Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features made sense in the ways that they were being added. There should not be any necessary work to "rollback" features that do not make sense, because they should have not built them in the first place.
Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. Taste comes from knowing what not to build.
Right now Windows is an unstable mess, filled with things that shouldn't have been built. The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...
> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.
You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.
What exactly was wrong with Edge Legacy(not IE) based on their own engine that they need to fix, and why was Chromium a sweet taste?
AFAIk Edge Legacy was kicking ass in all benchmarks. Their only achilles heel was Google messing up Youtube and G-apps to break they way they got displayed on Edge LEgacy forcing users to switch to Chrome.
The constant fear of having Copilot shoved down your throat whenever you close and update Edge. And Microsoft homepage.
> why was Chromium a sweet taste?
Do zero of the heavy work maintaining a browser engine. Do maximum (little) work of adding AI slop.
Copilot only cam after they switched Edge Legacy to Edge Chromium.
I imagine it was not as compatible and it was less work to simply rebrand Chromium as Edge.
And personally, I preferred the native IE UI over the Chrome-lookalike Edge UI.
I’d still have liked for Microsoft to keep maintaining their own engine, but I can understand why they didn’t.
Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.
They’d have nothing to gain from doing this, NT kernel isn’t the problem with windows.
On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
I just want to be productive, not fly a plane.
"Azure Active Directory" wasn't Active Directory, and who'd have guessed a year ago that "365 Co-pilot" would mean the Office applications in 2026. Yes really.
At one point in time, before AzureAD got renamed to Entra ID (or is it just Entra now?) they had:
Active Directory Domain Services, Azure Active Directory Domain Services, Azure Active Directory. All three different products.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).
Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.
'The Microsoft Office app is now Microsoft 365 Copilot'
It is really sad to see MS kill such a behemoth brand for nothing.
Wow
Only the domain and SEO artifacts remain.
But even the Labrador licking his own balls that someone else mentioned would be better than Microsoft at naming things. I'm surprised they haven't changed Windows to Microsoft Azure Copilot Platform .NET 365 yet.
I mean, c'mon. They are deliberately trying to be confusing.
MacBook Pro (M5)
MacBook Pro (M4 Ultra)
MacBook Pro (M4 Pro)
Mac Pro (M2 Ultra)
Once you remember the general rule that Pro costs/does more than the base model, it’s really not that hard to keep track of.
Every generation the base iPhone becomes a lower and lower tier product.
I bet MS saw this too and the “CoPilot Everything” pivot was their failed effort to maintain vendor lock-in in the age of LLMs. That failed, devalued their product, since they doubled-down in the meantime on enhanced hostility to cross-platform tools (try lately to read LLM markdown on vanilla M365?) now MS will have that reckoning after conceding a 3-year head start to disrupters and, yes, antagonizing core users with uptempo customer-hostile slop.
or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).
They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company.
Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.
"Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it."
As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.
Their shareholders wanted AI.
Their shareholders wanted MSFT stock price to go up.
Like, just because the outcome sucks and the solutions are user-hostile, let’s not assume the decision makers are dummies. I see profit motives as the likely delta between their decisions and our userland expectations.
Let me run the MS LLM department and I could easily explain to the board why we’re about to see a big upsurge Azure, office 365 integrated, and MCP-based solution spending… hint: it’s because the machine god will tell the consultants AND the customer those solutions are what’s SmartGood. We’ll sell ‘em a box that tells ‘em what to buy (lul, subscribe to!), the profitability part kinda writes itself.
Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are.
Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.
And I mentioned PMs but realistically its whatever decision makers that decide these, PM can be a middle manager cog with no real power or somebody adequately high. I know I myself won't affect some hiring of some CTO but somebody here eventually might. Thats a good start.
I am fed up with uncritical celebration of people who make this world a worse place and harm us all. Perfect execution of amoral goal is still purely a shit in negative sphere (this goes straight to worship of mr musk but thats another topic)
See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?
What pure C# inference tooling is out there? I know they have a solid ONNX engine, but not everything runs on ONNX.
I say this as both a Python and .NET developer mind you, but if Microsoft actually built up .NET more seriously to power AI infrastructure, I could see it making a big difference for them. Look at how many game engines use C# as opposed to literally any other programming language. C# could have been a #2 language for AI by now.
Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins.
People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages.
That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevance, while other Microsoft departments double down on Python.
