> If you're just tuning in, the company announced that it's moving to make Windows an agentic operating system, which is when AI does most of the decision-making and heavy lifting.
They will do anything but let users make decisions about their own computers that they own. If having agency is so great, why does every Windows version take more of it away from me?
Because you’re not a source of recurring revenue and therefore have no useful value to their annual growth target for revenue growth per year.
If they ship an AI operating system they can lay off a ton of costly interface engineers in favor of a Cortana search box and the cost offset of your freely-donated training data to their bottom line.
If AI succeeds, any corporation that has adopted it will drastically outpace those who have not in growth of revenue growth per year by already having dumped the deadweight ballast of human workers. Windows 11 is positioned to deliver on that promise, if only they can stick the landing, and they don’t understand why we all hate on AI because their largest paying customers are desperate for them to provide it, to unlock the exponential growth factor from the shackles of Still All Humans.
They assume most people don’t realize how much profit there is to be had from AI if they succeed, and so of course they think we’re confused — and in large part they’re right to think that. People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc.
This all isn’t certain to come to pass, but it’s a well-understood and significant threat in certain groups. No one will say it to anyone outside those groups — and so Microsoft is confused that we don’t like it, without explaining the existential threat to the future of Microsoft if it fails.
> People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc.
It is investment 101 not to put all eggs in one basket.
I immediately get it that some years ago an investment into AI (in the sense of NLMs) was a decent idea because in the (rare) event that people actually get NLMs to work decently, it would pay off big. But if you apply some common sense, already from beginning on it was clear that the hurdles to overpass so that AI becomes more than just some experimental toy were huge.
So, what Microsoft did was like investing, say, 1 billion USD into one single lottery ticket which with a probability of, say, 0.1 % gives you 50 trillion USD and with 99.9 % probability it gives you 0 USD, i.e. the investment opportunity has a huge expected value, but in all likelihood, it will burn money.
In a solid portfolio, you add some of these highly experimental investments to your portfolio, but you base your company on much more solid investments. The same statement hold for betting a big part of the future of the national economy on such a strange lottery ticket. I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity.
Most of the pushback seems to come from a loss of trust. People feel Windows is becoming more of a service built around telemetry and ads rather than an OS they control. Until Microsoft addresses that underlying concern, frustration will keep showing up.
I never actually thought for a second that os updates would lose my files... until it proudly started saying on screen YOUR FILES ARE RIGHT WHERE YOU LEFT THEM
I knew then... that there was non zero chance those files will be right where i leave them. And sure enough it was months later some update deleted peoples files
To be fair, they added that after an upgrade removed all of your files, so perhaps they felt they needed to re-assure the public it wouldn't happen again.
It's a shame they didn't instead invest resources into actually making sure of that, because I'm pretty sure it happened a second time.
Long ago (circa 2007) I remember having a chat with an MS PM. The guy could not comprehend Windows Vista sucked. Internally, apparently everyone loved it.
I bet that the systems that Microsoft employees used internally at the time (mid 2000s) were the ones probably best supported by Vista in terms of drivers and performance.
"injecting a solution into a "problem" that doesn't exist."
Oh, the problem exists --- for Microsoft. Their problem is how to monetize your privacy. So they have CoPilot taking screen shots of your computer and storing them on their server using your bandwidth.
Why should users have a problem with this? They use Google --- which does pretty much the same ... or worse.
> Why should users have a problem with this? They use Google --- which does pretty much the same ... or worse.
Not to excessively defend Google, who have their own problems, but they don't appear to do anything of that sort on chromeos or android.
They might monetize your data but their methods differ a lot here. For example, using Android without a Google account is supported. (ChromeOS doesn't support it tbf)
MS has a history of flagrant abuse of user's privacy much before Win11, with Telemetry, Recall fiasco and Cortana, just try to analyze the traffic from MS Teams and you'll have hard time to find a bigger nosing spyware (Zoom as a Chinese cloaked is arguably close). Mindset of "anything goes" as long as it decorated with "nice sounding words and names" while under the hood is doing a mix of potentially quite nefarious things. I stopped at sanitized Win10 and can not trust that Win11 sanitation can hold (therefore won't switch to it likely ever and there is growing number of users like me). Once you start seeing this, you can't unseen it. Long term it is bad intent strategic direction that will end in loose-loose.
