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Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when th

Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn't really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they're going to do this with Teams now. For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices. Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers. It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.

rektide 5y ago
It's such an interesting contrast, for both ends of Microsoft to have reversed so heavily. The core consumer product once fought for betterment and improvement. "Where do you want to go today" was the slogan, suggesting users the helm, piloting their Personal Computer wherever they may. Oh, and it was a complete vision, totalizing. Microsoft did not care at all about open source, webdev, Linux, or broader ecosystem outside their castle. The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.
- skoskie 5y ago
  > But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.
  - rektide 5y ago
    I think there is a danger, but hubris has gotten them way up shits creek & their relevance was rapidly moving to 0. Desktop platform is dying, mobile barely matters and they have no presence there... Microsoft started playing with others because pretending they were the unilateral giant that could dictate terms to the world landed them on a small shrinking pathetic island. So help them gods if they try that shit again. That said, I 100% absolutely endorse caution. The past couple years of behaviors are no indicator Microsoft will stay a societally-positive technological force. The corruption & darkness & manipulation could play back in at any moment. Already, Microsoft creating very special terms of service for things like VSCode Remote Development Plugin, having extremely fantastically proprietary implementations for the incredibly useful/popular/fantastic LiveShare are harbingers of the old ways, indicators that Microsoft just wants to force the door open, not really engage & participate. For now though, I still overall think they are doing good work, pariticpating/not domineering (with some caveats). They learned very very very personally what happens when you violate the core rule of software, the most important maxim, not couched as such but absolutely of key vitality to computing: "Create more value than you capture." -Tim O'Reilly. Of course, all organizations forget the/their past. And I quake thinking of how many people pretend they are using/learning Linux while never seeing systemd, freedesktop, the greater Linux project: WSL is amazing but a dark & tragic small death for the real open source, & it's cheered on & fanboyed endlessly for enabling the blessed ignorant. You are right. Adopter beware.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Another thing that really bothers me about Microsoft is all the logging they do. They don't care about privacy at all. They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder. I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter. They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.
Silhouette 5y ago
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do. Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them. Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  As a developer I want to implement everything possible on the web platform. It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are. As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.
  - skoskie 5y ago
    I agree with all of your points yet come to the opposite conclusion. Choosing the web means everything I make goes through Google’s hands in one way or another, which irks me. Plus it evolves so quickly that you can’t just make a good product and let it be. I’m learning rust as time allows.
  - 5y ago
banana_giraffe 5y ago
Even stuff like WSL is loosing it's shine now for me. I've personally hit a bug on multiple computers that I can reliably repo a blue screen if I attempt to update a specific package. The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago. Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Is that WSL 1 or 2?
  - banana_giraffe 5y ago
    WSL 1, my attempt to install WSL 2 after this BSOD failed miserably, put a machine in a boot loop, I haven't dug into what was going on there.
    - gruez 5y ago
      AFAIK WSL 1 isn't actively being worked on anymore, now that there's WSL 2. As for your issue with WSL 2, it runs off hyper-v, so my guess is that there's something with your BIOS/UEFI/firmware settings that's breaking it (eg. secureboot/CSM, TPM, virtualization).
      - banana_giraffe 5y ago
        You might be right about WSL 1 being dead, which is just annoying since it's useful for me. Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
coryrc 5y ago
> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste" -- Steve Jobs
- petilon 5y ago
  You could say that about the post-Steve-Jobs Apple as well.
  - sgjohnson 5y ago
    Is that really true though? Yes, the UIs Apple make are no longer anywhere near as intuitive as they were in Steve Jobs’ days, but Apple definitely still have their soul. You don’t even have to look further than the latest iMacs.
    - dogleash 5y ago
      >Apple definitely still have their soul Really? It's all so painful sterile. Even their attempts at deviating from that coldness feel like someone with a spreadsheet calculated they should increase the brand-safe fun quotient in sector 7G by 4%.
- pseudostem 5y ago
