Why is it that MS only gets every second version of Windows right?
Vista, 8 and 11 were all a step back for usability and stability, while 7 and 10 were solid with a decent user interface.
Perhaps they just get bored with something that’s working well, and start tinkering (“Let’s move the WLAN control 2 layers removed from the system tray and also make”, “The Explorer context menu has too much stuff for power users”).
Vista was Longhorn redone with COM instead of .NET, after the whole internal drama from pro C++ folks, after Sinofsky took over.
Window 8 was .NET redone by the same folks, as the original idea from Ext-VOS, COM getting IInspectable, in addition to IUnknown, while Type Libraries replaced by .NET metadata.
Windows 10 was the reunification of WinRT programming models across devices.
There were massive changes in Vista, new audio stack, new default permissions, new USB stack, new networking stack, new graphics stack, which caused tons of compatibility problems.
I may be wrong in some of the specifics, but the truth still is that every other version is half-baked OS changes with the main selling point to consumers being the upgraded GUI changes, while the actual working OS comes as the next version.
While yes they did introduce GUI changes they also introduced a lot more fundamental changes. Typically the second release is seen as better because it's usually a refined version or at least the changes had more time to perculate.
For example Vista introduced many things that changed the fundamental nature of Windows, UAC (split tokens, integrity levels, etc), new audio stack, overhaul of IPv6, new display driver model. A lot of these new driver changes and the extra hardware requirements caused a lot of issues whereas when 7 came out the requirements were no longer as burdomsome and manufacturers had more time to release better drivers.
Windows 8 introduced UWP silos, new startup process, Hyper-V as a client. 8.1 and 10 were definitely more iterations on the GUI and other features to make it a bit more palatable.
I liked 8 more than 10. The wonky interface was preferable to the ridiculous, unavoidable Windows Update regime and telemetry. I halfway believe that they make every other release bad on purpose, in order to make the poison pill of the next one easier to swallow (post Vista->7, when they realized that this was a viable strategy).
Windows 10 is still a steaming pile of shit. Just because the start menu eventually started to bring all of you applications and they made 11 even less performant and more intrusive it does not make 10 any "good".
Or just roll it back to Windows 10, stick to that promise that it was the final version, and cut out all this nonsense. Most folks don’t wanna swap out their hardware just to get Windows 11, deal with those ads, or the super snoopy AI that digs through their data. And nobody's sitting around hoping Microsoft's gonna drop something even sketchier.
I wish they would stick to one version and just stack up additional features and fix existing UI crap. It feels like the only reason to keep adding major versions is to half-ass some major UI rework before giving up because their new UI doesn’t have feature parity with the old one. Feels like we’ll have three control panels soon enough at this rate.
> stick to that promise that it was the final version
That was never an official promise. It was one developer advocate making an off-hand comment in a breakout session which had a topic of designing Live Tiles.
It’s clear that Microsoft’s iterations on Windows aren’t working, and their management of windows needs to be reworked. At a certain point the constant “stop improving existing version and start the next one” has to be seen as silly by upper management, right? Is there any business benefit to constantly updating major Windows versions that I’m not seeing?
Not too many people "buy" a retail copy of Windows; you either pay for it as part of your computer, or it's included as part of an enterprise plan. They'd get all that revenue without pushing a new major version.
They're stuck trying to figure out how to monetize a product that people don't want a subscription for. Their only choice is to keep releasing new versions with different features (or sneak in advertising) and hope people keep buying in. Unfortunately, people haven't really wanted a new version of Windows since it switched to the NT kernel. So it seems like every new version is a lose lose scenario.
> Is there any business benefit to constantly updating major Windows versions that I’m not seeing?
Well sure! Remember that whole kerfuffle over Windows 11 requiring TPM? A new major version means new hardware requirements and new hardware requirements mean new vendor obligations. It's their silver-bullet solution for whenever hardware vendors get uppity.
Actually the source I linked lays it out pretty clearly:
> That (in)famous statement was actually spoken by Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist at Microsoft, whose job is to get developers excited about developing for Microsoft Store, at the 2015 Microsoft Ignite. Nevertheless, the technology media blew it up, and soon everyone was accepting it as gospel. But it never was.