Jokes aside, not really, however people have to accept to be polyglot, there isn't one language to solve all problems.
Regardless of whatever is in Rust, all AI key frameworks are in C++ and Python.
NVidia, Intel, AMD, Khronos aren't going to start publishing tools in .NET, Rust, Zig, or whatever is our liking.
So anything outside those stacks will always be a second class experience in IDE tooling, debugging, and libraries.
My Labrador says a/ he’s neutered c/ dogix user b/ his teams always begin with empathy: people (and retrieves) over outcomes
There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.
But that doesn't matter. It was bought as a toy and propaganda network. It can lose money indefinitely as long as its owner is paid by Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo
... where is this collapse?
FWIW, I don't have a skin in this game - just observing the facts.
Best guess would be he gets ~$10-$20bn, all of the companies collapse, their value driven to possibly sub-billion dollar ranges, and it triggers the Great Depression pt 2, electric boogaloo, and within a year he's "fallen out of a window".
It is very fortunate for Elon that Starshield exists, and that we've failed serving our country to the point that we need Starlink for rural areas.
Where I come from we prefer monkeys throwing darts.
They already made money.
They know what works to make money by convincing CEO VP PM devs. I do hope they jump to the next company (please meta or apple) and do their duties.
Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.
I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.
They also missed the boat on mobile, and I suspect they didn't want to miss the "AI" boat this time around.
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
It actually serves a purpose to them we can say every employee "has AI" so we're an "AI first" company at fancy press events.
Meanwhile nothing actually changed because the free features are even worse than the paid ones.
It's basically greenwashing all over again. AI washing :)
You’ve never worked at MS, have you? PMs aren’t asleep at the wheel. They are doing their job because their performance reviews are tied to adding these top-down goals into the team’s roadmap. That’s the horrible part.
As an OS, Windows died with 10.
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
CEO: Put AI everywhere/
Engineering Staff: There's a lot of places where it doesn't make sense to do this.
CEO: Do it or find somewhere else to work.
The problem of pushback at the lower levels is that it is completely ineffective when the top levels are set on something.
It was complete nonsense. Wound up leaving, partly over it. Nobody wanted to hear the emporor had no clothes and it made more sense to get out before that made my a layoff or URA target.
- having friends is more important than making output, which means that people above certain level just play politics instead of actually managing the company
- managers who miss targets get more people assigned which makes them climb the hierarchy, which means all levels below top level have the incentive to be inefficient
- saying "no" to the ruling party, no matter how stupid the idea is, is the second-easiest way to get replaced. The easiest is to offend the wrong person
- planning periods misaligned with the economic reality
An intelligent person will either be optimized out of the system, or will learn how to game it to their own advantage.
It is easier to let it all crash and burn, and try to leave with less scars as possible than try to fight the system.
You get to lose more for the visibility to fight back than letting it go down in flames.
In a company as large as MS, I'd never really expect a culture of encouraging pushback from below. They'd just never get anything done and the team culture and morale would likely end up in the tank.
It's just that I don't vibe with the sentiment that company culture are a one-way street from management.
Anyway I do see that after a while the people who would have said no would all be gone. So maybe this is not the start of the decline but actually closer to the end of Microslop.
Sure they want to hide their embarrassment at this second, but I'm not hearing any vision for a future where they make a product designed for someone like me. They don't want me anyore and they've made that quite clear through generations of hostile decisions
Given their current fixation on writing windows components in React Native, I suspect they have a talent problem internally. From the outside looking in, it looks like anyone who knew windows (and office) internals really well are gone, and the new talent they bring in can't deal with the legacy so now they don't touch it, and are building on top using web tech.
How so? The forced feeding of AI is what Satya called for.
Jobs was correct when he said that Microsoft has no taste.
It does, imagine how much faster it's going to be in the next model version!
We never, ever, learn from "lessons learned". They are there, just as a generic way, to tell other teams, that there might be some issues.
I deleted "Microsoft" from the quote because this, unfortunately, applies to a lot of companies.
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
They're not even trying anymore.
I am seriously thinking of looking for another role because it is such a HOG.
I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
I can't help but wonder if they're in the process of losing an entire generation of tech enthusiasts to Linux and maybe MacOS. And the rest of the world tends to slowly follow the tech enthusiasts.
