is that Satya Nadella is betting the farm on LLMs/AI and, even if it's a path toward failure, Nadella has built enough credibility from past results that he will allowed to go a long way before the board or investors will start trying to rein him in. This could be Nadella's "let's buy Yahoo" moment.

Microsoft is the world's first AI controlled company

the CEO has been conned into the bullshit, and now has "AI" Chiefs of Staff telling him what to do

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...

"Excellent question!" "Great idea!" "You're so smart!"

you can see how someone can fall into this trap, but normally they're not the one at the top so it's somewhat harmless

if you get someone at the top though... they can enforce their will downwards via KPIs and OKRs

.... Oh, wow, I assumed you were _joking_, but:

> At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots.

I don't think that's how these decisions are made. Their objective certainly does not have anything to do with happy users. Even if they lose a few (very few probably) Windows users they want to stay relevant in the AI race.

> stay relevant in the AI race

The race to what, pursue more of what users don't want so as to lose even more of them?

The race to talk more about AI at the quarterly earnings call.

No joke, this to me seems to be all that executives care about now.

My 70 year old father in law called me to ask how to install Linux after getting a new computer and finding Windows 11 unbearable (he liked Windows 10 fine). Everyone has their tipping point.

If people only got what they were asking for we would still be doing everything on paper, not computers.

Name just one accountant asking to do things on paper. I'll wait.

Its a bit late but I worked building point of sale systems when things were getting computerized. Many people wanted to keep their paper books.

Switch to Debian and i3wm and never be bothered again by this type of nonsense. PC = Personal Computer. Make other choices and regain your sovereignty and privacy.

I switched to Mac 20 years ago out of sheer frustration over the total lack of coordination between hardware and software, the frothing at the mouth obsession over excessive backwards compatibility over good design, privacy and security, and hardware that isn't total rainbow blinky light horseshit.

But I try to keep abreast of whats happening on the other side of the fence and I am often recoiling in horror and wondering why the fuck Windows users tolerate any of this.

If it wasn’t for the forced cloud integration, forced AI and other user-hostile behaviour, Windows 11 would actually be quite a nice OS.

It’s performant, easy to manage at scale, a lot of the UX weirdness from Windows 8-10 has been cleaned up, and tools like WSL are well integrated.

Windows 11 is not performant, it's sluggish in a lot of places and everything got slower on the same or even better hardware. And I will never not laugh about having two context menus. Windows 8 was way faster even on low-end hardware thanks to DirectUI.

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