> 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 question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).
If they want AI hype they should be building up .NET to be completely versatile for AI, not just ONNX, but the full pipeline. Make your strengths a key indicator that Windows is the place for AI, stop using up 50% of my RAM for no reason, I need it for real work. Till then Linux has been my new permanent home for about 5 years now or so.
Have you lost sight of how much AI is being shoved down .NET tooling?
See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?
Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years, such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen.
They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company.
Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.
The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.
You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it.
Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are.
Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.
> The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.
I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.
There's no way MS employees at all levels don't know. It only doesn't know organizationally. It's just the boring old incentive alignment problem.
There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.
> burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
That's a good boy, and I meant no disrespect to our furry family, just that they usually aren't known for their product management skills. I probably should have taken a leaf from UK politics and compared to a lettuce.
I'm shocked they didn't stash "defender" in there somehow. I used to joke that one name they'd rebrand the start menu as "defender for application launching" and rebrand the power button as "defender for powering on."
Microsoft's brands are historical markers. There's an era when a new Microsoft product is .NET, and an era when it's Azure, and one where it's 365 etc. If you have a new Doodad, if you say "Microsoft Doodad" the other divisions hate you because that's not their thing. Brand it "Hot Brand Name Unrelated Word" and now you're part of the family even though you have no product purpose and your customers will forever be confused.
"Azure Active Directory" wasn't Active Directory, and who'd have guessed a year ago that "365 Co-pilot" would mean the Office applications in 2026. Yes really.
The last lines on the page are a FAQ -- "You can find your favorite apps [...] under the Apps section in the left navigation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot web app."
But no normal person cares. Or do you know somebody that talks about using "Copilot"? Most people even just say "Office" when they mean "MS Office". The brand has entered public use, so that it is not for MS to decide its future.
tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).
Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.
Replacing Office with Microsoft 365 as the brand is still stupid. I was messing with Windows 11 a while back pre Copilot, and in the start menu was a pre installed spam link for “Microsoft 365 (Office)”. The fact they had to put the old brand in parentheses at the end should have been a hint they’re doing something stupid.
Word, Excel, maybe, but the MS strategy is vendor lock-in not any actual productivity. We see all day long how AI burns down silos and enables cross-platform coordination.
I bet MS saw this too and the “CoPilot Everything” pivot was their failed effort to maintain vendor lock-in in the age of LLMs. That failed, devalued their product, since they doubled-down in the meantime on enhanced hostility to cross-platform tools (try lately to read LLM markdown on vanilla M365?) now MS will have that reckoning after conceding a 3-year head start to disrupters and, yes, antagonizing core users with uptempo customer-hostile slop.
Is X even breaking even at the moment? Last I checked the ad revenue had dried up and boiled off, did they actually manage to cut enough to even it out?
But that doesn't matter. It was bought as a toy and propaganda network. It can lose money indefinitely as long as its owner is paid by Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo
It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
As a point of data for your statement, Jassy has repeatedly said that teams that have higher AI adoption are safe from layoffs. Use AI or lose your job is the blunt message
Something I've noticed is that companies don't really promote intelligent people up the chain of command. Socialism failed because it was a less effective economic system than capitalism, and lots of its issues are neatly replicated within capitalist companies:
- having friends is more important than making output, which means that people above certain level just play politics instead of actually managing the company
- managers who miss targets get more people assigned which makes them climb the hierarchy, which means all levels below top level have the incentive to be inefficient
- saying "no" to the ruling party, no matter how stupid the idea is, is the second-easiest way to get replaced. The easiest is to offend the wrong person
- planning periods misaligned with the economic reality
An intelligent person will either be optimized out of the system, or will learn how to game it to their own advantage.
It could have been both for sure. I'm just going off the public info here though and it doesn't seem like the employees failed to do what they were told to do.
In a company as large as MS, I'd never really expect a culture of encouraging pushback from below. They'd just never get anything done and the team culture and morale would likely end up in the tank.
I think it’s governance. It can make sense to ask to put AI into everything. But then you also need to check it’s done in a useful way. MS leadership seems to have skipped this step.
And there's no real evidence of any kind that they positive motivating vision for them other than AI right now.
Sure they want to hide their embarrassment at this second, but I'm not hearing any vision for a future where they make a product designed for someone like me. They don't want me anyore and they've made that quite clear through generations of hostile decisions
They might be getting the order to RIP it out because Of the cost - autocompleting peoples word documents still uses tokens which, last time I checked, were anything but cheap.
A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work.
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Unlike IE, the NT kernel was never bad and is still (presumably) in a pretty good shape. It's the userland that's gone insane. Someone should just port the Windows 7 shell to the newest kernel and call it a day.
>Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie
What exactly was wrong with Edge Legacy(not IE) based on their own engine that they need to fix, and why was Chromium a sweet taste?
AFAIk Edge Legacy was kicking ass in all benchmarks. Their only achilles heel was Google messing up Youtube and G-apps to break they way they got displayed on Edge LEgacy forcing users to switch to Chrome.
I was playing with the RTM release of Windows 10 which came with the "new Edge" browser (post-IE, pre-Chromium). It's a cool piece of software, very slick and minimal browser UI and not a hint of Copilot anywhere (since that would come ~8 years later).
I imagine it was not as compatible and it was less work to simply rebrand Chromium as Edge.
The problem with windows is not the kernel, as it is preety solid, but user space.
Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.
Windows NT is indeed a pretty solid technical foundation. But I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to destroy that in a push to use AI for ongoing development. Perhaps the kernel team will have enough political sway to avoid that outcome. We'll see.
That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)
If they actually did this they would vendor lock you into a custom DM after one or two iterations and then anyone not using that DM would be locked out of any real software. It's a Trojan horse.
It would not make Windows a good project, but it would mean that hardware vendors would have to implement good Linux drivers. It could therefore help all other distributions, too!
> The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high.
That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...
> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.
You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.
My comment was meant to be an old fogey criticism of giving up on having in-house browser talent and instead just white-labelling chromium, but clearly that's not how it was taken. Another lesson for me in writing clearly (no sarcasm on the internet!), but the last thousand haven't stuck so I'm not terribly optimistic about this one
I think Windows 11 is the Trump moment. Even if they right the ship, Linux is good enough or good enough is on the near horizon for most use cases so people are jumping ship. There's also bleed from people being tired of Apple's lack of software innovation.
The amount of cognitive dissonance required to work at Microsoft is high. Many people working there insulate themselves from the downsides of what the company produces, they only acknowledge the upsides. They (the many) would not bother to contemplate HN commments like this no matter how many such comments exist
It is a cult-like environment. To the people working there, as long as it pays well and it's easy work, there is no problem
> because they should have not built them in the first place
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
Yes, I hear your point. I guess I take failure of governance to mean that rules and procedures were not followed or never properly put in place--not that the head boss is promoting bad strategy and tactics.
You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong.
Seems like Microsoft needs to take an ultra-conservative approach with Windows, and instead build AI in a "new" operating system that people can elect to use.
Too late, idiots.
Just as Windows 10 was being retired, you ran the craziest anti-marketing campaign I've ever seen and successfully coaxed me into switching my daily driver to Linux. Until this year, I've been using windows my ENTIRE life.
I'm in the same boat, have to use Windows at work. In addition to whatver MS is doing, every workstation is encumbered with various EDR and antivirus software.
Windows 10 is my last Microsoft Windows operating system. Between the fact that I had to turn of TPM in the bios so that I wouldn't wake up one day turn on my computer and see Windows 11. The massive bugs that prevent things like power off. The insane push for AI in everything (notepad? really?).