Just to add the poor UX on Teams, confused menus, latency, random weird bugs, non-ergonomic UI. Have you tried to make a bot to send messages ? It's a nightmare compared to "curl with token to url" of any other chat app. Who designs this horrible stuff, who tests it and who validates the tests ?
This looks like some inexperienced devs play with AI to make this product.
As usual it’s the end users and customers who have to do the testing.
I’m still annoyed that they fucked around with the webhooks by trying to force everyone to configure them through whatever “Power Automate” is, which introduced a whole bunch of permissions and ownership issues, not to mention the absolute dross of a UI. They kept sending emails and putting notices like “we hear that you despise this but stay tuned for updates!”, not to mention the hilariously short deadline.
Then they finally caved and said “oh, sorry. you can keep your old webhooks but you still have to go regenerate them”. And still today I get random emails saying “your power automate flow has a new URL”. It does? Why? I thought I threw that thing in the trash.
Microsoft's holistic direction is so bad I have moved all of my on-prem Windows Server clients that will listen to Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and all desktop clients out of M365 to Office LTSC 2024.
This was after dragging many endpoint users by tooth and nail that just use Xero or web based apps to MacBook Airs (which are going down a similarly terrible direction post Tahoe).
Is there no saviour for modern software? I'm obviously technical but my adolescent quest for customisation and tinkering is behind me. I want software that works and keeps up with hardware, not degrades its margin of improvement.
This is potentially a inflection point for windows being the dominate OS. If Google, who now have Android working on desktop, and can market it well enough. Since half of the mobile users in world would be less afraid to try something they are familiar with on their phones.
> If Google, who now have Android working on desktop, and can market it well enough
Too little, too late.
Everyone's switching to Linux now, in droves. Microsoft have hit that Trust Thermocline[0] and that has made perfectly ordinary people like your parents or the guy you sometimes chat to in the pub or your plumber go "You know what, fuck it, I'm going to give this Linux thing a go", and they actually are doing that.
We're at a point now where most people do everything in a web browser, for better or worse, so the OS that your browser runs on is pretty much irrelevant. It's been that way for years, but it's taken Windows to get to a point where it's not just that people don't like it but they actively distrust it.
They still won't fucking make it respond to my own key presses.
Why in the the godamn fuck can I not press the right arrow key when I'm in the start menu to move the selection to "stuff I open all the time." It's been like 10 years since they broke this now so I can only assume that nobody there gives a shit about anything
In other Start Menu pain, I like to press WIN and then type to open an app. There is a small delay and it commonly misses the first character, which triggers an Edge Internet search. I have to use a 3rd party app to open apps because of that stupid start menu.
It's a giant pile of stuff that isn't at all cohesive and they keep building on it, and building on that, and building on that again. Everything uses entirely different technologies. You go through the menus and it's like doing an archeological dig. It's slow, things take forever to load, constant driver issues and freezes. I had my mouse start chugging for no reason at 20% CPU load with one update and it stopped after another update. The updates get randomly applied, so make sure to save your work, don't count on putting it on sleep overnight and coming back with your work tomorrow. Speaking of, when it updates it can't do it in the background, so since it's in my bedroom I put it on sleep and then get woken up at 3am with a bright blue screen staring at me!
> If you're just tuning in, the company announced that it's moving to make Windows an agentic operating system, which is when AI does most of the decision-making and heavy lifting.
They will do anything but let users make decisions about their own computers that they own. If having agency is so great, why does every Windows version take more of it away from me?
Because you’re not a source of recurring revenue and therefore have no useful value to their annual growth target for revenue growth per year.
If they ship an AI operating system they can lay off a ton of costly interface engineers in favor of a Cortana search box and the cost offset of your freely-donated training data to their bottom line.