But still, I just want stability. Also the lack of support for older hardware - I just built a PC four years ago and am being told its not good enough for 11? No thanks.
> There’s also the fact that the OS has been forcing ads as "recommendations" into the Start menu and has even begun testing promotional recommendation pages that take up your whole screen, urging users to make Edge the default browser and installing or enabling other services. The worst part is that there’s no way to fully opt out of these ads, which accomplish nothing but clog up the UI with constant notifications.
If Microsoft wanted to drop that, they could do so instantly. But apparently MS values the ad revenue more than they do the trust in their system, and going to Windows 12 won't magically change MS's mind.
Windows 11 feels like the kind of OS you would get if it were free (ad supported). Ironically, the actually free OSes are much less cluttered and much more stable.
Wait, they still expect people to pay for Windows? I thought the whole play now was giving that away as a loss leader for the services that actually make money.
Granted, I haven't paid attention to Windows since about 2020, when a brief flirtation with an OEM copy of Windows 10 turned me off the platform permanently. So maybe this is just me being out of touch - although, if they are still charging money for it, maybe not as out of touch as Microsoft's product leadership.
it's not just this tiny place though; their desire to force "stuff" everywhere - by default - widgets on the lock screen, things on the taskbar and system tray, useless apps you cannot uninstall, repeated nagging to change default apps for specific documents to the lame MS ones (Q: has anyone ever done this after changing it to their desired application?), having to opt-out and try and turn off things that add no value for the user... I've used windows my entire professional life and when my current win10 system (which easily runs triple-A games and deep development) is EOL'd because it "can't run windows 11" I think I hold my nose and switch to a Mac.
Just in case: some systems "can't run windows 11" because the TPM module is disabled in the bios. If that is the problem, enabling it allows the upgrade. You might need to update the bios first. If you already knew this, sorry, but I thought I would mention it.
I haven't seen any ads on Windows 11 (besides constant nagging about switching to Edge..). It seems pretty easy to disable all of that crack in regedit, of course that's not ideal but not really a huge deal for all "power" users.
I recently set up my grandmother with a new computer running windows 11. She has gotten used to checking her mail using the Mail app on Windows10; Windows 11 forces you into what seems like a "lite" outlook app.
It's normally wouldn't be a problem, except their new outlook Mail app has ads that look like emails. The very first "email" Is actually an ad built into the default mail client.
I had to explain to my grandmother that she has to always just ignore the first email since it will always be an ad.
> I kinda recall a big marketing campaign saying just that
You recall a bunch of publications saying that, but not an official statement from Microsoft. It was all conjecture based on one comment one person made during one breakout session at one developer conference.
It was Jerry Nixon, speaking at a Microsoft conference on behalf of MSFT as a Microsoft employee, not on person opinion. He said that Windows 10 was the last numbered version of windows directly.
Gartner did some faff around it and editoralised that into it being the last version of windows. Subtle difference.
Jerry Nixon is one person, correct? Or is Jerry Nixon multiple people and also the official spokesperson for Windows? What other conferences did he speak at making that statement? What other official correspondence did Microsoft make stating it was the last version of Windows?
What part of my comment falls under the "no"? It was one guy (a Microsoft employee) stating one time at one conference speaking to a completely unrelated topic (Live Tiles). You think Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist, was the kind of person authorized to make such a statement of "Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows" while giving a presentation on Live Tiles?
If a developer evangelist was giving a talk about bringing Clippy back to Word and how you can add your own prompts and they made the statement of "we're discontinuing Xbox", would you take that as an official statement of Microsoft's intentions?
Yes. In a single comment that wasn't followed up with more explanation going on a tangent about how the Live Tile APIs will probably be around for a long time so go ahead and develop on them. He wasn't the kind of employee to speak as to such massive trends and make official statements of the future development of Windows overall. Everyone taking this as some statement of absolute fact just ran with that without even wondering what that meant or if the one employee might have been misinformed.
There's 300,000 employees at Microsoft. You think they're all on the same page of everything all the time? This employee wasn't there to speak about the future of Windows, just to showcase how to use the new functionality of Live Tiles. It wasn't some big meeting about the future of Windows by any measure.
