4 ms·

This is basically an article by a guy angry that the UI for printers changed and predicting the end of the Windows empire based on that.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Accurate as every other week's predicting of Microsoft's impeding doom from users who don't like Windows in the past 30 years. - 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft. - 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft. .... - 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft. Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.
- Lammy 3y ago
  Where's the lie though
- overgard 3y ago
  Well in 2013 Windows had a 90% market share for desktop PC's, and now it's evidently down to 69%... so yeah, I'd say they have a problem. (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... )
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    What problem? In 2013 Microsoft only had 2-3 big products, Windows, Office and X-Box. Now it's significantly more divested and the company's growth no longer depends on Windows' success or failure, and the stock pricing reflects that.
    - overgard 3y ago
      So, you're saying that losing 21% of their OS market share by actively pissing off their customers shouldn't be seen as a problem? OS stagnation would be an improvement compared to what they're currently doing.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Why is having even bigger market share so important? Android has bigger market share than iOS too yet iOS is the more profitable one. Microsoft cares about profit first, not unprofitable market share. Not saying they're right or wrong, just saying it seems to be working for their bottom line as Windows is less relevante towards that as the PC market has been in a continuous decline anyway in the last decade. Fighting to capture more % of a declining market seems like a fool's errand, when they have bigger fish to fry now.
        dijit 3y ago
        why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue? Because of revenue? a large seller of windows is genuinely just it’s market cap, it doesn’t really have a lot of killer utility compared to contemporaries. If it loses market cap then it’s a precipitous issue for them as there’s no point choosing the OS for other reasons, it simply lacks the value. It’s market cap comes from people thinking it has a huge audience and so tailoring software for that audience and putting significant resources into that. Without that third-party effort: windows is toast.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue? Because unless you're from the 90's, the market for desktop operating systems is not one that generates a lot of revenue anymore. That's like laughing at Netflix for loosing DVD rental market share to Blockbuster. >Because of revenue? See my comment above. Microsoft makes a fuck tonne of revenue from services no matter if your company doesn't buy Windows PCs. If they buy Macs, they'll still pay Microsoft subscription fees for Office 365, Outlook, OneDrive, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. and soon Copilot AI stuff. All these are platform agnostic and way more profitable for them than selling more Windows licenses.
- Fervicus 3y ago
  I don't think it's the same. I have been a Windows user all my life. Bloat and bad UX changes is one thing, but this is the first time I feel like I am having to actively fight the OS against showing me ads and dark practices like changing user preferences unbeknownst to me.
  - pacifika 3y ago
    People have been having that feeling for 20 years as well, just different people with different tolerances. Look at the feedback on Windows Me, Windows 8, The IE monopoly, breaking web standards, etc etc.
- trealira 3y ago
  Mainly because - There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux. - Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned. But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though. Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system. [0]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-data-confirms-apples-mac-renaissance.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-da... edit: It was 53% when the article was written. The statistics they link say it's now 64%.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  Except that too much wah wah will eventually tank a company - even the size of Microsoft
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    And when will that happen? In 30 more years?
naasking 3y ago
He's not angry that it changed, he's angry that the new settings interface doesn't let him fix the issue at all, and while he used to be able to easily access the old interface so he could fix it the old way, MS has now hidden that ability too. If not for some user-hostile magical incantation, printing would have been permanently broken. Who wouldn't be seriously annoyed with this situation? How many non-technical users would have chucked a perfectly good printer because of a poorly executed software change? The Windows control panel UI transition has been a serious boondoggle from the start.
- nickelpro 3y ago
  The article doesn't specify what the issue was, neither you or I can say what the best way to fix the problem would be, if it required something specific of the old panel unable to be accessed via more appropriate or modern tooling. I suspect this is on purpose.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    Well I still need to access the good old control panel each time I long on to a new machine, since the new settings app thing still doesn't have all the regional settings. Quite basic stuff, at least it's still available in the old control panel for now.
lencastre 3y ago
A long time ago there was a video (or was it audio) of a really angry dude ranting about this and that and in the end he exclaims: I can’t print. And that is the punch line, his life was miserable and the root of the problem was printing.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Printers have been this evil hellhole of driver support for a decade or more, compared to other devices. These days, I print so little I either stop at my local library, where printing is free, or I pay a pittance to print at a shop. It would take me a decade or more to pay off a printer when pages cost $.10.
- tigerlily 3y ago
  Someone should mash this with retro encabulator to create an infomercial to showcase the ease of printing to various devices on Linux desktop.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Yep. My first reaction was printer issue? Riiight, that's definitely going to be the large market issue driving ppl away. People like the blackbox OS that doesn't do anything. It's not good for IT, but neither is Mac OS!
overgard 3y ago
Every Windows user I know hates the new control panels. (I use plural because they've been trying to replace the actual good control panel basically every version of Windows since 7 and it's an incredible mess). Enterprise users put up with Windows because it's better to administrate than anything else, so taking away that stuff really is murdering windows.
- nickelpro 3y ago
  I did enterprise administration of Windows boxes, ~400 seats. We did not manually muck with control panels per station. I could not care less what the settings UIs for home installs of Windows are. And that's the real truth, power users and these small fry IT install bases are not major markets. The most prominent markets are OEM installs for non-technical home users (who hate complex panels and love the push-button UIs), and large 3/4/5 digit enterprise installs that do not give a damn about this stuff because they're using MDT (or whatever) to deploy images to all their stations and not playing with this per-station configuration stuff.
  - overgard 3y ago
    I dunno man, with Steam on linux and most of the major game engines making porting easy (or at least moving in that direction) I have very few reasons to stick with Windows anymore. At this point it's basically Photoshop and Fusion 360, otherwise I'd abandon it completely. If they lose gamers, I think they'll have a real issue.
    - nickelpro 3y ago
      You're a power user unable to understand the needs of non-power users. We all go through that stage, it's natural. I once installed Linux on all my siblings' desktops because I had convinced my parents it would lead to "less viruses" (Fedora 13, I think, GNOME 2, those were the days). The nightmare of providing support for that over the rest of my high school years provided me with a powerful and important lesson. You have few reasons to stick with Windows, you are a very, very tiny droplet in an ocean of users with different needs than you. Judging what such markets will do based on your personal needs is unwise.
rolph 3y ago
On Tuesday, I had a printer issue at a client site and I was going to pull up the “Devices and Printers” panel to manage the drives and printing default settings. In the most recent 22H2 Windows 11 update, they hid it! Using old Control Panel (Start->Run->control) Clicking on this will redirect you to the new settings printer that gives NO options to do any advanced troubleshooting and removes the ability to FIX the issue!
- pacifika 3y ago
  Press win-x
tshirttime 3y ago
Forty-four years ago another guy felt the same anger towards a closed-source printer driver, and he started a movement that actually did end Microsoft's stranglehold.
- nickelpro 3y ago
  What stranglehold do you imagine MS had in 1980, prior to shipping a single DOS install? Android Linux and iOS are what killed MS's stranglehold on consumer electronics. GNU is a footnote in the history of MS's rise and fall in the space.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