If AI succeeds, any corporation that has adopted it will drastically outpace those who have not in growth of revenue growth per year by already having dumped the deadweight ballast of human workers. Windows 11 is positioned to deliver on that promise, if only they can stick the landing, and they don’t understand why we all hate on AI because their largest paying customers are desperate for them to provide it, to unlock the exponential growth factor from the shackles of Still All Humans.
They assume most people don’t realize how much profit there is to be had from AI if they succeed, and so of course they think we’re confused — and in large part they’re right to think that. People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc.
This all isn’t certain to come to pass, but it’s a well-understood and significant threat in certain groups. No one will say it to anyone outside those groups — and so Microsoft is confused that we don’t like it, without explaining the existential threat to the future of Microsoft if it fails.
> People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc.
It is investment 101 not to put all eggs in one basket.
I immediately get it that some years ago an investment into AI (in the sense of NLMs) was a decent idea because in the (rare) event that people actually get NLMs to work decently, it would pay off big. But if you apply some common sense, already from beginning on it was clear that the hurdles to overpass so that AI becomes more than just some experimental toy were huge.
So, what Microsoft did was like investing, say, 1 billion USD into one single lottery ticket which with a probability of, say, 0.1 % gives you 50 trillion USD and with 99.9 % probability it gives you 0 USD, i.e. the investment opportunity has a huge expected value, but in all likelihood, it will burn money.
In a solid portfolio, you add some of these highly experimental investments to your portfolio, but you base your company on much more solid investments. The same statement hold for betting a big part of the future of the national economy on such a strange lottery ticket. I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity.
> I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity.
I can find one other explanation: greed.
Most of the pushback seems to come from a loss of trust. People feel Windows is becoming more of a service built around telemetry and ads rather than an OS they control. Until Microsoft addresses that underlying concern, frustration will keep showing up.
s/feel/have noticed/
"Hello!"
"Welcome"
When your device welcomes you, something super inappropriate is going on, unless the device isn't actually yours...
I never actually thought for a second that os updates would lose my files... until it proudly started saying on screen YOUR FILES ARE RIGHT WHERE YOU LEFT THEM
I knew then... that there was non zero chance those files will be right where i leave them. And sure enough it was months later some update deleted peoples files
To be fair, they added that after an upgrade removed all of your files, so perhaps they felt they needed to re-assure the public it wouldn't happen again. It's a shame they didn't instead invest resources into actually making sure of that, because I'm pretty sure it happened a second time.
"We (...)"
OneDrive was the last straw for me.
Not surprising.
Long ago (circa 2007) I remember having a chat with an MS PM. The guy could not comprehend Windows Vista sucked. Internally, apparently everyone loved it.
This makes no sense. Putting the AI issue aside, do Microsoft employees not get annoyed by file explorer frequently hanging or crashing?
I bet that the systems that Microsoft employees used internally at the time (mid 2000s) were the ones probably best supported by Vista in terms of drivers and performance.
"injecting a solution into a "problem" that doesn't exist."
Oh, the problem exists --- for Microsoft. Their problem is how to monetize your privacy. So they have CoPilot taking screen shots of your computer and storing them on their server using your bandwidth.
Why should users have a problem with this? They use Google --- which does pretty much the same ... or worse.
> Why should users have a problem with this? They use Google --- which does pretty much the same ... or worse.
Not to excessively defend Google, who have their own problems, but they don't appear to do anything of that sort on chromeos or android.
They might monetize your data but their methods differ a lot here. For example, using Android without a Google account is supported. (ChromeOS doesn't support it tbf)
They might monetize your data but their methods differ a lot here.
Yes. Different methods, same result.
For example, using Android without a Google account is supported.
Check out "Android System Key Verifier". Again, different methods, same result.
They're both using your hardware and bandwidth for their benefit.
Google is basically killing side loading for all practical purposes. I get your point but the race for the bottom should be televised.
> using Android without a Google account is supported
I predict it's just a matter of time until it wont be
I predict they won't require one --- because they don't need to.
They have all the hooks into the system they need to fully compromise your privacy with the latest Android.