My work env was just VS Code + WSL and I realized the most pain points came from using Explorer and trying to admin the machine with the fractured landscape of sys admin tools. For me it became very obvious that windows is only going to get more bloated and less “my” machine going forward, why stay on this platform if I’m already spending most of my day in a Linux environment (that I’m already familiar with).
Much of the way AI has been forced upon the world by MS and the likes makes it very difficult to separate the two. The trend of enshittification leading up to LLMs has also not been a solid basis for trust. So yes, for a lot of people, the underlying technology isn't necessarily an issue, but it's kind of hard to imagine it being presented in a non-problematic way given the above, which I suspect is a big part of why there's a growing sentiment of distaste with anything AI now.
W11 local accounts only with terminal hacks sealed the deal along with valves contributions to linux.
I'm not sure if Control Panel is still available, hidden away somewhere, but I've since moved on to pastures that only seen to get greener when compared with the Microsoft Windows paddock. They're somehow finding new shades of brown on a monthly basis.
Settings was slow, it wasn't any easier than control panel, and if you wanted to do anything that mattered you ended up in control panel apps which were completely jarring UI-wise from the rest of the PC.
Imho, nothing should be allowed to ship in Windows unless it at least covers 100% of previous functionality.
If there are functional gaps, those should require approval at the CEO level.
The Windows team has incinerated a ridiculous amount of goodwill with 80% replacements that leave 20% of previous functionality (often including important workflows for power users) lost.
The issue isn't that Setting was different: it was that it didn't do as much as Control Panel. And that's a fixable issue! Just build the additional widgets / plug-ins.
I hate it. I was looking at how to fix the dark screen that resulted from turning on HDR in Windows 11, which some games need at the OS level for some reason, and Search was never giving me the Exact Keyword you need.
Search is always a guessing game, and you end up Googling the answer, it's so incredibly inefficient.
Does Windows 11 Notepad still choke on loading large files?
But I think formatting, grammar and ai are going too far for notepad, if I want to do something that need those I would use Word.
Copilot excluded, who decided that it was a good idea to have multi tab notepad that remembers unsaved files between executions ?
"We solved that, just go into settings to toggle that behaviour !"
Who decided that notepad had to have a full settings page ?
"Just use the feedback hub" ?
So basically, you removed Wordpad and now regret this decision and are slowly turning notepad into Jeff Raskins' Archy ?
I find it handy here and there. HOWEVER... There is no clear way to get rid of the thing. MS has added tons of features and then burry them in really obtuse ways to get rid of them if you can at all. That is the core of MS's user backlash. It makes people feel like they are not in control of their hardware. When I feed the machine 32 gig of ram and 8 to 12 is already taken up on fresh start something is seriously broken.
The second issue is people feel windows is not keeping up with its competitors (Linux, MacOS). They are throwing features in. When the benchmarks are where they are slowing yielding to their competitors.
The third issues is backwards compat is not as good as it used to be. They made backwards compat one of their key selling points. That is breaking in hundreds of subtle ways that piss people off. If I am going to lose my software to time rot why am I staying with this thing that randomly changes what the start menu looks like every 6 months and I have to figure out again where they put things. Plus now there is this copilot thing chirping all over the place.
CoPilot is not the issue, it is a symptom. It is the total lack of awareness MS has about its user base. It has been this way since windows 8 first launched. I use windows to launch my software and do things. There are 2 other viable OS's out there that do the same thing. If MS had put an advert into the message popup saying 'hey copilot is ready for your machine would you like to turn it on' they would have probably been in a better position. Instead it is on by default and you just get to deal with it. So now feel like 'gee thanks' hey what about these thousands of other issues? How many times are you going to break remote desktop again? How many weird directx 7/8/9 shims do I need to make my game launch this time? Oh an fix the backwards compat tool. It is broken too.
Windows 11 needs a 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on fixing as many bugs as they can. Lower the memory and CPU usage to as low as they can. Fixup the hundreds of backwards compat issues I see all over the net. Just well tested bug fixes.
The way the code assistants like opencode / claude / etc are improving with good models, I could easily see some kind of Copilot-like utility driving the whole OS in a pretty useful way to automate all kinds of tasks, just... not today.
Just like Google shoving the shittiest version of gemini into search results, Microsoft is shoving mostly useless half-baked AI features into Windows. There must be some kind of insane culture of just wanting to ship before it's done and assuming users won't notice it's crap, rather than waiting for a truly good experience.
