Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?
birchtree.me
birchtree.me
It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.
What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:
1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.
2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.
It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.
And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.
But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.
I use a Mac for work, but also use windows and Linux machines.
The best experience hands down when it comes to specific things would be Linux, for very niche things because it's way less clunky than it used to and people have figured things out in the meantime.
My mac is the only system that I can mount (without too much pain because people have figured it out) any filesystem, I can virtually open every document from Mac to Windows to Linux. I have something close to package control with homebrew. The M chips are ridiculously good at both being decently performant while low energy consumption.
Sure it has its host of issues and I would be the first one in line to dunk on Apple for many many... many many, reasons, but there are things to like with their laptops...
In comparison, recently, Windows has been more and more aggressive towards their users and their data, attempting to lock people in for some spreadsheet editor... Gone are the days of Lotus1-2-3...
Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).
Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.
I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.
Or you could buy a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max and plug in four monitors without displaylink.
I'm running multiple types of machines in my home for work and personal use but macs have been by far the worst offender for multiscreen support for a long time.
If you’re referring to using a dongle with its own GPU like some of the modern Displaylink adapters, any Mac can do that.
Here is the chip in my dogshit 2015 Ultrabook I still lug around, it very clearly states that the chip supports 3 displays regardless of how IO bandwidth is distributed on the mobo: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/88192/i...
You didn’t give any citations on your specific model of laptop or docking station. You just admitted that you used an old school docking station - those came with GPUs.
And your citation said it wasn’t available in all configurations.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/274734034597?itmmeta=01KAWK2DRBFS5H...
But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)
The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?
The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.
Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.
They all kind of blend together, so I asked Claude to give me a list of major features since 2020. Here are those that I've enjoyed:
* Universal control * iPhone mirroring * Stage Manager * Container CLI
Granted it's not a giant list, but each release does have little refinements here and there, and Claude may have missed some (it didn't mention container CLI, for instance; that was from my memory). I also omitted some features I don't care about (like Safari profiles and some other window management stuff).
What features are you hoping for? Aside from a tiling WM, which won't happen, I'd be happy just with refinements and bug fixes.
I'm not so sure about that, modern Linux is pretty good — I was able to configure it to fit my needs much better than I could a mac. It's also free of dark patterns (looking at Windows).
If you're willing and able to configure Linux, I would say that, for some people, it's much better than a mac.
Also, I'm no longer the kind of person who really wants to tinker with an OS set up and doing a lot of manual configuration. I just want a decent user experience out of the box and good connectivity with all my various peripherals.
I wish I could disagree, but Microsoft won't let me thanks to their determination and speed in destroying what was good about Windows.
Right now I find myself forced to use macos for iOS dev, and Windows for gaming-adjacent stuff. For the first time in 33 years, I truly wish I could just have Linux everywhere.
I had to disable all that AI garbage in the settings after researching a bunch of local inference and training processes that were grinding my MacBook to a halt every time it woke up from sleep.
At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).
Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).
Someone else on HN has a line that I agree with:”Apple makes the OS apps mundane so that people can write replacements and sell those in App Store where Apple has a fat share”.
Have you _seen_ system preferences?
Insanely hostile permissions and "untrusted software" behavior.
Nobody seems to like Tahoe, but I can't really speak to it because I don't even want to install it.
It probably helps that Microsoft has also abandoned usability, just for very different reasons
However, its definitely true that Apple prioritizes looks is function.
We're just currently in a generation where it ceased to matter for the most part, because Apple Silicon has made the previous tradeoffs basically meaningless. But that's not because Apple started to prioritize function, technology has just gotten good enough for their design philosophy to no longer hamper it significantly
I work with them a lot at work but when I use my MacBook I always use it docked. I just need more key travel. The feel is ok but the travel is not.
They were fine until 2015 and I still use the old aluminium keyboard at my desk.
The problem isn't really the experience being something like devices as a service. It's that the providers are a rent seeking duopoly.
I’m not saying there haven’t been vulnerabilities in iOS. But those were bugs that Apple tried to close. For desktop operating systems, giving third party applications that ability is a feature not a bug.
Yes I’m including MacOS in that bucket - see Zoom installing a web server on Macs without letting users know.
I see it the opposite. At least for iPhone owners Universal Clipboard and file sharing with Airdrop are killer apps.
On iOS, KDE Connect feels like its running a potato sack race with both arms tied behind its back.
My mum can use airdrop. She sends us things. She doesn't need to install anything or configure things. She just uses the first-party UI.
