10 ms·

Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again. No customer validation on any of the AI cruft. No full OPT OUT. Office products are bastardized with copil

Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again. No customer validation on any of the AI cruft. No full OPT OUT. Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. I've been a Windows user from day one and I now see a future without it. Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, but this blind lust for AI, especially in bed with Altman who is pure con artist, is unforgivable. Some of the investment sells recently are starting to look like the beginning of the end for OpenAI. That will have a wide range impact on everything. I use Claude for coding (and mostly in WSL). OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation. Seriously. And Satya just keeps on at full speed.

AlexandrB 11mo ago
> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft What? How? From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign. Solitaire is now a subscription service. I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.
- ChicagoDave 11mo ago
  Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. The real change was internally. Satya is well-known for eradicating the "Art of War" environment and bringing workers together. He also fully embraced open-source (Balmer hated OSS) and R&D has continued to innovate. (Still boggles the mind that F# exists and is awesome) Prior to CoPilot, my only beef was that Azure needs a ground up re-architecture. They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.
  - unboxingelf 11mo ago
    It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP. Wait until you try OCI.
    - ChicagoDave 11mo ago
      That's never going to happen. I'm more or less locked into AWS at this point, though for my personal stuff I'm using my linode server a lot. I thought Oracle Cloud was designed by AWS alum and was supposed to be solid?
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    Given the option, I always favour Azure over AWS or GCP. AWS is a complexity maze, whereas GCP seems Google only does the minimum and one can only talk to bots.
    - dijit 11mo ago
      You can pay for professional services. In Sweden the only one I ever got support with was Google, so it’s not a universal experience (I didn’t pay for professional services). I believe you and I have had this discussion before.
      - pjmlp 11mo ago
        Yes, and I told you those professional services were nowhere to be found, while in AWS and Azure we actually got people on the phone, so do you want to have this discussion again?
        dijit 11mo ago
        yeah. Because I have the opposite experience. So I think when either of us talk about it as if it’s universal we are both wrong. So every time you make a claim, I’ll be there. Your experience with Google, it’s mine with AWS.
        pjmlp 11mo ago
        See you next time, until my GCP experience improves.
  - int_19h 11mo ago
    It should be noted that while Satya opened the floodgates, it was already making inroads by then, just with a lot more paperwork. Some early examples of F/OSS predating Satya were ASP.NET MVC and PTVS. At the same time, the insistence from up top that all divisions have to be profitable on their own means that in practice there has been a steady ongoing scale-back from F/OSS for several years now. Just look at the situation in VSCode: sure, the base platform is still open, but increasingly many first-party extensions have their pieces replaced by closed source functionality - Python language server, C# debugger etc. Related to this are the attempts to block VSCode forks by using prohibitive licensing terms and even inserting runtime checks for the same.
    - pjmlp 11mo ago
      It always feels that whatever good .NET team manages, it gets killed by upper management decisions, like VSCode should not eat into VS sales, thus plenty of tools will never have a VSCode version. Example, you cannot do graphical debugging of parallel code, use visualizers, or do profiling analysis in VSCode.
  - ezst 11mo ago
    > They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP. I really don't see the problem with LDAP. If they make an overlay for it and it's needlessly complicated, that's just par for the course. Have you experienced SharePoint?
  - Lapel2742 11mo ago
    > Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. Sure it was. Just as OP wrote: > From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign.
  - raxxorraxor 11mo ago
    Ancient LDAP is probably the best they still offer. A far superior way for internal auth and vastly superior for companies that need on premise infrastructure. Nobody wants internal apps that auth through AWS or GCP. I hate registering a shitty app and use their modern auth flow. No security gain for additional maintenance. For that matter, this is a main reason why Windows is so established. The logistic problem of distributing user accounts on several machines. And no, a virtual and slow cloud Windows is not an alternative for anyone that wants to be productive.
  - KoolKat23 11mo ago
    Satya was definitely an improvement, a breath of fresh air. But the last few years, they've started dropping the ball. Everything is half-assed (new outlook), or releases too soon burning goodwill (new teams), or a miss being pushed on people (copilot integration). (strangely, perhaps my perception, this is roughly when the Mac M1 came out).
  - steve1977 11mo ago
    > He also fully embraced open-source Embraced as in this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
  - steve1977 11mo ago
    I wish we still had ancient LDAP tech at work...
