The largest Microsoft subscription account is the United States federal government. Windows/office/whatever else for every federal employee pays the company enough to continue development and offer it to the masses. I’m certain that the ability to collect habitual data on users is valuable to both Microsoft and the powers that be, for advertising and criminal investigation.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
Same thing happened to me last year: some files on OneDrive where deleted. It was random txt files that I use to log ma progress on projects.
I moved everything out of OneDrive and I backup on hard drives.
That is a shame because OneDrive was a very good product.
I’m not 100% sure if this will solve the problem, but I recall that if you open the explorer folder viewer and right-click on the pinned shortcuts on the left (Desktop, Documents, etc.), then in properties > location you can move the folder target.
Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I fully believe highly skilled people can get a great benefit from LLM tools; probably not 10x; but enough that its noticeable.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
exactly my thoughts as well - if LLM really were massive productive booms - then we would see the number of bugs in major software platforms going down - we would see more features - but neither is happening
I think it's naive to believe AI is used primarily for productivity boost. It's used mainly for cost reduction and to increase profits, even if quality and productivity take a hit in the process.
(1) a couple of years ago, LLMs for coding sucked pretty bad.
(2) LLMs are a force multiplier. If you start with a negative number, then your coefficient makes things worse.
(3) Microsoft has never been a place of quality. It's not organized for that, it doesn't have that as its philosophy, and so you should never be surprised that it doesn't deliver that.
The argument I usually hear is that you only truly get the 10x improvements with <new-model> (right now, Opus 4.5), so they've only had a few months, not years. In a few months, it'll turn out that <new-model> wasn't actually capable of that, but <new-new-model> is, and as that's not been out long its unfair to judge so early. And so the cycle begins anew
Everyone should read "The Bear Case for AI" thread:
"The bear case for AI is that bringing 10x or 100x or 1000x more intelligence to America will not change anything because U.S. institutions are already designed to ignore or waste intelligence and have no idea what to do with any more of it."
Its a misunderstanding of costs. Its the same misunderstanding of thermodynamics applied to dieting. Inputs do not equal outputs, or even scaled outputs. In any dynamic system there are costs to storage and costs to processing. This is how you can increase your calorie intake and still rapidly lose weight, yes, I have lost 30 pounds that way.
In the case of LLMs the only way LLM use becomes profitable is if this condition are achieved:
If you want to see a 10x savings then multiply the cost of manual output by 10. While LLM profit is achievable in some scenarios a t0x improvement in most scenarios is highly improbable.
People are pointing their fingers at QA, and while that is a big part of it I think the bigger issue is, like you said, them not really caring about some of their core products. Windows 11 seems to exist purely so that they can earn passive ad revenue while vacuuming up user data, Office 365 is now just a pile of mature applications that are slowly getting worse and new applications that are too unfinished to be actively useful.
I would like to point out that not even a week ago Satya Nadella stated that someone should finally do something really useful with AI because if no one does then they'll lose the social permission to burn all the energy on training and running the models: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that...
Mr. Nadella, why not lead by example and make Windows the most amazing operating system ever created with the help of Copilot? What's the holdup?
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to
no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.
Open gpedit.msc, configure policies to disable automatic updates. At this point Windows is a virus that is useful for only playing computer games and should be avoided for any other purpose.
Here's a similar discussion[0], and here's my experience[1]:
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
I seriously wonder if everyone in the Windows development team(s) are just vibe-coding everything now. I feel like all of these are rookie mistakes from the POV of working on an operating system. This is also the consequence of eliminating all QA and testing and forcing your users to do that for you. Admittedly there are some things that are hard to test (or impossible to) in an automated way, but that's what the old Windows hardware lab test machines were for.
That's terrifying, as I currently have no boot stick. Does someone know a reliable free system backup tool for windows, in simplicity comparable to Timeshift on Linux Mint, which I can start from an USB Medium to restore a broken system? (I need to able to exclude some folders, like Steam games)
Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
74 comments
[ 9.2 ms ] story [ 95.4 ms ] thread*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
I think I might know...
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
wouldn't a for-profit company just balance the workforce for the productivity gained to increase overall profit?
some person is 10x 'more productive' (whatever that means) , let's cut 9 jobs.
Although to your grander point, employment during the LLM-embrace period seems fairly stable.[0]
[0]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/msft/employees/
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
Also: do you have a reference for “a couple years ago Microsoft [made] LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production”?
I know they started investing, mentioning future benefits, but don’t remember them saying their Windows development team (heavily) relying on it.
so yeah we're being sold a bag of air
(2) LLMs are a force multiplier. If you start with a negative number, then your coefficient makes things worse.
(3) Microsoft has never been a place of quality. It's not organized for that, it doesn't have that as its philosophy, and so you should never be surprised that it doesn't deliver that.
"The bear case for AI is that bringing 10x or 100x or 1000x more intelligence to America will not change anything because U.S. institutions are already designed to ignore or waste intelligence and have no idea what to do with any more of it."
https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/2014255931215716545
In the case of LLMs the only way LLM use becomes profitable is if this condition are achieved:
If you want to see a 10x savings then multiply the cost of manual output by 10. While LLM profit is achievable in some scenarios a t0x improvement in most scenarios is highly improbable.Mr. Nadella, why not lead by example and make Windows the most amazing operating system ever created with the help of Copilot? What's the holdup?
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
Gets?
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761870
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?