It’s been ~15 years since I last installed linux (Linux Mint on a netbook that couldn’t run the pre-installed Win7), and am now curious about repurposing a gaming PC for software development.
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
Now it's pure emotional response and acting like rabid animals that lost every single notion but attacking and harming anything they see as a target.
I don’t doubt for a second Ballmer would also be jumping onto the AI hype train if he was still running the show.
Nadella is a marvelous Microsoft CEO for Linux though. Credit where it's due
I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again.
I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners
If MS rehires their QA teams and listen to the people on the ground, I'd imagine the very same devs who put AI in Notepad would be very happy to give us features we actually want.
The end result is a painful, inflexible, and overly opinionated piece of UI that is slowly re-learning lessons learned by it's fore barer and is likely to never be as capable of what it replaced. From beta people wanted to resize and reposition it and that feature is still nowhere to be seen after 5 years (including public preview).
I have little to no confidence that the develpers currently in the Windows org can, collectively, build their way out of this in any time frame that feels reasonable.
Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games.
Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.
However, they regularly run win 3.11 under “dosbox staging”, which is a greatly improved, but poorly named fork of dosbox.
Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.
It can even run diffusion models. I spent a few hundred on a video card for it during the pandemic.
Why should I want to add a TPM to it (assuming it’s even possible)?
Winslop is an open source tool that removes Windows 11 bloatware, disables AI features like Copilot, and restores useful settings: https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop
Microsoft can barely make Windows function when you're using it as intended. I don't expect them to make it work after I messed with their semi-functioning mess.
I had to reinstall Win11 on a newer PC, so I used Tiny11 for a debloated Windows installation, and it is working fine with the licensed Microsoft apps I use (Microsoft Office, MS Project, etc.) and other programs (game stores (Steam, GoG, Epic, etc.), video editing tools, programming tools, etc.
But I don't really like Win11 as I had to do hosts blocking to block ads on it, and everything Win11 does feels a bit more clunky compared to Win10. I even had to use a Start Menu replacer app, as M$ enshittified/nerfed the Start Menu for Win11.
As you rightly pointed out, these debloaters can be unsafe (if they are not open-source, so they are not validated for security issues and bugs; thankfully Winslop is open-source) and can cause Windows to misbehave. But I think such a debloater would be good for a dual OS setup (Linux and Windows).
In 2026, I think I'll have to throw out Windows out the proverbial virtual window, and switch over to Linux on all my home PCs. I am running out of my patience with M$'s enshittification and nasty ads.
What's concerning is that they lack judgment and proper insight into why pushing it in the first place was a bad idea.
If your OS truly is a product, users should not be beta-testers. This isn't an indie kickstarter game.
Forms of it are very powerful and have a lot of uses for sure. But there seems to be an enormous amount of top-down “figure out how to fit AI into our product/processes” for both producers and consumers.
AI tools are here to stay but they'll be scaled back a lot. Plus, there's still so much investments made into it that there's enough free plans or free alternatives (remember DeepSeek?), and you can't compete with free.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
It’s not an AI problem but rather a ram stuff down users throat even when they clearly don’t want it problem.
See broken start menu that does a web search instead showing your apps. See forced online install. See one drive everywhere.
Toning down the AI a bit won’t be enough
Hell, I might love it.
But when they overstep and shovel their crap into MY computer against MY will?
Piss off. I was already using linux in many ways, now it's my daily driver as well.
What would happen to the morale? What would people proudly say “this is what my company built”?
I’m trying to understand how they screwed up the AI thing so much.
There’s so much innovation, creativity possible using AI, especially as an integration in the OS.
> What would people proudly say “this is what my company built”?
Umm, we built the anger among about our best fans.
> There’s so much innovation, creativity possible using AI, especially as an integration in the OS.
No pls, we are already cooked enough.
Place your bets.
"And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that'll be a great day"
Hmmm, the "moonwalk" is a dance too...
* Kiosk Mode via the shell launcher delays logon times from <5s to 30-180s - just by turning it on, even if it doesn’t actually enable kiosk mode!
* Local changes via registry keys don’t “stick” consistently, even when the machine is entirely offline
* Offline activations using hardware keys fail across vendors without anyone knowing why (other than Microsoft, for the cost of a support call)
* Existing Windows 10 powercfg scripts and config files do not work with Win11. Our workaround was manually calling the exact same command twice, back-to-back, to force-apply a change.
