Microsoft is working to rebuild trust in Windows | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is working to rebuild trust in Windows

theverge.com

15 pointstimpera24 comments

This should not be hard. Lets start with 1) Allow local accounts without any tricks 2) Don't treat Windows as a funnel to push other MS products.

They are doing more than that. Windows is basically a data-collection platform.

> Microsoft has now confirmed in a statement to The Verge that it has received this negative feedback loud and clear, and is planning to make some important changes in 2026.

> “The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows.”

https://archive.is/Ru5Ls

I honestly don't think that Microsoft even knows what a good "overall experience of Windows" consists of. That's the charitable take. The uncharitable take is that revenue generation will trump user experience every day of the week.

> revenue generation will trump user experience every day of the week

The iron law of encrapification - I doubt Microsoft (or Apple or Google or any other company) can overcome it, as the business incentives (at least in the short term) are too great.

>The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear.

They misspelled "pissed-off". Or maybe it was a Copilot autocorrect due to the presence of the word piss in there.

Was thinking the same. Being pissed off is a fairly strong emotion, an LLM with marketingspeak instructions might reword it that way.

Actually I think it was a speech-recognition error, the author did say pissed-off but the speech recognition engine bowdlerised it to something more printable.

> > Microsoft has now confirmed in a statement to The Verge that it has received this negative feedback loud and clear, and is planning to make some important changes in 2026.

This line isn't in the article or the archived version of the article you linked - where did it come from?

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsof...

Apologies for the confusion on my part.

Who wants to bet they’re gonna add more meaningless AI features and terrible updates this year

> "[•••]This year you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows.”

Yes, that seems to be what they are aiming for exactly.

I am not sure if I count as a “passionate customer” or more a captive one, but I sure hope they fix it.

Recently, even cut and paste is no longer reliable.

- Sometimes cmd-c doesn’t do anything, only right-click works

- Pasting an image into PowerPoint requires an explicit paste as picture

- Pasting as picture in Outlook is only available after I default-paste the picture once

These and other things are very irritating because they disturb my flow and make me question my sanity (“did I not press cmd-c?”).

are you running windows on a mac?

Trust was very slow to come for me. It happened with Windows 10.

I really like 10.

My computing experiences began on Apple ][ 6502 systems. Then a mix of early Windows for workgroup and SGI IRIX.

I was online proper at 9600 baud in early 1990 at work and had my own WfW + Winsock running 14.4 early '91.

I got a DSL the moment Qwest announced it, and was rocking 100kb up 600kb down per second. A damn rocket ship straight to the WWW baby! Truth is hosting Q3A and mooching files were the real fun. I setup SGI Irix at home.

Linux soon followed. I have ran most everything. Solaris, AIX, MacOS, Be, HP/UX, even XENIX, CP/M and others...

I am at the core a UNIX head. And to all the naysayers back then: I was right! UNIX won!

Anyhow, I liked Win 10. Still do, if they would just continue with it. 10, with the WSL system is a pretty damn good OS, and it can run almost anything ever made for Win OS. 10, pre all the 11 vomit being back ported, is just great.

More of that please.

11 is a major league botch! I hate it. Not only are the UI simplifications a major league regression, but the intrusive data collection features and AI penetrating everything is nauseating. I hate it viscerally.

I am not going to use 11 as a primary OS. Nor anything built on it.

Ever.

The best M$ can expect is it running in a VM where it can be managed properly, and even then, only if some damn software costs too much to live without.

Nope. Not. Ever.

The dollar sign was deliberate. Win 11 trashed any good will Microsoft had garnered with me.

Did I mention visceral hate? Yeah. I use my Mac M1 a lot more now.

The amazing thing is my younger peers have come to me for opinions after they too began to hate 11 just as I have.

It is hard to botch it this completely.

Congrats MS leadership. You have accomplished something remarkable!

Well, I already switched to Linux, so have fun with all that. My file browser in Mint opens right away. It's like a miracle technology, or something.

TBH maybe just don’t touch it. Don’t fix any bugs, don’t add anything, not a single line of code, and in ten years it’s going to improve itself.

This is why Windows 7 is a significant improvement on all of its successors.

I'd say they need to rebuild trust in their suitability for re-earning trust first. This isn't the first time MS fucked us. Personally I'm sick of falling for the "we're sowee" shtick that barely lasts a few years before we're back to being fucked. MS has shown us it cannot change, and we deserve it if we fall for it yet again. It's time for MS to wither and die, let better things grow in the vacuum left by it's corpse.

I call BS on this nonsense. I still have a useless copilot key on my keyboard. But we'll see. I'm not going back.

There is a setting to control which app that key opens.

That is a hedge for people like us.

Power of the default says that button will needlessly over exploit a ton of users.

But you cannot change it to behave as a single key (i.e. Ctrl), only what the shortcut associated to it does (Shift+Win+F23 IIRC).

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/35808

Yes. As you say it maps to a key sequence, not a scancode. Additionally, it maps as a rapid key-down sequence followed immediately by key-up, so it cannot be remapped to a modifier key, such as right control (which it often takes over from on laptops).

There are ways, which involve using a software trap to capture it and then emit right control for a set period of time, but that's a workaround rather than a real fix.

https://github.com/m-bartlett/remap-copilot has a good writeup in the README

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