It's the same with Airpods. Bluetooth headphones? Yeah, you can buy some for $20, who needs Apple ones? Apparently everyone. Turns out providing great noise cancellation and bluetooth that just works means the product is appealing to general consumers.
It actually kind of makes sense. Apple has stopped caring but Microsoft is actively hostile. You then have people who can afford it switching to Apple, but the higher price deters everyone who can't, which in turn reduces the pressure on Microsoft to clean up their act.
The interesting thing is Linux. It's starting from a smaller base but in the last couple of years the growth rate is even higher than macOS.
You’ve seen much more frequent updates in the Mac line post ARM than you did in the Intel era.
In the PowerPC era the software was fantastic, especially when you factor in the much lower odds of viruses and malware. However, the hardware was well behind the curve except right at the release of a new generations, which were few and far in between.
Then when Apple switched to Intel, you had a few years of incredible hardware and incredible software. This is when the Mac absolutely blew up.
But then while Apple has constantly been improving the hardware (although they’ve made repairabiltu and extensibility worse), their software has seen a steady decline.
Where Apple has been really lucky is that while their software has seen a steady decline, their primary competitor MS’s software has seen several steep declines.
Windows, it feels like the OS is pointed AT ME more than anything else. I used to be happy with windows, it wasn't great but it was utilitarian enough that I could get things done ... not anymore, the OS is a hurdle.
I understand longer time Apple users say macOS used to be better, I don't know about that, but the experience with apple silicon and so forth has been great for me. If Apple wasn't trying they could have just stuck with x86...
https://www.google.com/search?q=innovator%27s+dilemma&ie=UTF...
And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve.
Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
I really don't understand the executives that read it and decide that "yeah, we are doing that impossible thing, disregard the sensible alternatives the book shows or thinking of something new!"
Meta Quest: Facebook has users, advertisers and all sorts of people who depend on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and such. Facebook knows that platforms like that fail eventually and doesn’t want to be the next MySpace so it has been struggling to get them into a virtual reality platform that, on a certain level, is well executed, but that people don’t have enthusiasm for. VR games for the Quest platform are pretty good but there are so many good flat games that I barely have time for them. I’d make the case that the 8GB MQ3 has enough RAM to run carefully optimized games but not enough for ordinary people to author content (some of why Horizon Worlds is dead: no way McDonalds is going to build an experience if they can’t import an SVG or PNG of the Coca-Cola logo to out in the cups and instead have to painstakingly make it out of solid geometry using the controller by hand… and the same is true for small businesses and enthusiasts) —- we are seeing 16GB headsets from Apple, Samsung and Valve now and maybe it will be better but quite probably it won’t. I know though that if Zuck gives up and somebody else succeeds he’ll have the most terrible regret.
That said, no, Microsoft wouldn't be crazy to make a tablet facade for Windows. What made them stupid (still not crazy) was to remove the desktop facade from their OS that sold exclusively to desktop users at the time.
Alibris link: https://www.alibris.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-When-New-Tech...
Ultimately, LLMs will probably find their place in a new product category instead.
The other end of the problem is Apple which is a consumer company, but they prohibit companies to use their hardware for building new things.
Both approaches suck for consumers and/or startups, but Apple's approach at least works for them from a business perspective.
Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, and use some of it for all their acquisitions of various software companies (biggest one was Red Hat) to leverage their massive B2B sales org to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.
Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
Shit like this make rogue AI scenarios totally plausible. I won't wish that on my worst enemy
How many more weeks? Also, is this before or after flying cars?
Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup, I guess it's going to be after flying cars.
I don’t see any reason to believe that “AGI office workers” will be ready to go by 2030. All signs right now are pointing to a looming plateau in their capabilities.
Those things are not the same kind of vaporware.
Also, if you compare with 50 years ago, AGI has also (better than) halved the interval experts are commonly predicting since then.
(Of course the experts could turn out to be hilariously wrong, for fusion or AI or both. I just don't think your comparison is anything like apples-to-apples.)
Latest LLM's have already been declining in performance. It's not a plateau and it's not looming.
We don't know what the hell we are doing. Adding more training data and parameters only degrades LLMs after a certain threshold.
That's so funny. Regular people can't hahndle regular cars. Self-driving cars barely handle 2 dimensional space within very specific confines and rules, in good weather. Existing airspace is congested to the point of being problematic in most metro areas around the world.
"Flying cars" might be replacing some private heliopters, maybe. But they aren't going mainstream any time soon.