* Installing language packs via the command line by any means available (Powershell’s add-windowscapability, DISM’s package installer, lpksetup, etc) do not actually populate the GUI with those packs as an option until we reinstall them from the GUI again.
* Adverts are everywhere, even on IoT LTSC Enterprise
Honestly, Microsoft completely lost the plot as to what an operating system is supposed to do in favor of turning it into an advertising and user surveillance machine masquerading as a useful OS.
I hate it.
I had a fresh install of Windows on a new computer which refused to install updates until I ran a bunch of commands in the "terminal". The whole thing is beyond fixing at this point.
(sarcasm)
Is not only AI bullshit in my notepad.
The excess adds, intrusive online stuff, terriblee performance for basic tasks like the File Explorer or even opening a menu.
Making everything a damn web page...
One clear example is outlook. Talk wathever you want, outlook, is the indistry standart for e-mail. And while not perfect it was very usefull. Then they keep pushing the new interface on everybody throats. The new interface takes like 1 gb of RAM when in use, agaisnt 200mb of the traditional one, while offering less options. Why would anyone who really cares about e-mail use that shit? People who just casually use e-mails dont use Outlook, they use the webmail.
They choose to ignore the users, and push top down changes into them. But the market dont really works this way for most people. Not every tech company needs to be like Apple.
Also, to be honest, I dont trust mozilla anymore than microsoft these days.
Had there been any sort of real competition, then they would have had to care about their users.
At this point I just hope that they don't manage to turn the ship before Linux has gotten a real foothold in the market.
Microsoft have been de-investing in its own companies to put more money into AI. Yes, they have made cuts on highly profitable business to burn money on AI. I hope that they reverse before they fire everyone that was able to build useful software.
Obviously the last part was disappointing. In hindsight, the push was far too aggressive, and too mediocre. We have a lot to learn from this try, about ourselves and about others.
Integration 2.0 will be or needs to be a bit more skewed towards low hanging fruits. I want a copilot for the help menu, and for the 1000 commands not in the toolbar, and a copilot enhancement to the search bar (which came from google!). And a natural language interface to bring up templates, open files, and look for images. Apple could have done this AI enhancement with settings, and added a start button to open apps.
As for "privacy", that is the first scream that comes out from people who have never touched the product. Assurety should have been made that all data would be local. This runs contrary to the "data is the new oil" direction, but it would have been a good way to entice the skeptics and eventually swallow them whole to give up their privacy (insert evil laugh here).
Windows 10 was the turning point on this. They charge you for the software, and charge you again by stealing your data.
They even used to have a whitepaper explaining how any MS employee can remotely pull any file from any windows machine with managerial approval.
The taskbar, start menu, file explorer, desktop and system settings are areas that should be boring, consistent and just work. That hasn't been close to the case since Windows 7.. Windows 8 was the start of the decline and that was over 13 years ago. While I like some of the things that have come to Windows since then, there's probably twice as much to dislike. Hire/promote/raise someone to act as a UX czar for Windows all around... design a "final" UI/UX target that covers existing features (starting with a checklist of everything that currently can be configured everywhere)... and finish that design.
Stop shifting gears and enshitifying the overall experience to wring every cent of "value" out of every user out there. Get a full release cycle or two with no new features... just solid bug fixes and a more consistent UI/UX. I know there's kernel features for new GPUs, improved storage and CPU interactions and scheduling... but the UI/UX on top of the kernel is a mess and it shows too well.
Get your staff aligned on a common UX theme... I don't care if it's back to Fluent or something closer to where Win11 is, but at least get it consistent above all else. It's a mess. Fire half the managers... stop giving out bonuses based on new features in windows, and give bonuses on sections of config/settings that are marked as complete without falling back to legacy UI from the late 90's. Not that the 90's setup was that bad compared to the hybrid bastard we have today.
They are doing dumb shit for about 5 years now, and killing MS Office, a brand thats market leader for more than 30 years prooves that anybody who had conservative opinion on how software should be built have already abandoned the ship or was kicked out of it.
Now is being run by "visionary" marketing people, and the only way left is down.