  I believe this [1] is the interview from which the quote is taken. [1] https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4 https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4
8note 5y ago
Nobody has figured out how to get the old windows ink back, unfortunately. I basically lost the reason for having a windows touch+pen input screen:/ and nobody has found out how to get the killer app back. I suspect that only pre-windows 8 good features will be retained over time
- poopooracoocoo 5y ago
  Windows Ink? Do you mean Windows Ink Workspace or Windows Sketchpad? It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble. Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.
QuantumSeed 5y ago
To your point, the Programs and Features section of the Windows 11 Control Panel no longer lists Microsoft Teams as a product that can be uninstalled.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  To be fair, that legacy control panel doesn't list any apps that use the AppX/MSIX packaging model introduced with Windows 8. I'm still not on Windows 11, so I don't know if Teams is listed in the newer list of apps available in modern Settings, but it's worth looking there.
  - iotku 5y ago
    They deliberately gray out and disable the button that works for every other application if I recall correctly.
  - ripley12 5y ago
    "Microsoft Teams" is present for in Settings -> Apps -> Apps & Features on Win11 for me. But given how they're integrating Teams into the OS, I wouldn't be surprised if I lose the ability to uninstall it soon.
    - lpcvoid 5y ago
      The fact that they are making that huge hunk of trash a core part of Windows tells me everything I need to know about the direction they are headed into. How does anybody put up with Windows in 2022?
  - lproven 5y ago
    There are loads of "modern" apps that can't be uninstalled from Win10. Some are in the list but you're not allowed; some aren't in the list. But it's easy to copy-and-paste a bit of Powershell and just uninstall them anyway: https://www.techsupportall.com/uninstall-built-apps-windows-10/ https://www.techsupportall.com/uninstall-built-apps-windows-... There are 3rd party tools too: https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10s-built-in-apps-and-how-to-reinstall-them/ https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10...
LegitShady 5y ago
since the announcement that windows 11 will require a microsoft account to install, I've decided that windows 10 is the last version of windows I will use for my personal computers. Your description of microsoft's opinion of their customers ('nobody at microsoft...actually cares') is apt.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  I wonder if that will be true of the Enterprise LTSC/LTSB version.
jiggawatts 5y ago
There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone. Some random examples: Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure. Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox. Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR. Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows. To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ. There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
As far as the Skype thing is concerned, isn't that the exact thing they got sued for with Explorer for in the 90's?... or somewhat similar?
- onpensionsterm 5y ago
  It is, as is the embedding of Edge as a default browser. The attitude seems to be that it doesn't matter anymore or that it's worth doing even if they do get in trouble.
  - bacchusracine 5y ago
    They're all paid up on their bribes now so they aren't worried. What's a bit of monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior when you've got a few Senators and other Bedfellows in your pockets?
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Would be interestng to know how many non-enterprise Windows users have ever made a direct payment to Microsoft. For that segment, the company suffers from the same problem as "tech" companies. The non-enterprise Windows user is not the customer. Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.
joe_the_user 5y ago
It's like being in an abusive relationship. Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced. I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things). Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.
- hulitu 5y ago
  A lot of people stay because it is required by the school or the employer.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  I've seen so many people say things like: "Windows is fine, all you have to do is [gigantic list of obscure settings changes, registry edits, external freeware programs] to turn off the telemetry!" It will eventually get to the point where it will take more settings-twiddling to make Windows do what you actually want than Linux does.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    I used an Ubuntu 21.10 installer recently, it was completely uneventful to set up with the default side-by-side configuration and actually easier than the Windows one (which must create a Windows account, you can then disconnect this from your local account later with a magic settings dance).