Does the flying car need to also be street legal on the ground? Does it just not have to look too much like a helicopter?
https://gizmodo.com/official-air-taxi-provider-of-the-2028-o...
Ai builder with gpt5 + workflow triggers is very capable already. 1-2 more model generation hops needed plus a bit more “agent” plumbing before its game over for the excel and word jobs.
One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.
While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.
Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world. At every company i've worked for (3 tech companies, 1 digital agency), the Macbook is the default issued workstation unless you formally request a Windows laptop.
Some roles, like finance, tax, 3D design, favor Windows but that is generally because certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world.
Microsoft totally dominates non-tech companies though.
Oh I'm aware, working at a digital agency myself. But that's not the "bigco" world aka S&P 500, DAX and the likes.
Not from my experience. I see product managers/owners and software engineers using Macs more than Windows where I work, and it’s in healthcare, not SV. This move to Mac was gradual, starting ~10 years ago, and I believe a part of this was moving away from native apps to web apps.
Depends on the BigCorp. One of the most quentessential BigCorps out there, IBM, is deep into Apple stuff. As far as publicly shilling for Macs with extremely questionablly extrapolated data - they did a pilot with power users for a year, and came out saying Macs cost less in hardware and support than equivalent Windows Lenovos over the full lifecycle of the machine; which is literally impossible to know a year in a pilot with power users compared to the 4 year lifecycle for all sorts of people.
In general, we should expect more AI use to decrease the value of human oriented products. A word document is just some XML collection to a computer program. An AI won't need Word to create or edit the files.
Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.
The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.
In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.
They sell you compute, plus a phone that gets renewed every 2-5 Years
Not consumer computing, but desktop computers would disappear.
We did the same when we managed the selling process in 2024 and when we bought our current home in 2022.
We arranged a year long “digital nomad” series of trips where we flew to over a dozen cities including flights and hotels on our phones starting in 2022.
(but looks like I got my timing wrong, as those were proposed 25~30 years ago!)
Around 2000, was the time that eMachines were selling $400 desktops and you had promotions from places like MSN making them free if you signed a contract for dialup.
Besides techies I'm seeing more and more people not even having a personal computer at all, doing most of their "computing" on their phone and using their work computer for the rare task that does require a real computer.
The younger generations have actually regressed in computer proficiency, file management, etc.
They won't be shifting to Apple in any large numbers, many aren't willing to pay the price Apple is asking for a laptop. More and more I'd say that the average consumer if going to either use their work laptop, or their phone, for all their personal computing needs. Other that gamers, and the few of us who actually think that computers are fun (or at least they used to be), why would the average person buy a computer? My personal experience is that especially women just handle everything on their big ass phone anyway.
The term is 'cash cow'. Something you milk for cash rather than grow or improve
I am going to have to suspend my objection to the HN usage of MBA as a term of abuse because of where I learn the concept......
That's a quite unfair take, especially when it fails to compare it with what things of note Linux distros have added over the last five years. Valve made Windows emulation better, yes. That's it. What else?
Actually, I wouldn't even call Copilot a thing of note. It's just ChatGPT-in-a-popup at the moment. A real thing of note is WSL2. It's a total game changer.
Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years such as an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
Most distros lack the features below, out of the box, which Windows has supported for years:
- "reset this PC" functionality
- a built-in anti-malware
- Touch/Face login
- Ability to enable FDE post-installation
- Hybrid-sleep
- Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
- Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
I agree that Microsoft needs to stop letting product groups get their way with screwing up user comfort on Windows for the sake of their arbitrary goals (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats) and keep it as a solid, bloat-free system that everyone can safely rely on. But, dismissing the existing pros of Windows is just unfair. Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
Disclaimer: I had to switch to Fedora on my old machines because Windows 11 weren't supported on them. That's an exceptionally rare incident where Microsoft dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. But that doesn't mean Windows itself is bad.
I think you ought to try "most distros" before making such claims.
I disagree, "a very good OS" wouldn't leave major issues unfixed for 5+ months and counting: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-finally-admits-almost-...
If Windows was "a very good OS", us Windows sysadmins would've been out of a job a long time ago! A good portion of our job involves trying to fix or workaround things that Microsoft breaks every Patch Tuesday, logging tickets with Microsoft, dealing with the asinine Microsoft Support (who don't even know how to extract .cab files from the logs generated by the Microsoft Support Tool!), and implementing fixes and workarounds for unwanted "features" they manage to sneak into the latest update.
Actually, I concede that it is "a very good OS" - it is very good for keeping me employed!