Accurate as every other week's predicting of Microsoft's impeding doom from users who don't like Windows in the past 30 years. - 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft. - 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft. .... - 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft. Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.

Lammy 3y ago
Where's the lie though
overgard 3y ago
Well in 2013 Windows had a 90% market share for desktop PC's, and now it's evidently down to 69%... so yeah, I'd say they have a problem. (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha... )
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  What problem? In 2013 Microsoft only had 2-3 big products, Windows, Office and X-Box. Now it's significantly more divested and the company's growth no longer depends on Windows' success or failure, and the stock pricing reflects that.
  - overgard 3y ago
    So, you're saying that losing 21% of their OS market share by actively pissing off their customers shouldn't be seen as a problem? OS stagnation would be an improvement compared to what they're currently doing.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Why is having even bigger market share so important? Android has bigger market share than iOS too yet iOS is the more profitable one. Microsoft cares about profit first, not unprofitable market share. Not saying they're right or wrong, just saying it seems to be working for their bottom line as Windows is less relevante towards that as the PC market has been in a continuous decline anyway in the last decade. Fighting to capture more % of a declining market seems like a fool's errand, when they have bigger fish to fry now.
      - dijit 3y ago
        why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue? Because of revenue? a large seller of windows is genuinely just it’s market cap, it doesn’t really have a lot of killer utility compared to contemporaries. If it loses market cap then it’s a precipitous issue for them as there’s no point choosing the OS for other reasons, it simply lacks the value. It’s market cap comes from people thinking it has a huge audience and so tailoring software for that audience and putting significant resources into that. Without that third-party effort: windows is toast.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue? Because unless you're from the 90's, the market for desktop operating systems is not one that generates a lot of revenue anymore. That's like laughing at Netflix for loosing DVD rental market share to Blockbuster. >Because of revenue? See my comment above. Microsoft makes a fuck tonne of revenue from services no matter if your company doesn't buy Windows PCs. If they buy Macs, they'll still pay Microsoft subscription fees for Office 365, Outlook, OneDrive, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. and soon Copilot AI stuff. All these are platform agnostic and way more profitable for them than selling more Windows licenses.
Fervicus 3y ago
I don't think it's the same. I have been a Windows user all my life. Bloat and bad UX changes is one thing, but this is the first time I feel like I am having to actively fight the OS against showing me ads and dark practices like changing user preferences unbeknownst to me.
- pacifika 3y ago
  People have been having that feeling for 20 years as well, just different people with different tolerances. Look at the feedback on Windows Me, Windows 8, The IE monopoly, breaking web standards, etc etc.
trealira 3y ago
Mainly because - There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux. - Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned. But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though. Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system. [0]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-data-confirms-apples-mac-renaissance.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-da... edit: It was 53% when the article was written. The statistics they link say it's now 64%.
whiplash451 3y ago
Except that too much wah wah will eventually tank a company - even the size of Microsoft
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  And when will that happen? In 30 more years?