There's a reason why often we hear a disclaimer "views are my own, not employer's".
A statement by an official employee has been made, it was widely publicized and never corrected. The onus to correct a false statement by an employee is on the company. With the amount of publicity, Microsoft definitely knew about this false advertisement, but did not want to correct it, because it was in Microsoft's interest for public to believe it was the official truth.
It was an offhand comment from some dev that was seen as some as a promise. MS certainly tried to do a rolling update model but shifted a few times in the frequency to finally releasing Windows 11.
> Windows 11 plummeted to a 25.69% market share after it reached an all-time high of 28.16% back in February 2024. Meanwhile, Windows 10 has risen to over 70% market share during the same period
1980's: we all wanted personal computers
1990's: we all wanted the Internet
2000's: we all wanted social networks
2010's: we all wanted mobile devices
2020's: we just want to get rid of shitty search and AI surveillance
Best version from my experience. Local accounts, minimal telemetry for years, run your updates on your schedule instead of Microsoft's. A computer that was actually yours and not a data pipe.
When Win10 support winds down, I am unsure if I will even bother to continue to use it.
MS has shit the bag so to speak with every version since Windows 7.
This is exactly how I feel, so fatigued from fighting the Microsoft BS of "making windows like it was before the last update". If you're going to make me buy new hardware to go to 11 I'll have to seriously consider buying a Mac
Windows 10 is the maximum intrusion people are willing to take. That's all there is. If Microsoft isn't going to stop this, I wonder where we end up. As this is an OS that billions of people rely on.
I can already see a lot of people using outdated versions w/o support just to avoid espionage hell.
> Windows 10 is the maximum intrusion people are willing to take.
Statistically, 100% of people are willing to take exactly what they get when they buy a new computer. With the same precision of rounding, 0% of people are going to dig into settings to see if they can turn off something that they find annoying- usually because they're afraid of breaking something.
People literally buy smart TVs that play ads when they aren't even watching anything (or it's been paused for a few minutes).
A lot of stuff cannot be turned off in the home editions and even some stuff cannot be disabled in the professional or enterprise editions. Microsoft is adding more and more espionage to its OS knowing all to well that whole countries cannot just switch easily away from it.
I hope that this triggers what is needed for people and companies to move over to open source software like FreeBSD.
The level of espionage has been dialed up in many products like TVs, phones, Windows and so on over time. So more and more people are becoming aware and realize they don't want to be spied on. So it's becoming more and more an issue of public interest.
So at least one commenter on HN underestimates how important this has already and will become in the future for normal users.
I've heard nothing but gripes about Win 11 from distinctly normal users. Like, the kind of user that calls me panicking because they can't find a file, because they got the Explorer search and directory bars confused and typed a search term into the wrong one. It's the users that are least able to disable all this shit who are understandably most upset.
The other day my decidedly non-technical accountant was complaining about how (to use his word) “gross” copilot felt with regard to recall tracking everything you do.
I was immediately reminded of the story of Joe Kennedy and the Shoeshine boy:
> As the story goes, Joseph was walking around when he decided to sit down for a shoeshine. While polishing his shoes, the young worker gave Joseph some of his favorite stock picks. When Joseph heard the shoeshine boy giving out stock tips, he figured the party was about to end, and it was time to get out of the market.
Windows has always gotten a healthy dose of derision from the tech community, but now it’s starting to come from people who have never had any reason to care about computers before, beyond the convenience they offer. Now that they do, I am not sure that it’s good for Windows.
Ideally Microsoft should just stop forcing bullshit and keep doing Windows the classic way. The value of Windows is in what it is, not in what it "can become".
Well, in case they want something new they should probably build something new rather than try "sitting on both chairs" (the rich valuable legacy and destructively new modern vision) with one product. But we know they will probably fail if they try because nobody really needs anything new from them.
Today's Windows 12 is tomorrow's Windows 11. Even if the teams change, the environment that produced the current team will remain -- it was game over the moment Windows OS fell from money maker to cost-center.
