> It appears this moment of pushback has resonated with internal teams: According to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, the company is now reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans changes to streamline or even remove certain AI features where they don’t make sense.
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.
The real issue was never AI in Windows
It was AI with no clear user benefit. A Copilot button in Notepad doesn't solve a problem anyone has
Good to see them pulling back, but the test will be whether the features they keep actually earn their place in the workflow instead of just being there because someone had a KPI to hit
This is absurd, the fact that Windows has 70% if global desktop operating system market share makes them their most important moat, why are they deliberately taking actions and steps to make it worse?
They added ads, forced updates, mandatory Microsoft account activation, so much unwanted AI slop... Think about it, if it was another more competitive company, they would be charging for the AI service and the onboarding experience would be totally different. It seems like the management is totally disconnected from their product.
Good, maybe Microsoft will start investing to solve real problems and develop better products.
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.
This entire thing seems very iffy. Not much in the way of concrete info, a lot of speculation, and I seriously doubt that MS will suddenly switch directions. It's just being modified/refactored into smaller suppositories over time rather than the large infrequent ones they seem to have used.
Trying to bake AI into the OS was so dumb. Make the OS super agent friendly, surface as much data as possible in agent accessible way, and perhaps create a journalling config management system so agent actions can be rolled back. Then sit back and let people build cool shit on your base and let people market your product for you.
I will believe it when I see it. I have been feeling really helpless and hopeless recently about Windows. So hopefully this news turns into something real.
I'll believe it when I see it. Windows many problems are the results of five years of terrible strategy and not caring about if users actually like your platform. It will require sustained effort over a long period to fix.
AI feels like the ultimate “a solution in search of a problem.”
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.
We, customers who were annoyed by these AI "improvements", knew we'd eventually get here. We hated these features from the get to.
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?
At this point I dont trust common sense in anybody inside Microsoft.
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.
Recall is a bloated waste of time that completely misses the point. Why not instead let me snapshot a set of apps and docs/projects that are open, then snapshot a different set of apps and what’s open, and let me flip between the two (or three or four)? This way I could sort out my setup for home versus work, or between multiple clients/customers, and be able to quickly jump between common layouts/apps depending on context. But to be honest, this is probably beyond what Windows APIs are capable of, since Windows can’t even remember what directories I was working in across apps.
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.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 62.1 ms ] threadObviously 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.
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.
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.
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
(sarcasm)
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.
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?
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.
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.