naasking 3y ago

He's not angry that it changed, he's angry that the new settings interface doesn't let him fix the issue at all, and while he used to be able to easily access the old interface so he could fix it the old way, MS has now hidden that ability too. If not for some user-hostile magical incantation, printing would have been permanently broken. Who wouldn't be seriously annoyed with this situation? How many non-technical users would have chucked a perfectly good printer because of a poorly executed software change? The Windows control panel UI transition has been a serious boondoggle from the start.

nickelpro 3y ago
The article doesn't specify what the issue was, neither you or I can say what the best way to fix the problem would be, if it required something specific of the old panel unable to be accessed via more appropriate or modern tooling. I suspect this is on purpose.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  Well I still need to access the good old control panel each time I long on to a new machine, since the new settings app thing still doesn't have all the regional settings. Quite basic stuff, at least it's still available in the old control panel for now.

lencastre 3y ago

A long time ago there was a video (or was it audio) of a really angry dude ranting about this and that and in the end he exclaims: I can’t print. And that is the punch line, his life was miserable and the root of the problem was printing.

bobthepanda 3y ago
Printers have been this evil hellhole of driver support for a decade or more, compared to other devices. These days, I print so little I either stop at my local library, where printing is free, or I pay a pittance to print at a shop. It would take me a decade or more to pay off a printer when pages cost $.10.
tigerlily 3y ago
Someone should mash this with retro encabulator to create an infomercial to showcase the ease of printing to various devices on Linux desktop.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Yep. My first reaction was printer issue? Riiight, that's definitely going to be the large market issue driving ppl away. People like the blackbox OS that doesn't do anything. It's not good for IT, but neither is Mac OS!

overgard 3y ago

Every Windows user I know hates the new control panels. (I use plural because they've been trying to replace the actual good control panel basically every version of Windows since 7 and it's an incredible mess). Enterprise users put up with Windows because it's better to administrate than anything else, so taking away that stuff really is murdering windows.

nickelpro 3y ago
I did enterprise administration of Windows boxes, ~400 seats. We did not manually muck with control panels per station. I could not care less what the settings UIs for home installs of Windows are. And that's the real truth, power users and these small fry IT install bases are not major markets. The most prominent markets are OEM installs for non-technical home users (who hate complex panels and love the push-button UIs), and large 3/4/5 digit enterprise installs that do not give a damn about this stuff because they're using MDT (or whatever) to deploy images to all their stations and not playing with this per-station configuration stuff.
- overgard 3y ago
  I dunno man, with Steam on linux and most of the major game engines making porting easy (or at least moving in that direction) I have very few reasons to stick with Windows anymore. At this point it's basically Photoshop and Fusion 360, otherwise I'd abandon it completely. If they lose gamers, I think they'll have a real issue.
  - nickelpro 3y ago
    You're a power user unable to understand the needs of non-power users. We all go through that stage, it's natural. I once installed Linux on all my siblings' desktops because I had convinced my parents it would lead to "less viruses" (Fedora 13, I think, GNOME 2, those were the days). The nightmare of providing support for that over the rest of my high school years provided me with a powerful and important lesson. You have few reasons to stick with Windows, you are a very, very tiny droplet in an ocean of users with different needs than you. Judging what such markets will do based on your personal needs is unwise.

rolph 3y ago

On Tuesday, I had a printer issue at a client site and I was going to pull up the “Devices and Printers” panel to manage the drives and printing default settings. In the most recent 22H2 Windows 11 update, they hid it! Using old Control Panel (Start->Run->control) Clicking on this will redirect you to the new settings printer that gives NO options to do any advanced troubleshooting and removes the ability to FIX the issue!

pacifika 3y ago
Press win-x

tshirttime 3y ago

Forty-four years ago another guy felt the same anger towards a closed-source printer driver, and he started a movement that actually did end Microsoft's stranglehold.

nickelpro 3y ago
What stranglehold do you imagine MS had in 1980, prior to shipping a single DOS install? Android Linux and iOS are what killed MS's stranglehold on consumer electronics. GNU is a footnote in the history of MS's rise and fall in the space.