You just described what Wine was able to do in Ubuntu since at least 2010
On my work computer, the search bar can't even find Intellij which is installed in a totally normal way. It's even in the same folder as clion in the program files and it can find that one. I also had a problem where the file explorer couldn't find a file by name and it made me look like an idiot.
You know what feature my menu bar has though? I tells me when the s&p 500 goes down in value to try to make me panic sell. That's a feature I really want in my work computer's os menu /s.
Also when I clicked on the time, it used to show me a calendar, but now it shows me a pomodoro app?
I don't want more features in notepad, what I want is the os to do basic stuff, like finding my programs and files or show me the time, right.
Linux supports hybrid sleep. It might not be enabled by default because if you have a lot of RAM it has a tendency to burn out consumer SSDs. Consider what happens if you have 64GB of RAM, a 512GB consumer SSD that supports 100 full drive writes in total and you enter into hybrid sleep twice a day for three years.
> Ability to enable FDE post-installation
Copy entire filesystem to backup. This isn't even a step because you were already doing it, right? Enable FDE and copy it back.
These ones are just Windows defect workarounds:
> "reset this PC" functionality
> a built-in anti-malware
> Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
Windows messes itself up on a regular basis, requiring you to reset it; this is rare on stable Linux distributions and even then "reset this PC" is really just copying the user's documents and reinstalling the OS, which nobody cares about having a one-press button to do when they're not having to do it all the time.
Linux has functional package managers that people actually use, which makes the default way to install software be the one that isn't likely to introduce you to malware.
And the package managers recompile the software for whatever architecture you're using so you don't need to emulate a different one.
> Touch/Face login
I think people have tried to add this and the users went out of their way to remove it again. "Have the machine record your biometric data" is creepy and the security is bad because people leave their fingerprints on everything and post pictures of their face on the internet.
> Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
X has legacy issues with this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009035
Wayland supports it.
I don't get these complaints. Can you explain to me what the problem with `xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 0.8x0.8` is?
That is simply wrong. Some of them might be a package install away rather than there by default, but they are hardly features that Windows pioneered…
> automatic private info redaction
With regard to that, I wasn't aware of a direct end user feature for that in Windows. There are tools for it in Office, and from a programmers PoV in .Net, but these are things that will continue even if Windows gets canned because it is a tech debt problem: Office is still a cash cow and .Net is via VS/VSCode and funnelling people into Azure.
> - "reset this PC" functionality
Maybe not as a one-click, but just re-follow the installation instructions…
> - a built-in anti-malware
Good point, though it is less needed due to most users installing via OS package repos which offers some friction to malware installation. Individual services that particularly need it have support for it though (mail servers and such). This might become a bigger issue if the use of “curl -> bash” as an installation or quick-run method keeps gaining traction.
> - Touch/Face login
I'm a refusenik there so I don't care about that one - biometric are bad for authentication/authorisation as they can't be easily revoked! And I'm sure I've seen it done so it is at least available.
> - Ability to enable FDE post-installation
Valid, ish, but where FDE is required commercially it is going to be done on first install anyway, the same for most home users that care enough. And conversion is possible after-the-fact, just not in as automated a manner as with Windows.
> - Hybrid-sleep
Though while we are talking about that, proper hibernate has been broken on Windows on many laptops for some time.
> - Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
I can't comment on that, it isn't something I would need. Though it is worth pointing out that a great many applications on Windows don't handle HiDPI well anyway, especially when you have different scaling factors on different screens. This is the same on any OS I think.
> - Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
Again completely out of my wheelhouse so I can't really comment. Again, this feels like a niche issue for consumer use cases ATM - the situation may change quickly as demand increases.
> (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats)
And bloody “AI”. They've put it in notepad…
Thankyou the Sirius Cybernetics Marketing Division!
I think it was noticing that Notepad (and Calculator) in Windows 10 took a countable number of seconds to open, that's what pushed me over the edge into permanent Linux desktop land.
Touch is notorious for there are very few touch sensors that actually have drivers for linux and vendors keep using unsupported ones.
Hybrid sleep... is actually a big problem as it replaced the regular sleep and now we are all in some deep deep muck.
And fractional scaling works fine on wayland, it is a recent feature of the last 1-2 years but seems to have stabilized.
Yeah, but they are far outweighed by the quality of life regressions that pushed me to desktop Linux a number of years ago. I only use Windows, begrudgingly, on my work laptop these days, and it just seems to get more bothersome as the years pass.