I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
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
Windows 10 searching the web started it all for me - not AI. Followed by constantly changing/moving the option on how to disable it. Use Edge, Onedrive, help finish setting up your PC (by logging in), constant disrespect of me the user.
W11 local accounts only with terminal hacks sealed the deal along with valves contributions to linux.
The dumbification of Control Panel to Settings was one of the factors for me.
I'm not sure if Control Panel is still available, hidden away somewhere, but I've since moved on to pastures that only seen to get greener when compared with the Microsoft Windows paddock. They're somehow finding new shades of brown on a monthly basis.
The idea made sense to me, but the execution was trash.
Settings was slow, it wasn't any easier than control panel, and if you wanted to do anything that mattered you ended up in control panel apps which were completely jarring UI-wise from the rest of the PC.
The way the code assistants like opencode / claude / etc are improving with good models, I could easily see some kind of Copilot-like utility driving the whole OS in a pretty useful way to automate all kinds of tasks, just... not today.
Just like Google shoving the shittiest version of gemini into search results, Microsoft is shoving mostly useless half-baked AI features into Windows. There must be some kind of insane culture of just wanting to ship before it's done and assuming users won't notice it's crap, rather than waiting for a truly good experience.
> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit.
I find it handy here and there. HOWEVER... There is no clear way to get rid of the thing. MS has added tons of features and then burry them in really obtuse ways to get rid of them if you can at all. That is the core of MS's user backlash. It makes people feel like they are not in control of their hardware. When I feed the machine 32 gig of ram and 8 to 12 is already taken up on fresh start something is seriously broken.
The second issue is people feel windows is not keeping up with its competitors (Linux, MacOS). They are throwing features in. When the benchmarks are where they are slowing yielding to their competitors.
The third issues is backwards compat is not as good as it used to be. They made backwards compat one of their key selling points. That is breaking in hundreds of subtle ways that piss people off. If I am going to lose my software to time rot why am I staying with this thing that randomly changes what the start menu looks like every 6 months and I have to figure out again where they put things. Plus now there is this copilot thing chirping all over the place.
CoPilot is not the issue, it is a symptom. It is the total lack of awareness MS has about its user base. It has been this way since windows 8 first launched. I use windows to launch my software and do things. There are 2 other viable OS's out there that do the same thing. If MS had put an advert into the message popup saying 'hey copilot is ready for your machine would you like to turn it on' they would have probably been in a better position. Instead it is on by default and you just get to deal with it. So now feel like 'gee thanks' hey what about these thousands of other issues? How many times are you going to break remote desktop again? How many weird directx 7/8/9 shims do I need to make my game launch this time? Oh an fix the backwards compat tool. It is broken too.
Windows 11 needs a 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on fixing as many bugs as they can. Lower the memory and CPU usage to as low as they can. Fixup the hundreds of backwards compat issues I see all over the net. Just well tested bug fixes.
You probably wouldn’t like 20 year old Notepad’s habit of leaving Unicode BOMs everywhere, or only supporting CRLF line endings. They did improve it a tiny amount circa Windows 10.
Does Windows 11 Notepad still choke on loading large files?
> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit
Much of the way AI has been forced upon the world by MS and the likes makes it very difficult to separate the two. The trend of enshittification leading up to LLMs has also not been a solid basis for trust. So yes, for a lot of people, the underlying technology isn't necessarily an issue, but it's kind of hard to imagine it being presented in a non-problematic way given the above, which I suspect is a big part of why there's a growing sentiment of distaste with anything AI now.
As someone that uses Linux distros since 1995, I have had lots of joy getting it to work on various kinds of hardware, during weekends and long nights.
Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)?
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
Ballmer was kinda the best Microsoft CEO for Windows, IMO. He didn't get the Justice department's attention in either the states or Europe, and he started building alternate revenue streams (XBOX, Windows Phone) without destroying the core product. Sure, MetroUI had no place in Server2012, but that was less egregious than the AI-everything and multiple settings menus
Nadella is a marvelous Microsoft CEO for Linux though. Credit where it's due
wel, I was fired (after multiple rounds of downsizing our team from ~200 people to 20 people) by the new guy Satya back in the day, so yeah, I prefer Ballmer's approach as well
This reminds me of a useful tool I encountered recently..
Winslop is an open source tool that removes Windows 11 bloatware, disables AI features like Copilot, and restores useful settings:
https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop
Yeah, this is a public relations effort. Corporations, especially ones that have spent an obscene amount of money on AI companies aren't going to change their direction. They have to justify that spending to their shareholders.
Great. Let us hope that support for hardware without TPM is next. Creating several mountains worth of electronic waste was a terrible decision. And in the middle of the AI-induced memory shortage!
Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.
Motherboards have had TPM support (built-in/exteral) since like 2017. Are there a bunch of models that don't support a plug-in TPM? I guess the BIOS would probably be the next issue.
Microsoft had gained my goodwill as a linux user when they didn't immediately destroy github and embraced open source
I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again.
I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that I actually have faith in the people actually developing Windows. I'm not at all aurprised that they are rebelling against stupid non-features. But that rebelling doesn't amount to anything, since managers and decrees from the top funnel all effort into the most user-hostile results possible.
If MS rehires their QA teams and listen to the people on the ground, I'd imagine the very same devs who put AI in Notepad would be very happy to give us features we actually want.
As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/server).
Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games.
Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
Thing is, at the time it felt like these experiences (e.g. demos) were rare and a treat; nowadays you can open up Steam or the App Store and get full versions of full games with hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay right there and then.
Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.
I love the care and polish that went into the Microsoft Windows XP Welcome/Tour app that played after install. That was the peak of the summit—quality wise.
Yeah, there was a lot of good memories. And it does have a 64-bit version so not a too-bad option as a retro-OS. But I think we need to find retro hardware for it to work properly.
Maybe it's a bad idea to build critical UI bits with React? I mean, I'm a big fan of React for a lot of things... but I don't think critical pieces of UI/UX interactions should be built with it at all.
The taskbar, start menu, file explorer, desktop and system settings are areas that should be boring, consistent and just work. That hasn't been close to the case since Windows 7.. Windows 8 was the start of the decline and that was over 13 years ago. While I like some of the things that have come to Windows since then, there's probably twice as much to dislike. Hire/promote/raise someone to act as a UX czar for Windows all around... design a "final" UI/UX target that covers existing features (starting with a checklist of everything that currently can be configured everywhere)... and finish that design.
Stop shifting gears and enshitifying the overall experience to wring every cent of "value" out of every user out there. Get a full release cycle or two with no new features... just solid bug fixes and a more consistent UI/UX. I know there's kernel features for new GPUs, improved storage and CPU interactions and scheduling... but the UI/UX on top of the kernel is a mess and it shows too well.
Get your staff aligned on a common UX theme... I don't care if it's back to Fluent or something closer to where Win11 is, but at least get it consistent above all else. It's a mess. Fire half the managers... stop giving out bonuses based on new features in windows, and give bonuses on sections of config/settings that are marked as complete without falling back to legacy UI from the late 90's. Not that the 90's setup was that bad compared to the hybrid bastard we have today.
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.
For sure, and mainly because the stakes are so high - they invested billions into it. But despite AI being very popular - loads of people ask ChatGPT or Gemini before punching in two words into a search engine - it's hard to monetize, or the monetization does not cover costs let alone investments made.
AI tools are here to stay but they'll be scaled back a lot. Plus, there's still so much investments made into it that there's enough free plans or free alternatives (remember DeepSeek?), and you can't compete with free.
For people who work in very classified/secure environments (designing weapons systems, rev eng UFO's, etc...) does M$ offer some version of windows without all of the AI crap and bloat?