With that being said, what kind of change would "save" Windows? From an organizational perspective, a spin-off would be most effective... albeit the least likely. If we take that off the table, the next best thing would be to retool the product so that it scales better for such an unwieldy organization. I'm talking a new kernel that's compact and totally modular... but good luck dealing with that can of worms. It all circles back to Microsoft as a corporate entity -- what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander.
*off topic
Some parts of the window are absolutely well done and excellently polished and implemented - and there are some killer features and applications which makes it an amazing platform.
however - I don't know how much longer I can balance my privacy against this functionality, and it is a struggle in the workplace as well, where management seems to appreciate the functionality to restrict, constrain and monitor their users.
A big reason that nobody is switching to Windows 11 is because Microsoft actively makes it impossible for most consumers to do so. They're trying to force you to buy new hardware by obsoleting the vast, vast majority of Windows 10 machines - even though those machines are completely capable of running Windows 11!
If they simply allowed people on older devices to install Windows 11, those usage numbers would double or triple basically overnight. I don't think most non-HN people care about spying, but they also don't care enough about having the latest version of Windows to buy a whole new computer. I can't imagine why Microsoft thought they would.
The big question is what happens when Windows 10 support ends, about a year and a half from now. Microsoft will basically be creating one of the biggest security disasters of all time by no longer providing updates for Windows 10 to keep it secure. It's hard to believe they'll do that, but all signs point to it. Support ending is not going to convince people to start throwing out perfectly functional computers.
Microsoft is doing about what Apple does except more as a one time thing. 7th Gen Intel chips launched in early 2016. These machines will lose support for Windows 10 in October 2025. Most Macs are supported about 5 years for full OS updates and about 2 more years of security updates though this all varies a bit OS to OS version.
As an example, when macOS 12 (Monterey) reaches end of life in a few months, MacBook Pro pre-2017, MacBook Air pre-2018, iMac pre-2017, and Mac Mini pre-2018 will all be unsupported and no longer receive security updates.
They should really buy Ubuntu and shut down Windows entirely. Then release a compat layer for Windows software and sell the enterprise add-ons on top. Linux won.
Windows 11 and WSL2 is pretty much the best development environment experience around right now in my books.
Being in the Windows ecosystem lets me benefit from that crazy backwards compat and support for mainstream software, windows-rs lets me customize a batteries-included DE[1] without having to touch JS, and on the WSL2 side of things I can run NixOS for all of my regular development needs.
It's very sad and frustrating to see Microsoft, despite all of this, trying to make the operating system as un-useable as possible in all the ways mentioned in this article and in other comments.
If you un-fuck Win 11 (shout out to O&O ShutUp10++ which should be mandatory for any user), PowerToys and WSL it's _probably_ the best dev environment you can get. Even so, the trajectory is not great. I wonder where the point of resistance will be for the normal user, but then again probably it doesn't matter. Normal users won't go to Linux. It's either Mac or Windows.
As a Dev (and company owner) I would pay for a stripped out version of Windows Pro that contains only the stuff I need for dev and nothing else. No AI crap, no spyware and forced updates crap etc.
It’s funny peering into the windows cosmos after leaving it when things started to get bad. To me it seems like a bunch of tech people disillusioned with their OS grasping at straws hoping Microsoft rights the course knowing full well it will never happen, RIP Windows I for one am glad you are dead.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadVista, 8 and 11 were all a step back for usability and stability, while 7 and 10 were solid with a decent user interface.
Perhaps they just get bored with something that’s working well, and start tinkering (“Let’s move the WLAN control 2 layers removed from the system tray and also make”, “The Explorer context menu has too much stuff for power users”).
Vista was essentially XP with the GUI for Windows 7, Windows 8 was essentially the Windows 10 GUI with the Windows 7 OS, etc.
11 is just 10 with broken GUI updates, 12 will be the finalized version of the 11 GUI with the actual underlying OS updated as well.
Window 8 was .NET redone by the same folks, as the original idea from Ext-VOS, COM getting IInspectable, in addition to IUnknown, while Type Libraries replaced by .NET metadata.
Windows 10 was the reunification of WinRT programming models across devices.
There were massive changes in Vista, new audio stack, new default permissions, new USB stack, new networking stack, new graphics stack, which caused tons of compatibility problems.