- chistev 11mo ago
  Solitaire is no longer free?
- phito 11mo ago
  They said Microsoft not windows. Modern dotnet is a good example of something Microsoft has been doing right. Windows on the other hand...
- auggierose 11mo ago
  > Solitaire is now a subscription service That is a joke, right? Right??
  - int_19h 11mo ago
    Nope. Minesweeper, too. Well, the games are still free, the subscription is to remove the ads. But you have to subscribe for each game separately, and it's a per-device subscription. Yes, Microsoft really is that petty when it comes to nickel-and-diming users these days.
    - auggierose 11mo ago
      Can't believe anyone is subjecting themselves to this on their own free will.
    - ludicity 11mo ago
      This is so fucking insane that I don't even know where to start. I'm hoping that even this is a joke.
      - jstanley 11mo ago
        https://www.pcworld.com/article/2820462/microsofts-solitaire-subscription-expands-to-minesweeper-and-beyond.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2820462/microsofts-solitaire...
  - megous 11mo ago
    Well, you can have a subscription for switching a relay in your car, so that current flows from the battery to some wire, so that your seat heats up. It's a sign of the times...
    - auggierose 11mo ago
      That should be criminal.
- internet_points 11mo ago
  > I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8. That's a phrase I would never have thought I'd see. I remember Windows 8 as being generally despised when it first came out.
  - int_19h 11mo ago
    There's no bottom. It can always get worse.
  - keyringlight 11mo ago
    On the UI side of things the trouble with 8 was the push towards touch as the latest shiny object to chase, coming a few years into the boom of smartphones/tablets. The start menu was full screen with no option and many OS applications were either full screen only or by default until you clicked a new title bar button. The 8.1 release pulled back from a lot of that.
- pcdoodle 11mo ago
  [dead]
ares623 11mo ago
It’s do or die. Any ounce of doubt will cause the entire house of cards to collapse.
luke727 11mo ago
> Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
- dimensional_dan 11mo ago
  Maybe it can finally get the new lines correct for a given application? ;-)
  - userbinator 11mo ago
    A choice of line endings was one of the few good things they did to Notepad, but that was in the Windows 10 era.
    - RestartKernel 11mo ago
      I remember it being pretty nice to explicitly choose encoding too.
- torginus 11mo ago
  This is the funniest thing, considering it lacks 90% of the features included freeware text editors written in some student's spare time back in the 90s. It's basically a fancy textbox. Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    They can, the problem is that apparently they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development experience, so they get interns that have grown in US universities with macOS and Linux, which sundenly have a Win32 developer role. That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET. I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
    - int_19h 11mo ago
jen729w 11mo ago
Meanwhile have you used the latest Excel for Mac? 1. Open a sheet. Type anything. 2. Hide Excel (Cmd+H). 3. Bring Excel forth. 4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds.
- hulitu 11mo ago
  > 4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds. It is because is drawing the 3D surface with your Excel cells. It's not Microsoft's fault that you didn't buy a decent graphics card. /s
userbinator 11mo ago
"again"? What they did in the past seems absolutely neighbourly compared to what they're doing now. Get a VM of Windows 9x/2k/XP to experience what "good Microsoft" was like.
- ako 11mo ago
  Windows NT
  - hulitu 11mo ago
    > Windows NT Windows NT what ? Microsoft was always the same.
    - BoredPositron 11mo ago
      Windows 2000 was generally a good operating system.
      - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
        It was also the last operating system from Microsoft that didn't require activation. It was full of vulnerabilities though. I used to take a laptop with some specialist software to clients and in the end I started running it in a VM so I didn't have to deal with my machine becoming infected from my clients dodgy networks.
    - ako 11mo ago
      Windows NT -> Experience what a good microsoft OS was. Especially around NT 3.1, NT 3.5 their goal seemed mostly to have a good competing OS.
