Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.
I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.
And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...
I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while every few years. But there was always something. Often video driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software does not run on it.
Still use it on my server though.
I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.
Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).
lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.
That's how the world works for everything: software, politics, social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and move on
Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in general.
I think private interests should not run what is effectively public infrastructure, like Windows. Or, put another way, infrastructure of national importance should be publicly controlled and governed with transparency and public interests in mind. Either that, or true capitalist competition has to be reenabled aggressively: forbid walled gardens, split up the Googles, etc. This centralization of public utility and power in the hands of private individuals, coupled with an uncompetitive market, is nonsensical. Competition or nationalization.
This is not general. This is true only on markets which are full regarding available customers, and there is no foreseeable growth.
What we can see in IT in the past 10-15 years (especially after around 2015) is the slow progress towards this state from a rich and competitive (and personally I think a way more fun) one.
I worked for dying companies (e.g. Ericsson), for slowly moving ones (e.g. Santander), and for several now dead startups, and what happened with Google, Microsoft, etc is that they slowly moving from the "startup" market - there is still available non conquered market segments - to the dying, slowly moving one - where there are a few large players, and it's not possible to grow in any meaningful way with your own skills. The only difference now compared to the decades until the 90s is that antitrust checks and balances are dead, and they can artificially inflate their own power, which haven't happened in this scale for at least 100 years. And it caused world shattering problems back then, and it will now too.
I would leave this field happily, even when I'm exceptionally good in it, because it's more and more disgusting. Only if there would be any good alternatives, which wouldn't require me to loose at least a decade of my life. But unfortunately, the balance is way more fucked up to easily change my lifestyle at this point. And it will be just worse than this.
> I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line.
I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour. Until we change that, the power will always be with these kind of companies.
Perhaps governments could levy punative fines in such situations. But that seems like a bandaid (and ripe for corruption). Ideally we'd have structural change that prevents this behaviour in the first place. Perhaps worker representation on company boards. Or progressive corporation taxation that more strongly encourages smaller companies and more competition.
Speaking only for myself, this sort of behavior is a great way to break the Trust Thermocline [1]. The point where I am so frustrated, so fed up, so expectant that said company will abuse me again, that I refuse to do business with them at all, under any circumstances, no matter if it is inconvenient to avoid them or not.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
Yes, when there isn’t real competition. And that’s in part due to a long history of anti competitive practices but also simply because Microsoft is too big and should be broken up.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate
I get the impression that many companies are working through this with AI-assisted coding.
How bad can the product get before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing programmers and deploying AI slop?
For products like Windows and Office,
the subscription model and enterprise account revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before they even have to apologize and roll back.
The underlying philosophy for these companies seem to be "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Some of us are done forgiving, but I am not sure there are enough of us to reverse this cultural trend.
I've noticed recently that my Windows 11 start menu isn't a 50% gray empty blob anymore. I always disable "recommended apps" (eg. ad supported app suggestions), so 50% of the space in my start menu was unused, yet it was still there of course. Kind of refreshing to have a somewhat normal looking start menu again with something as revolutionary as a list of apps right when you open it. Let's see how long it takes before they mess it up again.
A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a little of it nobody cares, if you demonstrate too much of it you clash with everyone else's priorities which quickly becomes career limiting. So people willing to fight for taste never advance.
This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs you've ever seen, as one example.
A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in Microsoft's DNA.
I think about how a successful and robust ecosystem is one in which there are many parasites at every level of the food chain. If your ecosystem doesn’t have parasites then it’s not operating with nearly the amount of interconnectedness or efficiency that it could be otherwise.
It’s similar to that idea that floats around where $0 lost to fraud is not the optimal amount. If you over index on removing fraud from your system eventually you will spend more on monitoring and removing it than you save on the fraud itself. That is time you could have spent building more things that make money.
The ecosystem is a beast of its own and the optimal state of the ecosystem is /not/the optimal state for any actor within it
I call this odious practice "profit maximization titration" and almost all companies do it now. They continually enshittify the product a little at a time until they notice a dip in profits and then they dial back the shittiness a bit. Or if they're really sophisticated they will enshittify the product by a large amount and then do a binary search to restore product functionality in logarithmically smaller steps until the balance between profits and customer dissatisfaction re-stabilizes. They 'git bisect' the product's shittiness, as it were.
This wasn't even the first time for MS .. Win98SE was a similar disaster stuffed full of junk, most people don't remember Vista fondly either. In each case they redeemed themselves temporarily .. XP following 89SE and Windows 7/8 after Vista. History repeats I guess.
That is power the user loses if he chooses SaaS for the most part. An OS is still a different case, but that part is covered with restrictive update policies.