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions. Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use, where you get your choice between "up to date but frequently broken" rolling-release[0] or "several years out of date but probably stable". To me, the idea it is considered reasonable to expect a user to set up a dev environment and compile software from source is ludicrous, but until relatively recently that's been the norm[1]. Thankfully, AppImage and Flatpak have been gaining popularity and making that much less of a problem. Now the two biggest things keeping me from switching immediately are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane[2], and my Oculus isn't supported at all[3]. Still, I'll go to Linux before I go to Win 11. [0] which still often has out of date and missing packages [1] for anything not packaged by the distro or if you need a newer version [2] thanks Bitcoin Idiots, LLC [3] and from everything I gather no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
mulmen 5y ago
WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.
- lproven 5y ago
  Strongly agreed. WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all. Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor? https://github.com/google/gvisor https://github.com/google/gvisor Others have done it. Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator
  - chithanh 5y ago
    > I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all. As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
    - lproven 5y ago
raxxorrax 5y ago
I think any developer that could long moved from their ecosystems by now. You can see that if you try to get technical knowledge. I can imagine that there are many departments that have to continually justify their existence and management tries to find the one-hit wonder that gets users engaged. All these departments try to have their dejure product integrated into Windows to have a chance to pump up their KPI. You should be able to tell an operating system that it is not allowed to phone home. That is not possible in Windows, on the contrary, they have increased their spying dramatically. It has been a adversarial relationship for a long time by now and I don't see any attempts to change course or anyone that really cares for the platform. Their corporate integration and PC gaming keeps Windows relevant for now, but people will look elsewhere.
spc476 5y ago
You are not the target audience for Microsoft, the corporation is. Who uses a home computer anymore? (it's all smart phones now) You start work, you get a pre-installed Windows laptop to use by the corporate IT department, configured to be used as they see fit. You no longer own a computer. Nobody is expected to, these days.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > Who uses a home computer anymore? Me (but not Windows), my three grown children, my sister, at least one brother in law. At least half of the people I know personally. Half of them using laptops, the rest desktop machines. All of them have smartphones, and sometimes tablets, as well.
- theclansman 5y ago
  I think combining Macbooks and gaming PCs then home computers are being used more than ever, but I'm not sure, it's true that you don't need one to browse facebook anymore. But at the same time I don't know anyone without a laptop.
Neil44 5y ago
They are doing this with Teams and it gets better, it’s a different Teams than normal that looks the same but only accepts personal MS accounts not business / 365 ones. WTF?
DrBazza 5y ago
> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either. It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads? I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need. And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Making money and caring about users are related, but there's definitely a difference between making a good product that people would like to use, and trying to make money. The latter may well make you rich, but it may make your product much worse, which you shore up with lots of salespeople and complex pricing schemes and dealmaking to keep people locked in.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Totally unrelated: The Microsoft PowerApps licencing PDF is 6 pages long.
- cyxxon 5y ago
  Or they do have an idea what the users want, but it is still bad... at my job, the non-technical managers bought the SAP marketing koolaid, promised our internal users the cool new stuff they were going to get with the new software, and we in the IT just want to scream and say, no, you can't get that, that's not supported, or will take a year to build because we would have to revamp almost everything ourselves... and, yes, all because at SAP no one knows what users need. We have had several rounds with SAP PMs already were they basically said "huh, that's interesting, that's how you work with the software? We need to discuss this internally." Well... good thing you didn't ask before launching the new version then.
MrPatan 5y ago
I don't even know what is my microsoft account anymore. I have created so many for so many services and devices over the years that I don't have a "main" one anymore. So every new install is a crapshot, I try to go local account only, but something gets in the way and I end up creating yet another one for that specific device. It's madness.
spaniard89277 5y ago
From my POV it has come to a time where the tradeoffs you make switching to Linux (xubuntu in my case) are worth it. A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery/safe mode and take a look. But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn't work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it. I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse. If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point? Its just too much effort.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?" Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need. (except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)
