Even aside from the things that Microsoft is doing that come off frustrating, the tone-deafness is amazing. The whole "we don't want to let you move the taskba

Even aside from the things that Microsoft is doing that come off frustrating, the tone-deafness is amazing. The whole "we don't want to let you move the taskbar" saga is a disaster of messaging even more than it is a technical fiasco. Even if you have actually decided from some top-down diktat that the taskbar is now permanently glued to the bottom, the appropriate corporate answer is "We're taking your feedback into account and considering it." It creates no obligation. You don't whine "very few people actually want it" or "It's too hard even though somehow it was doable in 1995 on a 386SX." That does not make your customers feel appreciated and valued. (I'm sure this then pivots into a "they're not really our customers if they aren't a PC OEM or large enterprise" discussion.) If they don't want to reach out to the power-user community directly, they still have the ability to pawn this sort of problem off on third-party developers. I recall back in the late Win3.1 era, it was, perhaps not common, but not "strange" to use alternate shells. Compaq and Packard Bell home PCs booted into their cutesy custom UIs in instead of Program Manager, and on the more enthusiast-side, I fondly recall Calmira (the Win95 Explorer clone) and the one IBM prepared which was a cutdown model of the OS/2 Workplace Shell. These days, alternatives feel almost illicit-- "You can install Classic Shell or the like, but odds are you're going to have to keep battling with Windows updates that want to restore the defaults." When they acknowledge the third party ecosystem-- the biggest selling point Windows has over MacOS or Linux-- they can then reframe the message as "We're providing a basic solution that services most people's needs, but there's also a vibrant ecosystem of alternatives." All it requires is respecting user choice. I'm personally mostly not interested in Windows 11 because of the account requirement. (PC login is a huge obvious point for "I have a home persona and a work persona and potentially multiple of each, so trying to force One Account To Rule Them All is just going to conflate details that should remain siloed") Yeah, I could switch over to local accounts after install, but it feels like it ends up with some terrible situation where the license I paid $120 for is locked behind a throwaway Microsoft account I can no longer recover.