I do believe that Microsoft does bleed users though. This is an effect that isn't easily observed, but users tend to follow developers at some point when the software repertoire begins to get more attractive on other operating systems. The industry still employs a lot of native Windows apps, but more and more get replaced through alternatives and here Windows will be less relevant at some point as well.
Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?
The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.
Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.
We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.
Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.
We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.
Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.
Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.
It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).
Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.
XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
Microslop is saying “I’m sorry that you’re offended” and will continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to fix their image so that they can raise more money.
Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.
Highly doubt it's good for the mass consumers and non-power users in the long term. Most consumers would prefer household OS name like Windows or MacOS over Linux as a pre-installed OS.
OEMs will always prefer Windows because of the profits they make whenever there's a Windows Refresh, no matter how bad the version is.
Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.
When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadIf you don't use Linux or MacOS yet, why?
Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.
I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...
And it sucks at gaming.
Linux on the other hand is great for power users!
I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.
Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.
Still use it on my server though.
I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.
As for MacOS, I just hate it.
Saying that here as someone that isn't fond of the Windows experience these days, but the two are not relatable.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
OneDrive managers on the other hand are one step away from inventing some way of adding a gacha mechanic.
this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).
lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.
As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your poison" situation.
It's called "enshittification": https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
This is not general. This is true only on markets which are full regarding available customers, and there is no foreseeable growth.
What we can see in IT in the past 10-15 years (especially after around 2015) is the slow progress towards this state from a rich and competitive (and personally I think a way more fun) one.
I worked for dying companies (e.g. Ericsson), for slowly moving ones (e.g. Santander), and for several now dead startups, and what happened with Google, Microsoft, etc is that they slowly moving from the "startup" market - there is still available non conquered market segments - to the dying, slowly moving one - where there are a few large players, and it's not possible to grow in any meaningful way with your own skills. The only difference now compared to the decades until the 90s is that antitrust checks and balances are dead, and they can artificially inflate their own power, which haven't happened in this scale for at least 100 years. And it caused world shattering problems back then, and it will now too.
I would leave this field happily, even when I'm exceptionally good in it, because it's more and more disgusting. Only if there would be any good alternatives, which wouldn't require me to loose at least a decade of my life. But unfortunately, the balance is way more fucked up to easily change my lifestyle at this point. And it will be just worse than this.
I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour. Until we change that, the power will always be with these kind of companies.
Perhaps governments could levy punative fines in such situations. But that seems like a bandaid (and ripe for corruption). Ideally we'd have structural change that prevents this behaviour in the first place. Perhaps worker representation on company boards. Or progressive corporation taxation that more strongly encourages smaller companies and more competition.
It's quite common for megacorps, FAANG and friends, NASDAQ bigwigs.
It's rare for small companies, and extremely rare for independent developers.
1. https://x.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904
Yes, when there isn’t real competition. And that’s in part due to a long history of anti competitive practices but also simply because Microsoft is too big and should be broken up.
I get the impression that many companies are working through this with AI-assisted coding. How bad can the product get before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing programmers and deploying AI slop? For products like Windows and Office, the subscription model and enterprise account revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before they even have to apologize and roll back.
developer delusion. devs who barely use their own apps. who dont understand the day-to-day user experience.
A framework of just and fair laws and regulations should support this, backed up by open enforcement.
but, yeah.
This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs you've ever seen, as one example.
A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in Microsoft's DNA.
It’s similar to that idea that floats around where $0 lost to fraud is not the optimal amount. If you over index on removing fraud from your system eventually you will spend more on monitoring and removing it than you save on the fraud itself. That is time you could have spent building more things that make money.
The ecosystem is a beast of its own and the optimal state of the ecosystem is /not/the optimal state for any actor within it
I do believe that Microsoft does bleed users though. This is an effect that isn't easily observed, but users tend to follow developers at some point when the software repertoire begins to get more attractive on other operating systems. The industry still employs a lot of native Windows apps, but more and more get replaced through alternatives and here Windows will be less relevant at some point as well.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?
The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.
We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.
Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.
Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.
Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.
Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
People seem to forget Teams is the unloved child of a forced marriage between acquisitions, it was never going to turn out successful.
1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of control to begin with
2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again
Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3 years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.
Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.
That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
I am customer and I absolutely hate it that they have restricted the machine that Windows can run on.
If they don't fix this sort of anti customer garbage then all their words are pure horseshit.
All because it has some AI stuff on it that I don’t want.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
It's remarkable that computer users are paying $139 to give data to Microsoft through an ad-supported "operating system"
Back in the day (generally) only OEMs paid
What is the $139 for
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.