  - Zopieux 5y ago
    Are you complaining about missing drivers in Linux? For the life of me, I never had to install any particular driver since like 2010 on both laptops and workstations. Not even for printers. Specialized audio/video equipment? Probably, and of course the vendor will only provide them for Windows.
    - MonaroVXR 5y ago
      HP Envy x360 2021 AMD Ryzen 5700U Needs a touchpad driver on both Fedora and Pop?_OS, I'm not sure if this is still true or not. I don't really care, since I can fix this. I use all the major operating systems.
    - 5y ago
syshum 5y ago
I dont think it is contempt for the users, It is more that consumers (i.e non-enterprise editions of windows) is the Beta Test group for windows Microsoft has always been, and will always be an enterprise company, they do not care about Consumers, and they do not care about SMB business. they care about Large Enterprise. I have seen it countless times in my career, SMB space and can be complaining up a storm about a problem for years but until some 20,000+ employee CTO has the problem MS will not give it the time of day. It is all numbers, and if you are not a government or Large corporation Microsoft does not give you the time of day
- digisign 5y ago
  You've just described the passive side of "contempt."
rbanffy 5y ago
Windows and macOS users have different expectations. On a Mac, I expect my login account to also know my Apple ID and connect seamlessly with my iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, Messages, and all other Apple cloud services. I like being able to answer phone calls on the computer when the phone is nearby. When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like, it faces a couple problems - not everyone wants to be on Skype or Teams - some people use Zoom or Slack. To make things worse, even Microsoft products are not well integrated into the platform. Depending on how I open a SharePoint document, I can either have another Edge window, with an online version of an Office app or the standalone app opening (with different UI conventions on how shared edits work). The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed. And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.
- q-big 5y ago
  > When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? Not sure. Macs are not that available and, in some places, are prohibitively expensive. Others would love the everything-integrated experience while using software that runs only on Windows. I'm not sure Microsoft even has that "core customer" as neatly defined as Apple (or Linux). Getting a Mac or a Linux box is a deliberate action, whilst, for the end user, getting a Windows box is the default when you get a "generic" computer. One group I can think of is the corporate administrators, who want to deliver a locked down set of functions to corporate workstations - VPN settings, firewalls, blocked websites, custom update schedules, and so on. That same crowd also orders Macs and Chromebooks with the same goals. What Microsoft can do is to offer tailored experiences for specific groups - people who want everything to just work (who'll be happy with Skype logging them on on boot, with OneDrive backing stuff up...), gamers who'll definitely not want Skype to interrupt them and who have nothing to back up to OneDrive, but, sometimes, want to record and stream their games, Windows developers who'll spend most of their time within Visual Studio and the MSDN KB (am I dating myself here?), and so on. I'm very sure they have a list of personas already built for that.
rbanffy 5y ago
The one thing I find the most terrible is the "10 different UI conventions" thing. Dig enough and I bet you'll find a control panel or some other thing the has Windows NT 3.1 look and feel. It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.
- 6yyyyyy 5y ago
  Open "ODBC Data Sources" from the start menu Click "Add..." Click "Finish" with "Microsoft Access Driver" selected (no, you're not finished) Click "Select..."
  - UberFly 5y ago
    Ding ding ding. You win the prize. Every click is a step back in time.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    If you are curious but don't have Windows: https://imgur.com/a/40vuBTK https://imgur.com/a/40vuBTK
  - Ruphin 5y ago
    Thanks for the trip down memory lane
  - superleo2020 5y ago
    Disappointingly this wasn't in the ARM version (the access driver). Just SQL Server. Wonder if it can be found anywhere else. I did try the old progman.exe (via x86 compatability), and while it worked, it uses the modern API for the file dialog.
segmondy 5y ago
As the techie helping my folks with their Windows issue, it was far easier and better for my mental health to spend my own money buying everyone chromebooks and ipads.
yibg 5y ago
Is it nobody cares or they care about different things? If you want to be cynical, they care about making money. But could it also be that they're more focused on the general population (who don't care as much about this stuff)? It's hard to tell for me to be honest, but are we (e.g. HN crowd) just a minority of power users that are in our own echo chamber complaining and making us happy doesn't really move the needle for MSFT?
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Even on Linux, when I use the Teams Electron program (app? website in a dress?), it comes up in the PulseAudio mixer as Skype.