The latest Windows 11 Pro for Workstations builds appears to still support workgroup or domain joins without requiring a Microsoft account. In terms of the OS still shipping with crap, it is still there but since there's no Internet connection the crap is largely useless.
I understand the approach Satya took initially. He had a big investment in AI. He saw a theoretical value in AI supporting productivity. And he pushed his developers and creators to imagine and mock up ideas how AI would deliver.
Obviously the last part was disappointing. In hindsight, the push was far too aggressive, and too mediocre. We have a lot to learn from this try, about ourselves and about others.
Integration 2.0 will be or needs to be a bit more skewed towards low hanging fruits. I want a copilot for the help menu, and for the 1000 commands not in the toolbar, and a copilot enhancement to the search bar (which came from google!). And a natural language interface to bring up templates, open files, and look for images. Apple could have done this AI enhancement with settings, and added a start button to open apps.
As for "privacy", that is the first scream that comes out from people who have never touched the product. Assurety should have been made that all data would be local. This runs contrary to the "data is the new oil" direction, but it would have been a good way to entice the skeptics and eventually swallow them whole to give up their privacy (insert evil laugh here).
Too little, too late, and too specific in scope. Windows 11 is awful not merely because of the AI bullshit being shoehorned into everything, everywhere (CoPilot in Notepad? In Paint? Are you serious, Microsoft?!), but also because of all the other completely unnecessary changes made to the OS. A curated selection of real-world examples from my recent gig making a hardened Windows 11 image for a physical product line:
* Kiosk Mode via the shell launcher delays logon times from <5s to 30-180s - just by turning it on, even if it doesn’t actually enable kiosk mode!
* Local changes via registry keys don’t “stick” consistently, even when the machine is entirely offline
* Offline activations using hardware keys fail across vendors without anyone knowing why (other than Microsoft, for the cost of a support call)
* Existing Windows 10 powercfg scripts and config files do not work with Win11. Our workaround was manually calling the exact same command twice, back-to-back, to force-apply a change.
* Installing language packs via the command line by any means available (Powershell’s add-windowscapability, DISM’s package installer, lpksetup, etc) do not actually populate the GUI with those packs as an option until we reinstall them from the GUI again.
* Adverts are everywhere, even on IoT LTSC Enterprise
Honestly, Microsoft completely lost the plot as to what an operating system is supposed to do in favor of turning it into an advertising and user surveillance machine masquerading as a useful OS.
Besides the general awfulness of Windows that you describe, have you looked at C:\Windows recently? It is an unorganised mess with multiple different case styling all over the place. I get this is not that important but I can't help feel it illustrates just how little care is taken behind the scenes. The whole thing seems like a nightmare to deal with.
I had a fresh install of Windows on a new computer which refused to install updates until I ran a bunch of commands in the "terminal". The whole thing is beyond fixing at this point.
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 never thought I would have to give up Notepad on Windows for quick file edits. But now with AI in notepad, paint, snap tool, etc, I had to install and use third party alternatives all the time.
Too be honest, thres is too much wrong with win 11 to save it at this point.
Is not only AI bullshit in my notepad.
The excess adds, intrusive online stuff, terriblee performance for basic tasks like the File Explorer or even opening a menu.
Making everything a damn web page...
One clear example is outlook. Talk wathever you want, outlook, is the indistry standart for e-mail. And while not perfect it was very usefull. Then they keep pushing the new interface on everybody throats. The new interface takes like 1 gb of RAM when in use, agaisnt 200mb of the traditional one, while offering less options. Why would anyone who really cares about e-mail use that shit? People who just casually use e-mails dont use Outlook, they use the webmail.
They choose to ignore the users, and push top down changes into them. But the market dont really works this way for most people. Not every tech company needs to be like Apple.
It’s amazing how much worse outlook got and how fast it got so much worse. It also can’t handle screens with different scales, it sometimes inexplicably fails to render an email, printing can produce files of different size - using the web version produces smaller pdfs than the desktop version. I miss thunderbird a lot since the company forced Outlook use and also removed the classic outlook option - or maybe it only has the weird white space version now.
In the end is hardto see why they banked so heavy into it. When open AI started t o make promisses and everybody saw what it could do, Microsoft invested heavily on it, seeing some of the largest increase in its shares, and in consequence on big fat bonus for its executives.
NOw that the hype is naturally going down, and people are encountering limitations in what modern AI can do, and having more realistic expectations, Microsoft hype train stoped in middle of the hill climb.
They pretty much exchanged gradual increases in revenue for a quick but ultimally short term profit.
I genuinely think that an "agentic" (I hate that word) OS would be incredibly useful. But both how Copilot was integrated into Windows and it simply being a terrible model destroyed that possibility.
I think it can work. In about what? 10 years, maybe more. Tech is simply not yet on the same page as a star trekk computer that you can talk and make it work.
And the main thing that needs to change for it to work is, that AI agents need to run locally, with your own agent without needing cloud processing. Maybe when we get into this point, is when it will make sense, from a pratical and private way.
Now what could work is making a traditional OS, but exposing ways of its power users maketheir own IA agents with the OS data, and this way choose what they want to share wth the cloud.
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.
It's the same geniuses that come up with the worst product names possible. Like they came up with a really good product name and inverted the value to use the opposite.
The problem is that the engineers and coders that ran microsoft are no longer doing so. Their leadership is too disconnected.
It's the same recipe of enshittification you see all over, marketing, sales take over along with consultants and MBA's. Except, I think in Microsoft's case there are still enough people who know about the technology to be dangerous, they're not entirely clueless, they just know enough (like about AI in this case) to be dangerous.
Regardless of the sentiment on HN and elsewhere though, even excluding enterprise usage, I doubt windows' marketshare will suffer more than 10% YoY.
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.
The moat is still secure. So the strategy is to loot as much value as possible from within the moat. After all, where are the corporate customers going to go?
I think the summary is that "product owner" types and other agile simulacrums wanted it simply because they viewed it as an easy win towards KPI and other performance metrics. The most damning proof of this is Copilot in Notepad, and that half-attempt at renaming the entire Office suite to simply "Copilot" (they seemed to reverse this a few days later).
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.
After relentless pressure from Microsoft finally switched to Linux. I won't say it is smooth sail - but it respects your time and PC resources. Which Windows does not. Windows has had abhorrently slow Explorer, File Search and almost any end user interaction for couple of years now. And is so full of crap that can't be disabled or even don't know what it is doing.
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?
I don't like this. Bad user experience with AI and general enshitification of Windows was the push that many people needed to at least try Linux, and for companies to take Linux a bit more serious as the desktop platform.
I think the more important platform is Laptop right now. Linux on laptops has battery life issues because unfortunately modern/hardware software makes it so "good battery life" is a knifes edge configuration.
This story has already dropped three quarters of the way down the front page and has a grand total of 72 points. Topics that people really give a damn about on this site often garner 1000 - 2000 points and stay on the front page for 36 hours or more, but nobody cares about this.
They’ve already lost the HN audience and there’s certainly an element of where we go everybody else eventually follows, because I suspect we skew influential in the companies we work for.
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.
1. Find out what Co-pilot's reputation is among power users.
2. Realize that Co-pilot is bad and needs to improve up to Microsoft's highest gold standards of trustworthiness.
3. Ditch Co-pilot branding inside the OS.
4. Make AI features private and offline by default unless the local hardware cannot run the specialized tiny model for that task, at which point it goes online for it. It might be slower, but if it does the thing, it's ok.
5. Allow companies and power users to provide their own local models that hook into these tasks, so they can host AI servers within the company and these AI tasks never reach outside of the company.