Windows 10 released with the ability for the user to not consent to updates REMOVED
the direction of travel from that point on was clear
consent was no longer necessary
the OS is purpose is no longer to serve the owner of the computer, it is there to serve Microslop's whims
and that was the point I went full linux everywhere
I’m not sure why I need to know the history of screenshots that is Recall. Maybe this was simply the best they could do?
That said, Windows 11 is such an AI-fueled privacy dumpster fire that it’s getting replaced by Linux on my gaming PC this month. Then I’m only stuck on Windows for work, and even then I can still write code on Mac or Linux.
The problem is that the engineers and coders that ran microsoft are no longer doing so. Their leadership is too disconnected.
It's the same recipe of enshittification you see all over, marketing, sales take over along with consultants and MBA's. Except, I think in Microsoft's case there are still enough people who know about the technology to be dangerous, they're not entirely clueless, they just know enough (like about AI in this case) to be dangerous.
Regardless of the sentiment on HN and elsewhere though, even excluding enterprise usage, I doubt windows' marketshare will suffer more than 10% YoY.
Anyway, I re encrypted my Windows install a few days ago. Linux is still an adventure the moment you need to do anything difficult.
NOw that the hype is naturally going down, and people are encountering limitations in what modern AI can do, and having more realistic expectations, Microsoft hype train stoped in middle of the hill climb.
They pretty much exchanged gradual increases in revenue for a quick but ultimally short term profit.
And the main thing that needs to change for it to work is, that AI agents need to run locally, with your own agent without needing cloud processing. Maybe when we get into this point, is when it will make sense, from a pratical and private way.
Now what could work is making a traditional OS, but exposing ways of its power users maketheir own IA agents with the OS data, and this way choose what they want to share wth the cloud.
This story has already dropped three quarters of the way down the front page and has a grand total of 72 points. Topics that people really give a damn about on this site often garner 1000 - 2000 points and stay on the front page for 36 hours or more, but nobody cares about this.
They’ve already lost the HN audience and there’s certainly an element of where we go everybody else eventually follows, because I suspect we skew influential in the companies we work for.
Now I'm curious: will the executives, paid millions because they are visionaries well ahead mere mortals like us, be fired for this pathetically stupid strategic push?
Which makes me believe that their "walk back" is just to change the packaging of the same old "slop" being shoved down their customers throats.
Can they go back and restart from Windows 7?
2. Realize that Co-pilot is bad and needs to improve up to Microsoft's highest gold standards of trustworthiness.
3. Ditch Co-pilot branding inside the OS.
4. Make AI features private and offline by default unless the local hardware cannot run the specialized tiny model for that task, at which point it goes online for it. It might be slower, but if it does the thing, it's ok.
5. Allow companies and power users to provide their own local models that hook into these tasks, so they can host AI servers within the company and these AI tasks never reach outside of the company.
6. Make AI features more specific, targeted and useful instead of simply integrating it into the various functions and throwing it at users like "here, you figure out what to do with this thing, we don't know."
7. Don't expect people to want to chat with it in every app, just find a task that you know it succeeds at and expose that task rather than letting users figure out what it sucks at.
8. Don't make the AI integration APIs a case of increased surface area privacy and security risk that 3rd party system apps can hook into, to mass extract information out of every app on your system easily. Put limitations on it.
9. Add features to specify where AI can go and cannot go, just like the microphone. Folders, apps, online services. Even if it does use Co-pilot online, let users sculpt it.
10. Make it explicit and obvious when AI features are operating offline or online. If users have decades of understanding that Notepad is a private offline app, preserve that expectation as much as possible. Just because Outlook and OneNote are very online-oriented apps, it doesn't mean they want their local experience to be online in every way. If you force AI to go over all my cloud files, notes and e-mail without my permission, that is sociopathic behavior and I will ditch you, Microsoft.
Some day Co-pilot will probably be good. That isn't today. It's probably not this year or next year, but eventually. Until then, it needs to stay in a lane with freshly painted lines surrounded with sand barrels in case it wrecks.
It's not that I'm entirely opposed to some Microsoft AI feature existing in Windows, but manufacturing a user assumption that it is everywhere all the time is bad not just for Windows, but for society as a whole.
We've already seen how political and activist the public sphere became over the last decade, which reduces trust in the people who make software and services too. What do we do when Microsoft gets ideologically taken over and abuses its information access to people for political ends?
Show you can be trusted. When I put a little food bowl down for you, don't scratch me and we'll go from there.