rektide 5y ago

It's such an interesting contrast, for both ends of Microsoft to have reversed so heavily. The core consumer product once fought for betterment and improvement. "Where do you want to go today" was the slogan, suggesting users the helm, piloting their Personal Computer wherever they may. Oh, and it was a complete vision, totalizing. Microsoft did not care at all about open source, webdev, Linux, or broader ecosystem outside their castle. The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.

skoskie 5y ago
> But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.
- rektide 5y ago
  I think there is a danger, but hubris has gotten them way up shits creek & their relevance was rapidly moving to 0. Desktop platform is dying, mobile barely matters and they have no presence there... Microsoft started playing with others because pretending they were the unilateral giant that could dictate terms to the world landed them on a small shrinking pathetic island. So help them gods if they try that shit again. That said, I 100% absolutely endorse caution. The past couple years of behaviors are no indicator Microsoft will stay a societally-positive technological force. The corruption & darkness & manipulation could play back in at any moment. Already, Microsoft creating very special terms of service for things like VSCode Remote Development Plugin, having extremely fantastically proprietary implementations for the incredibly useful/popular/fantastic LiveShare are harbingers of the old ways, indicators that Microsoft just wants to force the door open, not really engage & participate. For now though, I still overall think they are doing good work, pariticpating/not domineering (with some caveats). They learned very very very personally what happens when you violate the core rule of software, the most important maxim, not couched as such but absolutely of key vitality to computing: "Create more value than you capture." -Tim O'Reilly. Of course, all organizations forget the/their past. And I quake thinking of how many people pretend they are using/learning Linux while never seeing systemd, freedesktop, the greater Linux project: WSL is amazing but a dark & tragic small death for the real open source, & it's cheered on & fanboyed endlessly for enabling the blessed ignorant. You are right. Adopter beware.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Another thing that really bothers me about Microsoft is all the logging they do. They don't care about privacy at all. They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder. I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter. They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.

Silhouette 5y ago

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do. Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them. Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago
As a developer I want to implement everything possible on the web platform. It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are. As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.
- skoskie 5y ago
  I agree with all of your points yet come to the opposite conclusion. Choosing the web means everything I make goes through Google’s hands in one way or another, which irks me. Plus it evolves so quickly that you can’t just make a good product and let it be. I’m learning rust as time allows.
- 5y ago

banana_giraffe 5y ago

Even stuff like WSL is loosing it's shine now for me. I've personally hit a bug on multiple computers that I can reliably repo a blue screen if I attempt to update a specific package. The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago. Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.

mwcampbell 5y ago
Is that WSL 1 or 2?
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  WSL 1, my attempt to install WSL 2 after this BSOD failed miserably, put a machine in a boot loop, I haven't dug into what was going on there.
  - gruez 5y ago
    AFAIK WSL 1 isn't actively being worked on anymore, now that there's WSL 2. As for your issue with WSL 2, it runs off hyper-v, so my guess is that there's something with your BIOS/UEFI/firmware settings that's breaking it (eg. secureboot/CSM, TPM, virtualization).
    - banana_giraffe 5y ago
      You might be right about WSL 1 being dead, which is just annoying since it's useful for me. Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago

coryrc 5y ago

> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste" -- Steve Jobs

petilon 5y ago
You could say that about the post-Steve-Jobs Apple as well.
- sgjohnson 5y ago
  Is that really true though? Yes, the UIs Apple make are no longer anywhere near as intuitive as they were in Steve Jobs’ days, but Apple definitely still have their soul. You don’t even have to look further than the latest iMacs.
  - dogleash 5y ago
    >Apple definitely still have their soul Really? It's all so painful sterile. Even their attempts at deviating from that coldness feel like someone with a spreadsheet calculated they should increase the brand-safe fun quotient in sector 7G by 4%.
pseudostem 5y ago
I believe this [1] is the interview from which the quote is taken. [1] https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4 https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4

8note 5y ago

Nobody has figured out how to get the old windows ink back, unfortunately. I basically lost the reason for having a windows touch+pen input screen:/ and nobody has found out how to get the killer app back. I suspect that only pre-windows 8 good features will be retained over time

poopooracoocoo 5y ago
Windows Ink? Do you mean Windows Ink Workspace or Windows Sketchpad? It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble. Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.