6. Make AI features more specific, targeted and useful instead of simply integrating it into the various functions and throwing it at users like "here, you figure out what to do with this thing, we don't know."
7. Don't expect people to want to chat with it in every app, just find a task that you know it succeeds at and expose that task rather than letting users figure out what it sucks at.
8. Don't make the AI integration APIs a case of increased surface area privacy and security risk that 3rd party system apps can hook into, to mass extract information out of every app on your system easily. Put limitations on it.
9. Add features to specify where AI can go and cannot go, just like the microphone. Folders, apps, online services. Even if it does use Co-pilot online, let users sculpt it.
10. Make it explicit and obvious when AI features are operating offline or online. If users have decades of understanding that Notepad is a private offline app, preserve that expectation as much as possible. Just because Outlook and OneNote are very online-oriented apps, it doesn't mean they want their local experience to be online in every way. If you force AI to go over all my cloud files, notes and e-mail without my permission, that is sociopathic behavior and I will ditch you, Microsoft.
Some day Co-pilot will probably be good. That isn't today. It's probably not this year or next year, but eventually. Until then, it needs to stay in a lane with freshly painted lines surrounded with sand barrels in case it wrecks.
It's not that I'm entirely opposed to some Microsoft AI feature existing in Windows, but manufacturing a user assumption that it is everywhere all the time is bad not just for Windows, but for society as a whole.
We've already seen how political and activist the public sphere became over the last decade, which reduces trust in the people who make software and services too. What do we do when Microsoft gets ideologically taken over and abuses its information access to people for political ends?
Show you can be trusted. When I put a little food bowl down for you, don't scratch me and we'll go from there.
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.
> 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 question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
> The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel
or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).
If they want AI hype they should be building up .NET to be completely versatile for AI, not just ONNX, but the full pipeline. Make your strengths a key indicator that Windows is the place for AI, stop using up 50% of my RAM for no reason, I need it for real work. Till then Linux has been my new permanent home for about 5 years now or so.
Have you lost sight of how much AI is being shoved down .NET tooling?
See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?
Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years, such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen.
They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company.
Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.
I saw a presentation awhile back which included the slide (roughly):
"Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it."
As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.
The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.
That's a dramatic but fitting characterization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Their shareholders did not want them to add long term value to the company.
Their shareholders wanted AI.
Their shareholders never wanted AI.
Their shareholders wanted MSFT stock price to go up.
You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it.
Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are.
Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.
> The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.
I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.
There's no way MS employees at all levels don't know. It only doesn't know organizationally. It's just the boring old incentive alignment problem.
There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.
> burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
> they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
They also missed the boat on mobile, and I suspect they didn't want to miss the "AI" boat this time around.
> The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his
They already made money.
They know what works to make money by convincing CEO VP PM devs. I do hope they jump to the next company (please meta or apple) and do their duties.
> …because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
My Labrador says a/ he’s neutered c/ dogix user b/ his teams always begin with empathy: people (and retrieves) over outcomes
That's a good boy, and I meant no disrespect to our furry family, just that they usually aren't known for their product management skills. I probably should have taken a leaf from UK politics and compared to a lettuce.
> because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
Where I come from we prefer monkeys throwing darts.
Microsoft ? Google ? Monkeys are suppose to be more intelligent than labradors.
I don't know about Windows, but it will take a lot more enshittification than that to burn down the Office brand. Excel alone carries it to dominance.
The Office brand is literally gone, they renamed it to "Microsoft Copilot 365 app". Check https://office.com
That is insane. Microsoft Office is probably one of the most recognizable brand names ever. Reminds me of the time when they called everything .NET.
Literally nobody on the planet is worse at naming things than Microsoft.
Apple's not great, but Microsoft is worse.
I'm shocked they didn't stash "defender" in there somehow. I used to joke that one name they'd rebrand the start menu as "defender for application launching" and rebrand the power button as "defender for powering on."
Microsoft's brands are historical markers. There's an era when a new Microsoft product is .NET, and an era when it's Azure, and one where it's 365 etc. If you have a new Doodad, if you say "Microsoft Doodad" the other divisions hate you because that's not their thing. Brand it "Hot Brand Name Unrelated Word" and now you're part of the family even though you have no product purpose and your customers will forever be confused.
"Azure Active Directory" wasn't Active Directory, and who'd have guessed a year ago that "365 Co-pilot" would mean the Office applications in 2026. Yes really.
Copilot is such a dumb brand name. At least to me, it confers that I need to be a pilot and that it requires training to be one.
I just want to be productive, not fly a plane.
Also, the Copilot is “waiting in the wings” to take over your job.
And when you ask it to do something useful the answer usually is “sorry I can’t do that”.
At least the name is honest.
How about "Borland Sidekick" for a brand name?
The only mention of the word 'Office' on that page is
'The Microsoft Office app is now Microsoft 365 Copilot'
It is really sad to see MS kill such a behemoth brand for nothing.
The last lines on the page are a FAQ -- "You can find your favorite apps [...] under the Apps section in the left navigation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot web app."
Wow
Except that nobody cares. The Office brand is too large too get killed by Microsoft.
It's already gone. Replaced once with Microsoft 365 and then rapidly and haphazardly by the Copilot name.
Only the domain and SEO artifacts remain.
But no normal person cares. Or do you know somebody that talks about using "Copilot"? Most people even just say "Office" when they mean "MS Office". The brand has entered public use, so that it is not for MS to decide its future.
That's not really what happened...
https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).
Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.
Replacing Office with Microsoft 365 as the brand is still stupid. I was messing with Windows 11 a while back pre Copilot, and in the start menu was a pre installed spam link for “Microsoft 365 (Office)”. The fact they had to put the old brand in parentheses at the end should have been a hint they’re doing something stupid.
Word, Excel, maybe, but the MS strategy is vendor lock-in not any actual productivity. We see all day long how AI burns down silos and enables cross-platform coordination.
I bet MS saw this too and the “CoPilot Everything” pivot was their failed effort to maintain vendor lock-in in the age of LLMs. That failed, devalued their product, since they doubled-down in the meantime on enhanced hostility to cross-platform tools (try lately to read LLM markdown on vanilla M365?) now MS will have that reckoning after conceding a 3-year head start to disrupters and, yes, antagonizing core users with uptempo customer-hostile slop.
Massive self-inflicted brand damage worked for X dot com, I suppose.
Is X even breaking even at the moment? Last I checked the ad revenue had dried up and boiled off, did they actually manage to cut enough to even it out?
Statistia has them at a loss, but varying around breakeven: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
But that doesn't matter. It was bought as a toy and propaganda network. It can lose money indefinitely as long as its owner is paid by Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo
Tesla is also collapsing.
Musk's net worth was $300Bn in November 2024 and he ended 2025 at $726Bn.
... where is this collapse?
In the lala land. It's wishful thinking on HN.
FWIW, I don't have a skin in this game - just observing the facts.
It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.
Why not both?
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
I imagine it went like this:
CEO: Put AI everywhere/
Engineering Staff: There's a lot of places where it doesn't make sense to do this.
CEO: Do it or find somewhere else to work.
The problem of pushback at the lower levels is that it is completely ineffective when the top levels are set on something.
As a point of data for your statement, Jassy has repeatedly said that teams that have higher AI adoption are safe from layoffs. Use AI or lose your job is the blunt message
Something I've noticed is that companies don't really promote intelligent people up the chain of command. Socialism failed because it was a less effective economic system than capitalism, and lots of its issues are neatly replicated within capitalist companies:
- having friends is more important than making output, which means that people above certain level just play politics instead of actually managing the company
- managers who miss targets get more people assigned which makes them climb the hierarchy, which means all levels below top level have the incentive to be inefficient
- saying "no" to the ruling party, no matter how stupid the idea is, is the second-easiest way to get replaced. The easiest is to offend the wrong person
- planning periods misaligned with the economic reality
An intelligent person will either be optimized out of the system, or will learn how to game it to their own advantage.