      - hnlmorg 11mo ago
        Sure, if you ignore all the anticompetitive bullshit they pulled to blackmail high street stores into removing BeOS, DrDOS, Linux and others from their shelves. And the stunts they pulled to kill other IMs. Or how they crippled the web for a decade due to killing competing browsers, building Windows lock-ins into IE (eg ActiveX controls), fragmenting Java, and then leaving IE to die themselves. Or how they lied about Windows 98 requiring IE4. Or how they didn’t give a crap about OS security until halfway through the life of XP. Leaving literally millions of people vulnerable to a plethora of different forms of attacks from malware to direct hacking on open Telnet ports. Or how they tried to land grab IRC with their comic book GUI. Which, in fairness, was a novel app. But unfortunately it was another embrace, extend, extinguish play. Or how they tried to kill ODF with their own faux-open document format: OOXML Or their constant stream of FUD messaging about Linux being “communism”. Yeah, MS were really noble in their goals to create a good OS. /s It’s a pity they couldn’t even manage to do that well given every iteration of Windows has been bloated, buggy, and years behind the competition in terms of performance and capabilities. Windows was never a good OS. In fact I’d go further and say Microsoft have never release a good OS. Even their versions of BASIC sucked compared to the competition. Microsoft have always been good at negotiating with businesses. It’s why Azure is used in governments, why Windows is the “business platform”, and why 9x beat the competition in the 90s despite being consistently the worst in class for basically every metric you could think of. Windows didn’t succeed because it was good. Microsoft succeeded because Bill Gates was ruthless!
latentsea 11mo ago
> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation. Am I reading that right?
- cmckn 11mo ago
  You sure are: https://www.theverge.com/news/799312/openai-chatgpt-erotica-sam-altman-verified-adults https://www.theverge.com/news/799312/openai-chatgpt-erotica-...
  - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
    It's probably a ploy to get people to verify their identity.
jscyc 11mo ago
I opened my outlook android app today to find they'd replaced the archive button in the bottom toolbar with a "Summary by Copilot" one. It wasn't enough that the only colourful button is the Copilot one on the right. Thankfully they still let you reorder the buttons, so I moved archive back and hid that unwanted summary in the overflow menu.
- RobotToaster 11mo ago
  Once your coworkers start using copilot to turn what should be a single sentence email into six paragraphs, you'll need that to summarise it into a sentence. Progress!
  - wiseowise 11mo ago
    Yeah, but it will be very polite and full of corpospeak, which means that it is very insightful.
- everdrive 11mo ago
  >Thankfully they still let you They "let" you do fewer and fewer things with the computer you "own" every year.
RobotToaster 11mo ago
Never thought I'd miss Steve Ballmer
- jack_tripper 11mo ago
  Windows under Steve Balmer: "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" Windows under Satya Nadella: "Kindly provide your credit card and personal information sir"
  - someguyiguess 11mo ago
    It’s only a matter of time before MS starts asking us to send Wal*Mart gift cards.
Al-Khwarizmi 11mo ago
> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation. Considering that this is only with verified adults, how is this "evil"? I find it more evil to treat full grown adult users as kids and heavily censor their use of LLMs. (Not to detract from the rest of your post, with which I agree).
- logicprog 11mo ago
  Yeah the disapproval/disgust I'm seeing everywhere, from pretty much every side that I keep my eye on, about OpenAI enabling erotica generation with ChatGPT is so frustrating, because it seems like just Puritanism and censorship, and desiring to treat adults like children as you say.
  - poolnoodle 11mo ago
    It is not bad per se but in my opinion it shows that OpenAI is desperately trying to stop bleeding money.
    - logicprog 11mo ago
      I mean, their issue isn't that not enough users are using ChatGPT, so they need to enable new user modalities to draw more people in — they already have something like 800 million MAU. Their issue is that most of their tokens are generated free right now both from those users and stuff like CoPilot, and they're building stupidly huge unnecessary data enters to scale their way to "AGI." So yeah, everyone says this looks like a sign of desperation, but I just don't see it at all, because it would solve a problem they don't actually have (not enough people finding GPT useful).