QuantumSeed 5y ago

To your point, the Programs and Features section of the Windows 11 Control Panel no longer lists Microsoft Teams as a product that can be uninstalled.

mwcampbell 5y ago
To be fair, that legacy control panel doesn't list any apps that use the AppX/MSIX packaging model introduced with Windows 8. I'm still not on Windows 11, so I don't know if Teams is listed in the newer list of apps available in modern Settings, but it's worth looking there.
- iotku 5y ago
  They deliberately gray out and disable the button that works for every other application if I recall correctly.
- ripley12 5y ago
  "Microsoft Teams" is present for in Settings -> Apps -> Apps & Features on Win11 for me. But given how they're integrating Teams into the OS, I wouldn't be surprised if I lose the ability to uninstall it soon.
  - lpcvoid 5y ago
    The fact that they are making that huge hunk of trash a core part of Windows tells me everything I need to know about the direction they are headed into. How does anybody put up with Windows in 2022?
- lproven 5y ago
  There are loads of "modern" apps that can't be uninstalled from Win10. Some are in the list but you're not allowed; some aren't in the list. But it's easy to copy-and-paste a bit of Powershell and just uninstall them anyway: https://www.techsupportall.com/uninstall-built-apps-windows-10/ https://www.techsupportall.com/uninstall-built-apps-windows-... There are 3rd party tools too: https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10s-built-in-apps-and-how-to-reinstall-them/ https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10...

LegitShady 5y ago

since the announcement that windows 11 will require a microsoft account to install, I've decided that windows 10 is the last version of windows I will use for my personal computers. Your description of microsoft's opinion of their customers ('nobody at microsoft...actually cares') is apt.

at_a_remove 5y ago
I wonder if that will be true of the Enterprise LTSC/LTSB version.

jiggawatts 5y ago

There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone. Some random examples: Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure. Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox. Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR. Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows. To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ. There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

As far as the Skype thing is concerned, isn't that the exact thing they got sued for with Explorer for in the 90's?... or somewhat similar?

onpensionsterm 5y ago
It is, as is the embedding of Edge as a default browser. The attitude seems to be that it doesn't matter anymore or that it's worth doing even if they do get in trouble.
- bacchusracine 5y ago
  They're all paid up on their bribes now so they aren't worried. What's a bit of monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior when you've got a few Senators and other Bedfellows in your pockets?

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Would be interestng to know how many non-enterprise Windows users have ever made a direct payment to Microsoft. For that segment, the company suffers from the same problem as "tech" companies. The non-enterprise Windows user is not the customer. Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.

joe_the_user 5y ago

It's like being in an abusive relationship. Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced. I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things). Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.

hulitu 5y ago
A lot of people stay because it is required by the school or the employer.
_dain_ 5y ago
I've seen so many people say things like: "Windows is fine, all you have to do is [gigantic list of obscure settings changes, registry edits, external freeware programs] to turn off the telemetry!" It will eventually get to the point where it will take more settings-twiddling to make Windows do what you actually want than Linux does.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  I used an Ubuntu 21.10 installer recently, it was completely uneventful to set up with the default side-by-side configuration and actually easier than the Windows one (which must create a Windows account, you can then disconnect this from your local account later with a magic settings dance).
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions. Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use, where you get your choice between "up to date but frequently broken" rolling-release[0] or "several years out of date but probably stable". To me, the idea it is considered reasonable to expect a user to set up a dev environment and compile software from source is ludicrous, but until relatively recently that's been the norm[1]. Thankfully, AppImage and Flatpak have been gaining popularity and making that much less of a problem. Now the two biggest things keeping me from switching immediately are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane[2], and my Oculus isn't supported at all[3]. Still, I'll go to Linux before I go to Win 11. [0] which still often has out of date and missing packages [1] for anything not packaged by the distro or if you need a newer version [2] thanks Bitcoin Idiots, LLC [3] and from everything I gather no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.