MS has a history of flagrant abuse of user's privacy much before Win11, with Telemetry, Recall fiasco and Cortana, just try to analyze the traffic from MS Teams and you'll have hard time to find a bigger nosing spyware (Zoom as a Chinese cloaked is arguably close). Mindset of "anything goes" as long as it decorated with "nice sounding words and names" while under the hood is doing a mix of potentially quite nefarious things. I stopped at sanitized Win10 and can not trust that Win11 sanitation can hold (therefore won't switch to it likely ever and there is growing number of users like me). Once you start seeing this, you can't unseen it. Long term it is bad intent strategic direction that will end in loose-loose.
Just to add the poor UX on Teams, confused menus, latency, random weird bugs, non-ergonomic UI. Have you tried to make a bot to send messages ? It's a nightmare compared to "curl with token to url" of any other chat app. Who designs this horrible stuff, who tests it and who validates the tests ? This looks like some inexperienced devs play with AI to make this product.
As usual it’s the end users and customers who have to do the testing.
I’m still annoyed that they fucked around with the webhooks by trying to force everyone to configure them through whatever “Power Automate” is, which introduced a whole bunch of permissions and ownership issues, not to mention the absolute dross of a UI. They kept sending emails and putting notices like “we hear that you despise this but stay tuned for updates!”, not to mention the hilariously short deadline.
Then they finally caved and said “oh, sorry. you can keep your old webhooks but you still have to go regenerate them”. And still today I get random emails saying “your power automate flow has a new URL”. It does? Why? I thought I threw that thing in the trash.
probably fresh grads as usually. more stumbling -> more time used -> higher costs -> bigger middle men paychecks
I guess we will keep having every media publisher have articles like these, until Microsoft finally understands why.
Microsoft's holistic direction is so bad I have moved all of my on-prem Windows Server clients that will listen to Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and all desktop clients out of M365 to Office LTSC 2024.
This was after dragging many endpoint users by tooth and nail that just use Xero or web based apps to MacBook Airs (which are going down a similarly terrible direction post Tahoe).
Is there no saviour for modern software? I'm obviously technical but my adolescent quest for customisation and tinkering is behind me. I want software that works and keeps up with hardware, not degrades its margin of improvement.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious: Linux and other FOSS
This is potentially a inflection point for windows being the dominate OS. If Google, who now have Android working on desktop, and can market it well enough. Since half of the mobile users in world would be less afraid to try something they are familiar with on their phones.
> If Google, who now have Android working on desktop, and can market it well enough
Too little, too late.
Everyone's switching to Linux now, in droves. Microsoft have hit that Trust Thermocline[0] and that has made perfectly ordinary people like your parents or the guy you sometimes chat to in the pub or your plumber go "You know what, fuck it, I'm going to give this Linux thing a go", and they actually are doing that.
We're at a point now where most people do everything in a web browser, for better or worse, so the OS that your browser runs on is pretty much irrelevant. It's been that way for years, but it's taken Windows to get to a point where it's not just that people don't like it but they actively distrust it.
[0]https://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/sarahlethbridgelean/trust-thermo...
Nokia snake is a pinnacle of technology really. It all rolls down hill from there.
Every day we use MS Office 365 instead of WordStar we stray farther from God's light.
They still won't fucking make it respond to my own key presses.
Why in the the godamn fuck can I not press the right arrow key when I'm in the start menu to move the selection to "stuff I open all the time." It's been like 10 years since they broke this now so I can only assume that nobody there gives a shit about anything
In other Start Menu pain, I like to press WIN and then type to open an app. There is a small delay and it commonly misses the first character, which triggers an Edge Internet search. I have to use a 3rd party app to open apps because of that stupid start menu.
It's a giant pile of stuff that isn't at all cohesive and they keep building on it, and building on that, and building on that again. Everything uses entirely different technologies. You go through the menus and it's like doing an archeological dig. It's slow, things take forever to load, constant driver issues and freezes. I had my mouse start chugging for no reason at 20% CPU load with one update and it stopped after another update. The updates get randomly applied, so make sure to save your work, don't count on putting it on sleep overnight and coming back with your work tomorrow. Speaking of, when it updates it can't do it in the background, so since it's in my bedroom I put it on sleep and then get woken up at 3am with a bright blue screen staring at me!
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46001727