See recent discussion on why senior devs left projects crash.
It is easier to let it all crash and burn, and try to leave with less scars as possible than try to fight the system.
You get to lose more for the visibility to fight back than letting it go down in flames.
It could have been both for sure. I'm just going off the public info here though and it doesn't seem like the employees failed to do what they were told to do.
In a company as large as MS, I'd never really expect a culture of encouraging pushback from below. They'd just never get anything done and the team culture and morale would likely end up in the tank.
I think it’s governance. It can make sense to ask to put AI into everything. But then you also need to check it’s done in a useful way. MS leadership seems to have skipped this step.
And there's no real evidence of any kind that they positive motivating vision for them other than AI right now.
Sure they want to hide their embarrassment at this second, but I'm not hearing any vision for a future where they make a product designed for someone like me. They don't want me anyore and they've made that quite clear through generations of hostile decisions
They might be getting the order to RIP it out because Of the cost - autocompleting peoples word documents still uses tokens which, last time I checked, were anything but cheap.
A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work.
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Unlike IE, the NT kernel was never bad and is still (presumably) in a pretty good shape. It's the userland that's gone insane. Someone should just port the Windows 7 shell to the newest kernel and call it a day.
>Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie
What exactly was wrong with Edge Legacy(not IE) based on their own engine that they need to fix, and why was Chromium a sweet taste?
AFAIk Edge Legacy was kicking ass in all benchmarks. Their only achilles heel was Google messing up Youtube and G-apps to break they way they got displayed on Edge LEgacy forcing users to switch to Chrome.
Edge Legacy was always playing catch-up trying to be sufficiently compatible with Chrome.
And personally, I preferred the native IE UI over the Chrome-lookalike Edge UI.
I’d still have liked for Microsoft to keep maintaining their own engine, but I can understand why they didn’t.
I was playing with the RTM release of Windows 10 which came with the "new Edge" browser (post-IE, pre-Chromium). It's a cool piece of software, very slick and minimal browser UI and not a hint of Copilot anywhere (since that would come ~8 years later).
I imagine it was not as compatible and it was less work to simply rebrand Chromium as Edge.
What was wrong is that they had to foot the bill. Now Google does the hard and expensive part for them.
I meant what was wrong from the user's perspective who complained. Not from MS's perspective.
> What exactly was wrong with Edge(not IE)
The constant fear of having Copilot shoved down your throat whenever you close and update Edge. And Microsoft homepage.
> why was Chromium a sweet taste?
Do zero of the heavy work maintaining a browser engine. Do maximum (little) work of adding AI slop.
>The constant fear of having Copilot shoved down your throat whenever you close and update Edge.
Copilot only cam after they switched Edge Legacy to Edge Chromium.
The problem with windows is not the kernel, as it is preety solid, but user space.
Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.
Windows NT is indeed a pretty solid technical foundation. But I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to destroy that in a push to use AI for ongoing development. Perhaps the kernel team will have enough political sway to avoid that outcome. We'll see.
NTATSTATUS NTBuyTokens(HANDLE hCopilot, DWORD_PTR dwNumTokens, DQWORD dwCreditCardNum);
> another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
They’d have nothing to gain from doing this, NT kernel isn’t the problem with windows.
That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)
If they actually did this they would vendor lock you into a custom DM after one or two iterations and then anyone not using that DM would be locked out of any real software. It's a Trojan horse.
It would not make Windows a good project, but it would mean that hardware vendors would have to implement good Linux drivers. It could therefore help all other distributions, too!
> The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high.
That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...
> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.
You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.
My comment was meant to be an old fogey criticism of giving up on having in-house browser talent and instead just white-labelling chromium, but clearly that's not how it was taken. Another lesson for me in writing clearly (no sarcasm on the internet!), but the last thousand haven't stuck so I'm not terribly optimistic about this one
/s is pretty good
Yeah it’d be crazy to give over control of a core product line to a competitor.
Imagine they got their smart engineers to improve and refine Wine (and adjacent tools), rather than pushing out slop, it would be truly amazing
>Taste comes from knowing what not to build.
Jobs was correct when he said that Microsoft has no taste.
Tahoe...
Apple has now joined them in that, though.
And now Apple started to lose it.
QA? Hardly even know 'er! Windows 11 makes Windows Vista look polished and competent.
They're not even trying anymore.
QA teams were all fired in 2018, and devs asked to take over.
> 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.
It does, imagine how much faster it's going to be in the next model version!
Everyone was just following the boss (Satya)
I think Windows 11 is the Trump moment. Even if they right the ship, Linux is good enough or good enough is on the near horizon for most use cases so people are jumping ship. There's also bleed from people being tired of Apple's lack of software innovation.
The trouble with Microsoft is that even if the ship is holed beneath the waterline it will take a long time to sink.
I think they will find it very hard to right the ship. I suspect they have forgotten how to write good software.
The amount of cognitive dissonance required to work at Microsoft is high. Many people working there insulate themselves from the downsides of what the company produces, they only acknowledge the upsides. They (the many) would not bother to contemplate HN commments like this no matter how many such comments exist
It is a cult-like environment. To the people working there, as long as it pays well and it's easy work, there is no problem
HN commenters should be able to understand this
> because they should have not built them in the first place
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
> The question ... should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
We never, ever, learn from "lessons learned". They are there, just as a generic way, to tell other teams, that there might be some issues.
I deleted "Microsoft" from the quote because this, unfortunately, applies to a lot of companies.
But, but, what about those managers? What they are working on? Making explorer better? or AI AI AI?
Yes, Explorer is better now- it's preloaded to mask how bad it is
> Obviously this is a complete failure of governance.
How so? The forced feeding of AI is what Satya called for.
He's at the top of the governance
Yes, I hear your point. I guess I take failure of governance to mean that rules and procedures were not followed or never properly put in place--not that the head boss is promoting bad strategy and tactics.
You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong.
As an OS, Windows died with 10.
Died? It’s been working perfectly fine for me for years now.
Their customers for Windows are enterprises, OEM's, Azure users and now advertisers. Direct consumers probably don't register in any internal reports.
Seems like Microsoft needs to take an ultra-conservative approach with Windows, and instead build AI in a "new" operating system that people can elect to use.
Too late, idiots. Just as Windows 10 was being retired, you ran the craziest anti-marketing campaign I've ever seen and successfully coaxed me into switching my daily driver to Linux. Until this year, I've been using windows my ENTIRE life.
I recently started a new role and have to use Windows for work.
I am seriously thinking of looking for another role because it is such a HOG.
I'm in the same boat, have to use Windows at work. In addition to whatver MS is doing, every workstation is encumbered with various EDR and antivirus software.
Throw in some docker workloads and it's a party.
Windows 10 is my last Microsoft Windows operating system. Between the fact that I had to turn of TPM in the bios so that I wouldn't wake up one day turn on my computer and see Windows 11. The massive bugs that prevent things like power off. The insane push for AI in everything (notepad? really?).
I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
this isn't new, microsoft has been doing this to its customers for years
For sure, but 11 is on a whole new level in my experience.
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
Windows 10 searching the web started it all for me - not AI. Followed by constantly changing/moving the option on how to disable it. Use Edge, Onedrive, help finish setting up your PC (by logging in), constant disrespect of me the user.