mulmen 5y ago

WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.

lproven 5y ago
Strongly agreed. WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all. Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor? https://github.com/google/gvisor https://github.com/google/gvisor Others have done it. Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator
- chithanh 5y ago
  > I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all. As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
  - lproven 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

I think any developer that could long moved from their ecosystems by now. You can see that if you try to get technical knowledge. I can imagine that there are many departments that have to continually justify their existence and management tries to find the one-hit wonder that gets users engaged. All these departments try to have their dejure product integrated into Windows to have a chance to pump up their KPI. You should be able to tell an operating system that it is not allowed to phone home. That is not possible in Windows, on the contrary, they have increased their spying dramatically. It has been a adversarial relationship for a long time by now and I don't see any attempts to change course or anyone that really cares for the platform. Their corporate integration and PC gaming keeps Windows relevant for now, but people will look elsewhere.

spc476 5y ago

You are not the target audience for Microsoft, the corporation is. Who uses a home computer anymore? (it's all smart phones now) You start work, you get a pre-installed Windows laptop to use by the corporate IT department, configured to be used as they see fit. You no longer own a computer. Nobody is expected to, these days.

kwhitefoot 5y ago
> Who uses a home computer anymore? Me (but not Windows), my three grown children, my sister, at least one brother in law. At least half of the people I know personally. Half of them using laptops, the rest desktop machines. All of them have smartphones, and sometimes tablets, as well.
theclansman 5y ago
I think combining Macbooks and gaming PCs then home computers are being used more than ever, but I'm not sure, it's true that you don't need one to browse facebook anymore. But at the same time I don't know anyone without a laptop.

Neil44 5y ago

They are doing this with Teams and it gets better, it’s a different Teams than normal that looks the same but only accepts personal MS accounts not business / 365 ones. WTF?

DrBazza 5y ago

> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either. It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads? I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need. And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".

robertlagrant 5y ago
Making money and caring about users are related, but there's definitely a difference between making a good product that people would like to use, and trying to make money. The latter may well make you rich, but it may make your product much worse, which you shore up with lots of salespeople and complex pricing schemes and dealmaking to keep people locked in.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Totally unrelated: The Microsoft PowerApps licencing PDF is 6 pages long.
cyxxon 5y ago
Or they do have an idea what the users want, but it is still bad... at my job, the non-technical managers bought the SAP marketing koolaid, promised our internal users the cool new stuff they were going to get with the new software, and we in the IT just want to scream and say, no, you can't get that, that's not supported, or will take a year to build because we would have to revamp almost everything ourselves... and, yes, all because at SAP no one knows what users need. We have had several rounds with SAP PMs already were they basically said "huh, that's interesting, that's how you work with the software? We need to discuss this internally." Well... good thing you didn't ask before launching the new version then.

MrPatan 5y ago

I don't even know what is my microsoft account anymore. I have created so many for so many services and devices over the years that I don't have a "main" one anymore. So every new install is a crapshot, I try to go local account only, but something gets in the way and I end up creating yet another one for that specific device. It's madness.

spaniard89277 5y ago

From my POV it has come to a time where the tradeoffs you make switching to Linux (xubuntu in my case) are worth it. A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery/safe mode and take a look. But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn't work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it. I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse. If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point? Its just too much effort.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?" Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need. (except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)
- Zopieux 5y ago
  Are you complaining about missing drivers in Linux? For the life of me, I never had to install any particular driver since like 2010 on both laptops and workstations. Not even for printers. Specialized audio/video equipment? Probably, and of course the vendor will only provide them for Windows.
  - MonaroVXR 5y ago
    HP Envy x360 2021 AMD Ryzen 5700U Needs a touchpad driver on both Fedora and Pop?_OS, I'm not sure if this is still true or not. I don't really care, since I can fix this. I use all the major operating systems.
  - 5y ago