Linux used to require more install and post-install-setup effort to get me to my happy workflow place, but Windows overtook it a while back and has only been increasing its lead ever since as a result of a growing stack of defaults and unnecessary inclusions being, quite specifically, quality of life regressions (transgressions).
Desktops are on the way out for consumers.
That sounds like a hardware compatibility bug to me and not Bazzite's fault - I don't have those issues on my ThinkPad Z13, nor on my GPD Win Mini 2024.
The general consumer isn't going to hear "the manufacturer hasn't upstreamed stable drivers to the kernel" and suddenly stop blaming Linux if the hardware works in Windows.
I personally use Linux for all my devices, but I'm also very intentional on making sure ALL my hardware is compatible with Linux.
If you have all hardware compatible with the mainline Linux kernel, generally you can achieve a ChromeOS-level of system stability and reliability.
But as soon as you introduce incompatible hardware, all of that goes out the window. It's why I only recommend Linux to users that have compatible hardware.
At least in terms of Windows/Office, Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company. They've always been focused on corporate sales.
There have always been consumer-focused side areas, from Bob to Encarta to MSN to Xbox.
But Microsoft's bread and butter has always been corporations. I don't understand how the author thinks it was different at any time in the past.
Those risk-adverse behemoths are slowly coming to terms with Microsoft breaking their platforms and bread-and-butter applications.
Also, thelast few months have been a nightmare for or us as we were doing our migrations to Windows 11 and found how much of a steaming pile of poo it was - I mean, we already had an inclination, but it was even worse than the rumours. Never seen a shittier OS in my life, and that's even after considering Windows ME.
The Zune wasn't consumer tech?
Windows 95 was definitely consumer tech.
Windows XP was about making the Windows NT line accessible for home users going forward.
Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
This is because a completely under-appreciated apsect of the iPhone revolution was that it basically created the consumer smartphone market. Until then the only smartphone market that existed was the enterprise smartphone market, which was already locked up by BlackBerry and to a significant extent, Windows Mobile (with all the corporate integrations you mention), the predecessor to Windows Phone.
But that market was constrained to the phones that corporations would buy for specific employees, typically execs or senior employees, because the average consumer could not afford those at all. That's a tiny number.
And then the iPhone was originally released at the same price point.
This is why Ballmer was actually right to laugh at the iPhone at the time. The revolutionary UI could not overcome its fundamental unaffordability. I know because I had one through my employer, and I was the object of envy because none of my well-paid, tech-savvy peers in a relatively cosmopolitan major city could afford one.
What happened then was Apple or AT&T figured out that dropping the upfront price to $200 and amortizing the rest of the cost in the data plan suddenly made it accessible to the consumer market. If you look at smartphone sales, that is the point the hockeystick starts curving updwards.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Microsoft acquired Rubin's company for a Billion dollars and then spent so long rewriting everything from Java into .Net (before releasing it as the Microsoft Kin Phone) that it was dead on arrival.
> The Kin ONE and TWO went on the market on May 14, 2010. Within two months, Verizon stopped selling the phones because of poor sales.
But Win 95 and XP were were absolutely built for corporations.
Sure, XP came in separate "Home" and "Professional" editions. But the important thing is that it was the Home version that was missing features to make it cheaper -- not that the Professional edition was primarily a consumer product with some business functionality bolted on.
Obviously Windows has always been used by both home users and corporate users. But the bulk of Microsoft's revenue has always been from corporations. There is no sense in which Win 95 was designed primarily for individual consumers, and then business sales were somehow secondary.
Windows NT was for businesses
In the last 18 months we've seen a lot of maturation in various linux distros trying to make them "out of the box" usable by people who are not all that technical. More GUI utilities, better stability, compatibility layers for gaming driving adoption, and dead simple setup.
Valve has been doing a lot of the work driving adoption from gamers with Proton, PulseAudio is suddenly way more functional and compatible, working Nvidia GPU drivers (565+), and immutable spins on distros have all made it so that linux overall is more approachable than ever.
I think we'll look back at 2025 and see it as the inflection point where suddenly linux became a viable alternative to Apple/Microsoft in a way it wasn't before, driven in part by development targeting a new demographic along with the spotlight on both the technical and consumer issues with OSX/Windows (such as patches bricking hardware, attempting to crowbar AI into everything, and antagonizing their customer base with things like subscriptions and data harvesting).
Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.
“Yah”
What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?
> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to
But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
Bazzite has been great for me so far except for a few exceptions to okay with friends. With the end of support for 10 and the hostile crap Windows has become, I'm trying to see how to transition. Anti-cheat and business agreements seem to be the only real remaining barriers.
And to the original question: no, consumers are moat to the enterprise licensing pot of gold.
There is value in training consumers on Windows & Office so they are familiar when coming to the office. MS needs to retain endpoint dominance in the workplace. They can't survive on server alone. Windows & Office endpoints are essential to their business. This is the leads channel.
They add pizazz to features and beta test them to consumers . Consumer licensing is moderate revenue but minimal income for Microsoft. Thus consumers are really beta testers.
So Microsoft will continue to provide low quality consumer experiences that don't fit the consumer market that well. The consumer market isn't their goal. It's a means to their actual business.
If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
Microsoft was early to making tablets, smartphones, living room PCs, etc. They just royally screw up the execution of each product category every time.
Maybe it'd be a fun idea for to take some of Microsoft's failed consumer ideas, and revisit them 10-15 years later to see if some other company successfully executes on it.
Most of the time MS is actually delivering something successful is when they are very late or bought it and put their sticker on it.
It's weird to think I'm still paying for the Windows license because I like to buy from a physical store and they don't have alternatives.
Microsoft has become a bit like Oracle... You don't need what they make anymore but you have to keep paying for it. It's like the company has entered into retirement and society is still supporting it... But the difference is it never dies of old age to make room for new generations of companies.
I did some compilation tests on a 2025 Windows desktop with an i9 vs some MacBooks and a new top-of-the-line Windows machine can’t even keep up with a bottom-tier M1 MacBook Pro.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/compiler-performance-on-2025-devi...
The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.
I feel like the culture at large has shifted from doing what's exciting to doing what's safe, from actor's point of view.
In what world is VSCode fast when its startup time is multiples of Explorer (which had in recent news decided to preload itself to mask that issue) and they are the result of exactly the same fundamental shift from native to web native
VSCode is an IDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
>Visual Studio is the one to compare to "any other heavy IDE"
Why? VSCode is an example of a well-made product from MSFT, unlike Explorer.
>and there are plenty of code editors with plugins that start much faster,
What IDE with plugins starts faster? And I'm not talking about the startup time of VSCode.
Now try to follow your own sources, both links for that sentence call it a code editor with MS doing the correct reverence " happy with using a regular code editor like Sublime Text instead of a full IDE like Visual Studio."! It's also called so on its official page "The open source AI code editor" So try to make an actual argument/use a proper source for one instead of treating wikis as the ultimate truth
> What IDE with plugins starts faster?
Sublime Text, which is as much an IDE as VSCode
> And I'm not talking about the startup time of VSCode.
You're, you are responding to a point about very slow startup time
People call applications apps, and before that they called applications programs. VSCode is called an IDE. My link calls it an IDE. Some people call it a code editor. Some people call emacs and vim IDEs. VSCode does everything an IDE does, including compiling, debugging, and profiling.
>So try to make an actual argument/use a proper source for one instead of treating wikis as the ultimate truth
Just because you don't like it being called an IDE doesn't mean it isn't an actual argument.
Regardless, you haven't and can't attack my central point. The only one I care about, in fact: that the user can feel the vast difference in quality of VSCode vs. Explorer, and can tell that it's made competently vs. incompetently.
I also said nothing about how long it takes to start up--you brought that up. I called it "polished, fast, intelligent UI, not buggy, [and it] consistently improves," all of which are true. All of which you've ignored.
>You're, you are responding to a point about very slow startup time
I'm responding to someone who doesn't understand my argument, and probably doesn't want to.
Those are synonyms, how is it relevant?
> My link calls it an IDE.
Mistakenly because the sources it uses to support that do not call it an IDE
> Just because you don't like it being called an IDE doesn't mean it isn't an actual argument.
The reason isn't likes, but lack of substance. Like when you provide an empty reference to wiki without even reading it yourself to see that the sources don't support the statement
> Regardless, you haven't and can't attack my central point.
I have, your comparison is false, the "paleo slow" app is faster than the "fast" one. Now you claim that "fast" somehow doesn't include the speed of startup!
> All of which you've ignored.
Some of which, and given that you can't see the obvious about objective things like speed, and the common like the difference between an IDE and a code editor, there is no point in addressing more vague points like UI polish.
But also, why do you have the misconception that I should somehow address everything in you list???
CudaText starts at the same speed as Sublime Text, but on Windows 10 it starts faster for me. Due to the faster Python DLL initing.
This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.