      - Gerardo1 11mo ago
        If you re--calibrate from any lofty idea of their motives to "get investor money now", this and other moves/announcements make more sense: anything that could look good to an investor. User count going up? Sure. New browser that will deeply integrate chatGPT into users lives and give OAI access to their browsing/shopping data? Sure Several new hardware products that are totally coming in the next several months? Sure We're totally going to start delivering ads? Sure We're making commitments to all these compute providers because our growth is totally going to warrant it? Sure Oh, since we're investing in all of that compute, we're also going to become a compute vendor! Sure None of it is particularly intentional, strategic, or sound. OAI is a money pit, they can always see the end of the runway, and must secure funding now. That is their perpetual state.
pjmlp 11mo ago
> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, Not in what concerns Windows development, I miss "Developers, Developers, Developers" dance. UWP transition after Sinofsky was super bad managed, trying to rescue what was left of it as WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, killing C++/CX, C++/WinRT, .NET Native in the process is a bad joke on anyone that believed in the technology. Don't believe the WinUI marketing, the only reason left to use it, it being a Microsoft employee, or someone that just can't let go of UWP remains.
platevoltage 11mo ago
I don't know if it's evil. It's more like desperate and stupid. They are rapidly losing their gaming dominance thanks to Valve. They've been losing the console wars. There doesn't seem to be a single person using Windows 11 that isn't being forced to in one way or another. Now they are forcing online accounts and injecting AI where it doesn't belong. How they still have willing customers is beyond me.
- fodkodrasz 11mo ago
  Many people are using Win 11 out of free will, until they alienate them. The main problem is that they are alienating developers, and that they don't focus on anything they do everything half-heartedly (even AI). They abandoned the mobile phone market, where they couldn't decide to target businesess or consumers, so they let them both down. Same happens on the desktop, they are quickly eroding the platform advantage they had and leaving both hobbyists and home users and enterprises without a reason to choose them. They are pushing for the AI now, but in a way that is too controversial and is not acceptable nor for many individuals, nor for businesses, also doing so with forced hardware updates and high monthly costs. XBOX is being abandoned. They did venture into the streamed gaming topic, but abandoning, guess because all those powerful GPUs are needed for AI. Many core services are being abandoned, without alternatives, eg. Maps in windows was abandoned, without any successor. At least they could have created like a PWA wrapper for google/apple/osm, and put in a chooser facede on first start. It would have taken about 1 month for a single developer experienced in the windows relevant subsystems. Windows is still reliable, stable, decently fast and secure, but that is useless when you abandon it as a platform, you don't attract developer talent, you don't have a unified UI/UX language that differentiates you (if not with anything els then with its consistency), does not provide a more streamlined deployment and update flow than competitors, etc. Windows had these advantages, and is repidly loosing these.
npteljes 11mo ago
Microsoft was never not a full-blown evil corporation. What they had, at their peak, is some software that worked well. In the background, same evil corporation as ever. I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
- close04 11mo ago
  There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did look less evil for a brief time.
  - npteljes 11mo ago
    Looks-wise, I agree, the "MS heart Linux" era was better than the current one.
  - ptx 11mo ago
    That sounds consistent with their classic embrace-extend-extinguish process [1]. Embracing with no significant user-hostile moves is step 1, and then abusing competitors and users comes as step 3 of the process. They need to briefly look less evil in step 1 to maneuver into position for step 3. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
    - wkat4242 11mo ago
      Yes because they were embracing new markets. They've always followed this process but they made a big paradigm change at that point. This is why they suddenly "loved Linux". Because it was no longer a threat but a tool to them, as they were shifting from being an OS vendor to hyperscale cloud vendor. The same way with other big American tech. Netflix operated for a decade at a loss and now that they saturated the market they are constantly asking more money for less content.
zoobab 11mo ago
"No full OPT OUT" Well even if they have an "opt out" option, it's closed source software, so you cannot audit anything.
snarfy 11mo ago
It reminds me of the Xbox One release. They basically had the market with the earlier release compared to Sony's PS4, but then pushed the thing as a media/entertainment glorified roku box not gaming console. They didn't care what you want only what they wanted to sell you, and they were pushing NFL deals not gaming. Nobody wants this Copilot everywhere, but they sure are pushing it anyway. It's like they completely forgot how to make a product and only know how to push their agenda using whatever monopoly is left.
- MYEUHD 11mo ago
  > They basically had the market with the earlier release compared to Sony's PS4 The Xbox One and PS4 were both released in November 2013. If anything, it was the PS4 that was released a week earlier than the Xbox One.
- hollandheese 11mo ago
  You're mixing up the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One releases. Xbox 360 came out a year before the PS3.
neya 11mo ago
> Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again You lost me here. They ALWAYS have been evil and disrespectful of their customers. It's not just paid products, even their so called "open source" products like VSCODE and Github Desktop randomly add helpers to run in the background constantly (even on Mac) under the label Telemetry. They paid good money for OpenAI, they want to make full use of it. RIP to all their customers who have to use their Office 360 suite. They will probably pull off an Adobe at some point :(
duxup 11mo ago
Windows more often looks like an ad supported OS pointed AT ME rather than something for me to use to do anything.