syshum 5y ago

I dont think it is contempt for the users, It is more that consumers (i.e non-enterprise editions of windows) is the Beta Test group for windows Microsoft has always been, and will always be an enterprise company, they do not care about Consumers, and they do not care about SMB business. they care about Large Enterprise. I have seen it countless times in my career, SMB space and can be complaining up a storm about a problem for years but until some 20,000+ employee CTO has the problem MS will not give it the time of day. It is all numbers, and if you are not a government or Large corporation Microsoft does not give you the time of day

digisign 5y ago
You've just described the passive side of "contempt."

rbanffy 5y ago

Windows and macOS users have different expectations. On a Mac, I expect my login account to also know my Apple ID and connect seamlessly with my iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, Messages, and all other Apple cloud services. I like being able to answer phone calls on the computer when the phone is nearby. When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like, it faces a couple problems - not everyone wants to be on Skype or Teams - some people use Zoom or Slack. To make things worse, even Microsoft products are not well integrated into the platform. Depending on how I open a SharePoint document, I can either have another Edge window, with an online version of an Office app or the standalone app opening (with different UI conventions on how shared edits work). The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed. And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.

q-big 5y ago
> When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? Not sure. Macs are not that available and, in some places, are prohibitively expensive. Others would love the everything-integrated experience while using software that runs only on Windows. I'm not sure Microsoft even has that "core customer" as neatly defined as Apple (or Linux). Getting a Mac or a Linux box is a deliberate action, whilst, for the end user, getting a Windows box is the default when you get a "generic" computer. One group I can think of is the corporate administrators, who want to deliver a locked down set of functions to corporate workstations - VPN settings, firewalls, blocked websites, custom update schedules, and so on. That same crowd also orders Macs and Chromebooks with the same goals. What Microsoft can do is to offer tailored experiences for specific groups - people who want everything to just work (who'll be happy with Skype logging them on on boot, with OneDrive backing stuff up...), gamers who'll definitely not want Skype to interrupt them and who have nothing to back up to OneDrive, but, sometimes, want to record and stream their games, Windows developers who'll spend most of their time within Visual Studio and the MSDN KB (am I dating myself here?), and so on. I'm very sure they have a list of personas already built for that.

rbanffy 5y ago

The one thing I find the most terrible is the "10 different UI conventions" thing. Dig enough and I bet you'll find a control panel or some other thing the has Windows NT 3.1 look and feel. It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.

6yyyyyy 5y ago
Open "ODBC Data Sources" from the start menu Click "Add..." Click "Finish" with "Microsoft Access Driver" selected (no, you're not finished) Click "Select..."
- UberFly 5y ago
  Ding ding ding. You win the prize. Every click is a step back in time.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  If you are curious but don't have Windows: https://imgur.com/a/40vuBTK https://imgur.com/a/40vuBTK
- Ruphin 5y ago
  Thanks for the trip down memory lane
- superleo2020 5y ago
  Disappointingly this wasn't in the ARM version (the access driver). Just SQL Server. Wonder if it can be found anywhere else. I did try the old progman.exe (via x86 compatability), and while it worked, it uses the modern API for the file dialog.

segmondy 5y ago

As the techie helping my folks with their Windows issue, it was far easier and better for my mental health to spend my own money buying everyone chromebooks and ipads.

yibg 5y ago

Is it nobody cares or they care about different things? If you want to be cynical, they care about making money. But could it also be that they're more focused on the general population (who don't care as much about this stuff)? It's hard to tell for me to be honest, but are we (e.g. HN crowd) just a minority of power users that are in our own echo chamber complaining and making us happy doesn't really move the needle for MSFT?

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

Even on Linux, when I use the Teams Electron program (app? website in a dress?), it comes up in the PulseAudio mixer as Skype.