W11 local accounts only with terminal hacks sealed the deal along with valves contributions to linux.
The dumbification of Control Panel to Settings was one of the factors for me.
I'm not sure if Control Panel is still available, hidden away somewhere, but I've since moved on to pastures that only seen to get greener when compared with the Microsoft Windows paddock. They're somehow finding new shades of brown on a monthly basis.
The idea made sense to me, but the execution was trash.
Settings was slow, it wasn't any easier than control panel, and if you wanted to do anything that mattered you ended up in control panel apps which were completely jarring UI-wise from the rest of the PC.
They jumped the gun really.
The way the code assistants like opencode / claude / etc are improving with good models, I could easily see some kind of Copilot-like utility driving the whole OS in a pretty useful way to automate all kinds of tasks, just... not today.
Just like Google shoving the shittiest version of gemini into search results, Microsoft is shoving mostly useless half-baked AI features into Windows. There must be some kind of insane culture of just wanting to ship before it's done and assuming users won't notice it's crap, rather than waiting for a truly good experience.
> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit.
I find it handy here and there. HOWEVER... There is no clear way to get rid of the thing. MS has added tons of features and then burry them in really obtuse ways to get rid of them if you can at all. That is the core of MS's user backlash. It makes people feel like they are not in control of their hardware. When I feed the machine 32 gig of ram and 8 to 12 is already taken up on fresh start something is seriously broken.
The second issue is people feel windows is not keeping up with its competitors (Linux, MacOS). They are throwing features in. When the benchmarks are where they are slowing yielding to their competitors.
The third issues is backwards compat is not as good as it used to be. They made backwards compat one of their key selling points. That is breaking in hundreds of subtle ways that piss people off. If I am going to lose my software to time rot why am I staying with this thing that randomly changes what the start menu looks like every 6 months and I have to figure out again where they put things. Plus now there is this copilot thing chirping all over the place.
CoPilot is not the issue, it is a symptom. It is the total lack of awareness MS has about its user base. It has been this way since windows 8 first launched. I use windows to launch my software and do things. There are 2 other viable OS's out there that do the same thing. If MS had put an advert into the message popup saying 'hey copilot is ready for your machine would you like to turn it on' they would have probably been in a better position. Instead it is on by default and you just get to deal with it. So now feel like 'gee thanks' hey what about these thousands of other issues? How many times are you going to break remote desktop again? How many weird directx 7/8/9 shims do I need to make my game launch this time? Oh an fix the backwards compat tool. It is broken too.
Windows 11 needs a 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on fixing as many bugs as they can. Lower the memory and CPU usage to as low as they can. Fixup the hundreds of backwards compat issues I see all over the net. Just well tested bug fixes.
Notepad had been perfect for 20 years. Morons fucked with it.
I used notepad for quick edit of simple files OR copy pasting and removing formatting.
Copilot excluded, who decided that it was a good idea to have multi tab notepad that remembers unsaved files between executions ?
"We solved that, just go into settings to toggle that behaviour !"
Who decided that notepad had to have a full settings page ?
"Just use the feedback hub" ?
So basically, you removed Wordpad and now regret this decision and are slowly turning notepad into Jeff Raskins' Archy ?
You probably wouldn’t like 20 year old Notepad’s habit of leaving Unicode BOMs everywhere, or only supporting CRLF line endings. They did improve it a tiny amount circa Windows 10.
Does Windows 11 Notepad still choke on loading large files?
I actually liked some of the addictions to notepad, like tabs, reopen files, keeping unsaved files, and the unsaved changes indicator in the tab.
But I think formatting, grammar and ai are going too far for notepad, if I want to do something that need those I would use Word.
The might not be a clear user benefit, but there is a clear career benefit. Delivering AI for a billion users looks good on your CV
> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit
Much of the way AI has been forced upon the world by MS and the likes makes it very difficult to separate the two. The trend of enshittification leading up to LLMs has also not been a solid basis for trust. So yes, for a lot of people, the underlying technology isn't necessarily an issue, but it's kind of hard to imagine it being presented in a non-problematic way given the above, which I suspect is a big part of why there's a growing sentiment of distaste with anything AI now.
Microsoft needs to double down on its ubiquitous AI initiative so that more users can discover the joy of Linux.
As someone that uses Linux distros since 1995, I have had lots of joy getting it to work on various kinds of hardware, during weekends and long nights.
Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)?
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
I got that feeling by looking at their C# docs. It looks like someone had a KPI that was "words of documentation written"
I can’t believe I’m going to type this, but I miss the Ballmer days. Current leadership has somehow made this company even worse.
Ballmer was kinda the best Microsoft CEO for Windows, IMO. He didn't get the Justice department's attention in either the states or Europe, and he started building alternate revenue streams (XBOX, Windows Phone) without destroying the core product. Sure, MetroUI had no place in Server2012, but that was less egregious than the AI-everything and multiple settings menus
Nadella is a marvelous Microsoft CEO for Linux though. Credit where it's due
I miss him as well in regards to Windows development tooling and roadmap.
It's a bit like Bush. Sure, what happened back then was indeed stupid, but we didn't know how bad it was going to get.
Not only did we know, but the "stupid" part is one of the major causes of how bad it's getting, so in retrospect the "stupid" looks even worse.
For both cases, the previous bad management was calculatingly evil but there was reason.
Now it's pure emotional response and acting like rabid animals that lost every single notion but attacking and harming anything they see as a target.
If you haven't seen it before, I'd recommend Dan Luu's blog post about Ballmer:
https://danluu.com/ballmer/
Eh, I am pretty sure that if Ballmer was at the wheel today we would see AI literally everywhere in Windows.
What we’re seeing today with Windows is more representative of the times we’re living in rather than because of who’s the CEO.
I don’t doubt for a second Ballmer would also be jumping onto the AI hype train if he was still running the show.
wel, I was fired (after multiple rounds of downsizing our team from ~200 people to 20 people) by the new guy Satya back in the day, so yeah, I prefer Ballmer's approach as well
Between this, the paused NVIDIA deal and the reports of Claude Code within MSFT, I can't help but think that OpenAI is in trouble.
This reminds me of a useful tool I encountered recently..
Winslop is an open source tool that removes Windows 11 bloatware, disables AI features like Copilot, and restores useful settings: https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop
They'll pretend to care and change a few things for 6 months, but they'll just keep doing it. /shrug
Yeah, this is a public relations effort. Corporations, especially ones that have spent an obscene amount of money on AI companies aren't going to change their direction. They have to justify that spending to their shareholders.
Great. Let us hope that support for hardware without TPM is next. Creating several mountains worth of electronic waste was a terrible decision. And in the middle of the AI-induced memory shortage!
Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.
Motherboards have had TPM support (built-in/exteral) since like 2017. Are there a bunch of models that don't support a plug-in TPM? I guess the BIOS would probably be the next issue.
The only thing my 2010 desktop can’t do well is run a local LLM.
It can even run diffusion models. I spent a few hundred on a video card for it during the pandemic.
Why should I want to add a TPM to it (assuming it’s even possible)?
Microsoft had gained my goodwill as a linux user when they didn't immediately destroy github and embraced open source
I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again.
I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners
Remove copilot buttons from (new) Windows laptops and we'll talk.
Huh, I just noticed that my laptop has one. Never recognized it.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that I actually have faith in the people actually developing Windows. I'm not at all aurprised that they are rebelling against stupid non-features. But that rebelling doesn't amount to anything, since managers and decrees from the top funnel all effort into the most user-hostile results possible.
If MS rehires their QA teams and listen to the people on the ground, I'd imagine the very same devs who put AI in Notepad would be very happy to give us features we actually want.