Source: I was there
For example Vista introduced many things that changed the fundamental nature of Windows, UAC (split tokens, integrity levels, etc), new audio stack, overhaul of IPv6, new display driver model. A lot of these new driver changes and the extra hardware requirements caused a lot of issues whereas when 7 came out the requirements were no longer as burdomsome and manufacturers had more time to release better drivers.
Windows 8 introduced UWP silos, new startup process, Hyper-V as a client. 8.1 and 10 were definitely more iterations on the GUI and other features to make it a bit more palatable.
Right ? It is actually more like "less wrong".
That was never an official promise. It was one developer advocate making an off-hand comment in a breakout session which had a topic of designing Live Tiles.
Ahh, but does that mean benefit to corporate entity, or does it mean benefits to managers/executives that are seeking promotions/compensation? :p
Uhm, yes, they are making people pay for a new copy?
Well sure! Remember that whole kerfuffle over Windows 11 requiring TPM? A new major version means new hardware requirements and new hardware requirements mean new vendor obligations. It's their silver-bullet solution for whenever hardware vendors get uppity.
Actually the source I linked lays it out pretty clearly:
> That (in)famous statement was actually spoken by Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist at Microsoft, whose job is to get developers excited about developing for Microsoft Store, at the 2015 Microsoft Ignite. Nevertheless, the technology media blew it up, and soon everyone was accepting it as gospel. But it never was.
But still, I just want stability. Also the lack of support for older hardware - I just built a PC four years ago and am being told its not good enough for 11? No thanks.
"How Windows 10X runs UWP and Win32 apps"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrmrIlgbIc
> There’s also the fact that the OS has been forcing ads as "recommendations" into the Start menu and has even begun testing promotional recommendation pages that take up your whole screen, urging users to make Edge the default browser and installing or enabling other services. The worst part is that there’s no way to fully opt out of these ads, which accomplish nothing but clog up the UI with constant notifications.
If Microsoft wanted to drop that, they could do so instantly. But apparently MS values the ad revenue more than they do the trust in their system, and going to Windows 12 won't magically change MS's mind.
Granted, I haven't paid attention to Windows since about 2020, when a brief flirtation with an OEM copy of Windows 10 turned me off the platform permanently. So maybe this is just me being out of touch - although, if they are still charging money for it, maybe not as out of touch as Microsoft's product leadership.
So you constantly see one ad, instead?
They could go to drawing a more distinct and reachable line with the Home users suffering more while the rest has to pay more initially.
Home users feeding the machine while others get more privacy.
And so on.
It's normally wouldn't be a problem, except their new outlook Mail app has ads that look like emails. The very first "email" Is actually an ad built into the default mail client.
I had to explain to my grandmother that she has to always just ignore the first email since it will always be an ad.
You recall a bunch of publications saying that, but not an official statement from Microsoft. It was all conjecture based on one comment one person made during one breakout session at one developer conference.
It was Jerry Nixon, speaking at a Microsoft conference on behalf of MSFT as a Microsoft employee, not on person opinion. He said that Windows 10 was the last numbered version of windows directly.
Gartner did some faff around it and editoralised that into it being the last version of windows. Subtle difference.
What part of my comment falls under the "no"? It was one guy (a Microsoft employee) stating one time at one conference speaking to a completely unrelated topic (Live Tiles). You think Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist, was the kind of person authorized to make such a statement of "Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows" while giving a presentation on Live Tiles?
If a developer evangelist was giving a talk about bringing Clippy back to Word and how you can add your own prompts and they made the statement of "we're discontinuing Xbox", would you take that as an official statement of Microsoft's intentions?
So it was a Microsoft employee speaking in a conference being quoted by the press?
There's 300,000 employees at Microsoft. You think they're all on the same page of everything all the time? This employee wasn't there to speak about the future of Windows, just to showcase how to use the new functionality of Live Tiles. It wasn't some big meeting about the future of Windows by any measure.
A statement by an official employee has been made, it was widely publicized and never corrected. The onus to correct a false statement by an employee is on the company. With the amount of publicity, Microsoft definitely knew about this false advertisement, but did not want to correct it, because it was in Microsoft's interest for public to believe it was the official truth.