Lions led by donkeys, geniuses led by pointy haired bosses.
As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/server).
Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games.
Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
Our recent computers all came with a copy of Win11 that never made it past the setup flow.
However, they regularly run win 3.11 under “dosbox staging”, which is a greatly improved, but poorly named fork of dosbox.
Thing is, at the time it felt like these experiences (e.g. demos) were rare and a treat; nowadays you can open up Steam or the App Store and get full versions of full games with hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay right there and then.
Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.
I love the care and polish that went into the Microsoft Windows XP Welcome/Tour app that played after install. That was the peak of the summit—quality wise.
Yeah, there was a lot of good memories. And it does have a 64-bit version so not a too-bad option as a retro-OS. But I think we need to find retro hardware for it to work properly.
Maybe it's a bad idea to build critical UI bits with React? I mean, I'm a big fan of React for a lot of things... but I don't think critical pieces of UI/UX interactions should be built with it at all.
The taskbar, start menu, file explorer, desktop and system settings are areas that should be boring, consistent and just work. That hasn't been close to the case since Windows 7.. Windows 8 was the start of the decline and that was over 13 years ago. While I like some of the things that have come to Windows since then, there's probably twice as much to dislike. Hire/promote/raise someone to act as a UX czar for Windows all around... design a "final" UI/UX target that covers existing features (starting with a checklist of everything that currently can be configured everywhere)... and finish that design.
Stop shifting gears and enshitifying the overall experience to wring every cent of "value" out of every user out there. Get a full release cycle or two with no new features... just solid bug fixes and a more consistent UI/UX. I know there's kernel features for new GPUs, improved storage and CPU interactions and scheduling... but the UI/UX on top of the kernel is a mess and it shows too well.
Get your staff aligned on a common UX theme... I don't care if it's back to Fluent or something closer to where Win11 is, but at least get it consistent above all else. It's a mess. Fire half the managers... stop giving out bonuses based on new features in windows, and give bonuses on sections of config/settings that are marked as complete without falling back to legacy UI from the late 90's. Not that the 90's setup was that bad compared to the hybrid bastard we have today.
All I want is for this stuff to be a separate addon.
Anyway, I re encrypted my Windows install a few days ago. Linux is still an adventure the moment you need to do anything difficult.
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.
For sure, and mainly because the stakes are so high - they invested billions into it. But despite AI being very popular - loads of people ask ChatGPT or Gemini before punching in two words into a search engine - it's hard to monetize, or the monetization does not cover costs let alone investments made.
AI tools are here to stay but they'll be scaled back a lot. Plus, there's still so much investments made into it that there's enough free plans or free alternatives (remember DeepSeek?), and you can't compete with free.
For people who work in very classified/secure environments (designing weapons systems, rev eng UFO's, etc...) does M$ offer some version of windows without all of the AI crap and bloat?
The latest Windows 11 Pro for Workstations builds appears to still support workgroup or domain joins without requiring a Microsoft account. In terms of the OS still shipping with crap, it is still there but since there's no Internet connection the crap is largely useless.
I think the windows 11 IOT LTSC release is what you're looking for
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
No, not the IoT client build, but the Server build with Desktop enabled.
Yeah absolutely, but you'll never be able to install / license that version of Windows
I understand the approach Satya took initially. He had a big investment in AI. He saw a theoretical value in AI supporting productivity. And he pushed his developers and creators to imagine and mock up ideas how AI would deliver.
Obviously the last part was disappointing. In hindsight, the push was far too aggressive, and too mediocre. We have a lot to learn from this try, about ourselves and about others.
Integration 2.0 will be or needs to be a bit more skewed towards low hanging fruits. I want a copilot for the help menu, and for the 1000 commands not in the toolbar, and a copilot enhancement to the search bar (which came from google!). And a natural language interface to bring up templates, open files, and look for images. Apple could have done this AI enhancement with settings, and added a start button to open apps.
As for "privacy", that is the first scream that comes out from people who have never touched the product. Assurety should have been made that all data would be local. This runs contrary to the "data is the new oil" direction, but it would have been a good way to entice the skeptics and eventually swallow them whole to give up their privacy (insert evil laugh here).
There’s no way to set up Windows to respect your privacy at this point.
Windows 10 was the turning point on this. They charge you for the software, and charge you again by stealing your data.
They even used to have a whitepaper explaining how any MS employee can remotely pull any file from any windows machine with managerial approval.
[delayed]
He is just Marissa Mayer level of competence without the hotness.
I doubt the higher ups in MS even use windows, they probably have MacBooks.
Honestly, they probably do.
Too little, too late, and too specific in scope. Windows 11 is awful not merely because of the AI bullshit being shoehorned into everything, everywhere (CoPilot in Notepad? In Paint? Are you serious, Microsoft?!), but also because of all the other completely unnecessary changes made to the OS. A curated selection of real-world examples from my recent gig making a hardened Windows 11 image for a physical product line:
* Kiosk Mode via the shell launcher delays logon times from <5s to 30-180s - just by turning it on, even if it doesn’t actually enable kiosk mode!
* Local changes via registry keys don’t “stick” consistently, even when the machine is entirely offline
* Offline activations using hardware keys fail across vendors without anyone knowing why (other than Microsoft, for the cost of a support call)
* Existing Windows 10 powercfg scripts and config files do not work with Win11. Our workaround was manually calling the exact same command twice, back-to-back, to force-apply a change.
* Installing language packs via the command line by any means available (Powershell’s add-windowscapability, DISM’s package installer, lpksetup, etc) do not actually populate the GUI with those packs as an option until we reinstall them from the GUI again.
* Adverts are everywhere, even on IoT LTSC Enterprise
Honestly, Microsoft completely lost the plot as to what an operating system is supposed to do in favor of turning it into an advertising and user surveillance machine masquerading as a useful OS.
I hate it.
Besides the general awfulness of Windows that you describe, have you looked at C:\Windows recently? It is an unorganised mess with multiple different case styling all over the place. I get this is not that important but I can't help feel it illustrates just how little care is taken behind the scenes. The whole thing seems like a nightmare to deal with.
I had a fresh install of Windows on a new computer which refused to install updates until I ran a bunch of commands in the "terminal". The whole thing is beyond fixing at this point.
C:\Windows has always been that way. There's no demand for it to be organised in any way other than unique filenames.
It's like this _offline_ OS is now somehow doing things in async mode and sometimes they just don't work. That's how it feels.
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.
They need a more fundamental mind shift frankly.
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
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.
Agree – "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"
I never thought I would have to give up Notepad on Windows for quick file edits. But now with AI in notepad, paint, snap tool, etc, I had to install and use third party alternatives all the time.
right click on notepad and uninstall it. Then the old notepad pops right back (it never left)
So Copilot in Office is the new "Hall of Tortured Souls"?
Too be honest, thres is too much wrong with win 11 to save it at this point.
Is not only AI bullshit in my notepad.
The excess adds, intrusive online stuff, terriblee performance for basic tasks like the File Explorer or even opening a menu.
Making everything a damn web page...
One clear example is outlook. Talk wathever you want, outlook, is the indistry standart for e-mail. And while not perfect it was very usefull. Then they keep pushing the new interface on everybody throats. The new interface takes like 1 gb of RAM when in use, agaisnt 200mb of the traditional one, while offering less options. Why would anyone who really cares about e-mail use that shit? People who just casually use e-mails dont use Outlook, they use the webmail.
They choose to ignore the users, and push top down changes into them. But the market dont really works this way for most people. Not every tech company needs to be like Apple.