> Please verify that you are NoMoreNicksLeft by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
I think it must've updated over the long weekend.
1980's: we all wanted personal computers
1990's: we all wanted the Internet
2000's: we all wanted social networks
2010's: we all wanted mobile devices
2020's: we just want to get rid of shitty search and AI surveillance
1984-5: Big corpos, banks and so badly needs IBM PC's for everything. Every big serious office gets computerized.
1993-4: We want PCs for everyone -> Windows 95 and the Multimedia PCs with MSOffice, CD Players and so.
2003-4: Internet for everyone -> Flat rate broadband and P2P plus IM changues everything.
2013-4: Social media for everyone -> Everyone got its smartphone.
Make Windows Seven Again.
I can already see a lot of people using outdated versions w/o support just to avoid espionage hell.
Statistically, 100% of people are willing to take exactly what they get when they buy a new computer. With the same precision of rounding, 0% of people are going to dig into settings to see if they can turn off something that they find annoying- usually because they're afraid of breaking something.
People literally buy smart TVs that play ads when they aren't even watching anything (or it's been paused for a few minutes).
I hope that this triggers what is needed for people and companies to move over to open source software like FreeBSD.
HN commenters have a habbit of massively overestimating how important this is to normal users.
So at least one commenter on HN underestimates how important this has already and will become in the future for normal users.
I was immediately reminded of the story of Joe Kennedy and the Shoeshine boy:
https://www.pitzlfinancial.com/blog/ode-shoeshine-boy
> As the story goes, Joseph was walking around when he decided to sit down for a shoeshine. While polishing his shoes, the young worker gave Joseph some of his favorite stock picks. When Joseph heard the shoeshine boy giving out stock tips, he figured the party was about to end, and it was time to get out of the market.
Windows has always gotten a healthy dose of derision from the tech community, but now it’s starting to come from people who have never had any reason to care about computers before, beyond the convenience they offer. Now that they do, I am not sure that it’s good for Windows.
With that being said, what kind of change would "save" Windows? From an organizational perspective, a spin-off would be most effective... albeit the least likely. If we take that off the table, the next best thing would be to retool the product so that it scales better for such an unwieldy organization. I'm talking a new kernel that's compact and totally modular... but good luck dealing with that can of worms. It all circles back to Microsoft as a corporate entity -- what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander.
W12 = Wine + your favorite distribution.
(Yeah, yeah, like wayland, it's never going to happen but I can dream, can't I)
And it isn't only Windows, notice the whole drama regarding XBox hardware.
however - I don't know how much longer I can balance my privacy against this functionality, and it is a struggle in the workplace as well, where management seems to appreciate the functionality to restrict, constrain and monitor their users.
If they simply allowed people on older devices to install Windows 11, those usage numbers would double or triple basically overnight. I don't think most non-HN people care about spying, but they also don't care enough about having the latest version of Windows to buy a whole new computer. I can't imagine why Microsoft thought they would.
The big question is what happens when Windows 10 support ends, about a year and a half from now. Microsoft will basically be creating one of the biggest security disasters of all time by no longer providing updates for Windows 10 to keep it secure. It's hard to believe they'll do that, but all signs point to it. Support ending is not going to convince people to start throwing out perfectly functional computers.
As an example, when macOS 12 (Monterey) reaches end of life in a few months, MacBook Pro pre-2017, MacBook Air pre-2018, iMac pre-2017, and Mac Mini pre-2018 will all be unsupported and no longer receive security updates.
Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup
Name: AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1
Microsoft should accept that it's time to give up on Windows
Being in the Windows ecosystem lets me benefit from that crazy backwards compat and support for mainstream software, windows-rs lets me customize a batteries-included DE[1] without having to touch JS, and on the WSL2 side of things I can run NixOS for all of my regular development needs.
It's very sad and frustrating to see Microsoft, despite all of this, trying to make the operating system as un-useable as possible in all the ways mentioned in this article and in other comments.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLz3eqQDufw
Personally, I think that's one of the several big reasons to avoid Win 11.
As a Dev (and company owner) I would pay for a stripped out version of Windows Pro that contains only the stuff I need for dev and nothing else. No AI crap, no spyware and forced updates crap etc.