It’s amazing how much worse outlook got and how fast it got so much worse. It also can’t handle screens with different scales, it sometimes inexplicably fails to render an email, printing can produce files of different size - using the web version produces smaller pdfs than the desktop version. I miss thunderbird a lot since the company forced Outlook use and also removed the classic outlook option - or maybe it only has the weird white space version now.
While I did enjoy thunderbird its lack of hability to use microsoft outlook protocol for e-mail and calendas, always keeped me from use it.
Also, to be honest, I dont trust mozilla anymore than microsoft these days.
In the end is hardto see why they banked so heavy into it. When open AI started t o make promisses and everybody saw what it could do, Microsoft invested heavily on it, seeing some of the largest increase in its shares, and in consequence on big fat bonus for its executives.
NOw that the hype is naturally going down, and people are encountering limitations in what modern AI can do, and having more realistic expectations, Microsoft hype train stoped in middle of the hill climb.
They pretty much exchanged gradual increases in revenue for a quick but ultimally short term profit.
I genuinely think that an "agentic" (I hate that word) OS would be incredibly useful. But both how Copilot was integrated into Windows and it simply being a terrible model destroyed that possibility.
I think it can work. In about what? 10 years, maybe more. Tech is simply not yet on the same page as a star trekk computer that you can talk and make it work.
And the main thing that needs to change for it to work is, that AI agents need to run locally, with your own agent without needing cloud processing. Maybe when we get into this point, is when it will make sense, from a pratical and private way.
Now what could work is making a traditional OS, but exposing ways of its power users maketheir own IA agents with the OS data, and this way choose what they want to share wth the cloud.
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.
It's the same geniuses that come up with the worst product names possible. Like they came up with a really good product name and inverted the value to use the opposite.
The problem is that the engineers and coders that ran microsoft are no longer doing so. Their leadership is too disconnected.
It's the same recipe of enshittification you see all over, marketing, sales take over along with consultants and MBA's. Except, I think in Microsoft's case there are still enough people who know about the technology to be dangerous, they're not entirely clueless, they just know enough (like about AI in this case) to be dangerous.
Regardless of the sentiment on HN and elsewhere though, even excluding enterprise usage, I doubt windows' marketshare will suffer more than 10% YoY.
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.
The moat is still secure. So the strategy is to loot as much value as possible from within the moat. After all, where are the corporate customers going to go?
I think the summary is that "product owner" types and other agile simulacrums wanted it simply because they viewed it as an easy win towards KPI and other performance metrics. The most damning proof of this is Copilot in Notepad, and that half-attempt at renaming the entire Office suite to simply "Copilot" (they seemed to reverse this a few days later).
urgh. What is old is new. "Copilot" is the new omniname, what ".NET" was for a previous generation.
I think that’s a little harsh. When the CEO groupthink network says AI all the things, what are the PMs supposed to do?
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.
5 years? try 10
Windows 10 released with the ability for the user to not consent to updates REMOVED
the direction of travel from that point on was clear
consent was no longer necessary
the OS is purpose is no longer to serve the owner of the computer, it is there to serve Microslop's whims
and that was the point I went full linux everywhere
Its a fair point.
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.
It's a shame, I was dreaming of getting a chat-based operating system.
(sarcasm)
I'm hopeful but will wait and see just how much they change. If they remove Copilot from Notepad, I think that would be a reasonable indicator.
Please, delete all AI from my Windows
Not your property, sorry.
This PC, not My Computer
After relentless pressure from Microsoft finally switched to Linux. I won't say it is smooth sail - but it respects your time and PC resources. Which Windows does not. Windows has had abhorrently slow Explorer, File Search and almost any end user interaction for couple of years now. And is so full of crap that can't be disabled or even don't know what it is doing.
What's concerning isn't that they pushed AI and then walked it back.
What's concerning is that they lack judgment and proper insight into why pushing it in the first place was a bad idea.
If your OS truly is a product, users should not be beta-testers. This isn't an indie kickstarter game.
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?
I don't like this. Bad user experience with AI and general enshitification of Windows was the push that many people needed to at least try Linux, and for companies to take Linux a bit more serious as the desktop platform.
I think the more important platform is Laptop right now. Linux on laptops has battery life issues because unfortunately modern/hardware software makes it so "good battery life" is a knifes edge configuration.
I would also cheer on Microsoft to accelerate Windows into an immovable object.
Can they go back and restart from Windows 7?
Too little, too late.
Yeah, and you know how to know this is true?
This story has already dropped three quarters of the way down the front page and has a grand total of 72 points. Topics that people really give a damn about on this site often garner 1000 - 2000 points and stay on the front page for 36 hours or more, but nobody cares about this.
They’ve already lost the HN audience and there’s certainly an element of where we go everybody else eventually follows, because I suspect we skew influential in the companies we work for.
Did they ever have the hn audience? Over the years I've gotten the impression most folks here are primarily Mac and Linux for daily drivers.
Not surprised it took so long, the decision makers seems to be quite out of touch with the user base.
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.
Is it just me that sees "Windows Recall" and thinks "Total Recall -> Arnold Schwarzenegger -> Terminator"?
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.
AI overload? It's called "a complete shitshow".
Was this push for AI in Microsofts products just to get user number to go up, so investors don't pull out of the AI bubble?
I think it was just to get managers and product owners excited, so they get their companies to buy azure compute for AI.
Can we walk back on whatever is causing my 3060 computer to work slower than my windows computer from the 1990s? Or my phone?
1. Find out what Co-pilot's reputation is among power users.
2. Realize that Co-pilot is bad and needs to improve up to Microsoft's highest gold standards of trustworthiness.
3. Ditch Co-pilot branding inside the OS.
4. Make AI features private and offline by default unless the local hardware cannot run the specialized tiny model for that task, at which point it goes online for it. It might be slower, but if it does the thing, it's ok.
5. Allow companies and power users to provide their own local models that hook into these tasks, so they can host AI servers within the company and these AI tasks never reach outside of the company.
6. Make AI features more specific, targeted and useful instead of simply integrating it into the various functions and throwing it at users like "here, you figure out what to do with this thing, we don't know."
7. Don't expect people to want to chat with it in every app, just find a task that you know it succeeds at and expose that task rather than letting users figure out what it sucks at.
8. Don't make the AI integration APIs a case of increased surface area privacy and security risk that 3rd party system apps can hook into, to mass extract information out of every app on your system easily. Put limitations on it.
9. Add features to specify where AI can go and cannot go, just like the microphone. Folders, apps, online services. Even if it does use Co-pilot online, let users sculpt it.
10. Make it explicit and obvious when AI features are operating offline or online. If users have decades of understanding that Notepad is a private offline app, preserve that expectation as much as possible. Just because Outlook and OneNote are very online-oriented apps, it doesn't mean they want their local experience to be online in every way. If you force AI to go over all my cloud files, notes and e-mail without my permission, that is sociopathic behavior and I will ditch you, Microsoft.
Some day Co-pilot will probably be good. That isn't today. It's probably not this year or next year, but eventually. Until then, it needs to stay in a lane with freshly painted lines surrounded with sand barrels in case it wrecks.
It's not that I'm entirely opposed to some Microsoft AI feature existing in Windows, but manufacturing a user assumption that it is everywhere all the time is bad not just for Windows, but for society as a whole.
We've already seen how political and activist the public sphere became over the last decade, which reduces trust in the people who make software and services too. What do we do when Microsoft gets ideologically taken over and abuses its information access to people for political ends?
Show you can be trusted. When I put a little food bowl down for you, don't scratch me and we'll go from there.
microsoft saw global enshittification and thought enshittifying enshittification would be a valid strategy to one-up their competition
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.