MBerkley 11mo ago
Pure . This is clearly a opt-in feature and they make that abundantly clear in the article. Stop the dramatics.
sharts 11mo ago
Don’t they conduct research and tests with small groups of people before launching features? If so?’, then what the heck users are cool with these things?
eboynyc32 11mo ago
You only have yourself to blame. MS has been doing this for ages.
wkat4242 11mo ago
I think the agentic idea is worth exploring. It could be useful. However I would want it running fully locally (on my servers, absolutely not on Azure or any other cloud) and to have full control of where everything is stored and how it works. And have full control whether I use it or not. Absolutely no popups and marketing nudges to use it. That stuff tends to drive me away, it deeply annoys me and I only start hating the product. But this will not happen with windows. Microsoft is purely a cloud company now and windows is just a sales vehicle for it. I think that's the core problem more so than just the latest thing they're trying to push. But I'm not on this hype train. I don't need to have it today or have FOMO. Rven at work there's this push to use AI "or else we will become irrelevant soon". Which is partly driven by Microsoft as they are very close to our top dogs. Their "adoption" teams are constantly hounding us with their bullshit and I hate them so much. Also the colleagues who are evangelising AI (constantly shilling on Yammer and LinkedIn) are just working to make themselves irrelevant in the long term because AI is cheaper than colleagues. I'll try it when it comes to Linux in a workable form and fully under my control. Just like I didn't use chatbots until they had workable performance on my own ollama server. And even then I don't use it that much. It's still early days. I don't get this pressure "keep up our fall out". I've been doing computing for 40 years and all the big things have taken at least a decade to actually "change the game". Like the dotcom crash. Eventually we fulfilled it's promises but it required other things to make it happen. Like the smartphone and the app.

AlexandrB 11mo ago

> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft What? How? From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign. Solitaire is now a subscription service. I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.

ChicagoDave 11mo ago
Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. The real change was internally. Satya is well-known for eradicating the "Art of War" environment and bringing workers together. He also fully embraced open-source (Balmer hated OSS) and R&D has continued to innovate. (Still boggles the mind that F# exists and is awesome) Prior to CoPilot, my only beef was that Azure needs a ground up re-architecture. They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.
- unboxingelf 11mo ago
  It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP. Wait until you try OCI.
  - ChicagoDave 11mo ago
    That's never going to happen. I'm more or less locked into AWS at this point, though for my personal stuff I'm using my linode server a lot. I thought Oracle Cloud was designed by AWS alum and was supposed to be solid?
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  Given the option, I always favour Azure over AWS or GCP. AWS is a complexity maze, whereas GCP seems Google only does the minimum and one can only talk to bots.
  - dijit 11mo ago
    You can pay for professional services. In Sweden the only one I ever got support with was Google, so it’s not a universal experience (I didn’t pay for professional services). I believe you and I have had this discussion before.
    - pjmlp 11mo ago
      Yes, and I told you those professional services were nowhere to be found, while in AWS and Azure we actually got people on the phone, so do you want to have this discussion again?
      - dijit 11mo ago
        yeah. Because I have the opposite experience. So I think when either of us talk about it as if it’s universal we are both wrong. So every time you make a claim, I’ll be there. Your experience with Google, it’s mine with AWS.
        pjmlp 11mo ago
        See you next time, until my GCP experience improves.
- int_19h 11mo ago
  It should be noted that while Satya opened the floodgates, it was already making inroads by then, just with a lot more paperwork. Some early examples of F/OSS predating Satya were ASP.NET MVC and PTVS. At the same time, the insistence from up top that all divisions have to be profitable on their own means that in practice there has been a steady ongoing scale-back from F/OSS for several years now. Just look at the situation in VSCode: sure, the base platform is still open, but increasingly many first-party extensions have their pieces replaced by closed source functionality - Python language server, C# debugger etc. Related to this are the attempts to block VSCode forks by using prohibitive licensing terms and even inserting runtime checks for the same.
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    It always feels that whatever good .NET team manages, it gets killed by upper management decisions, like VSCode should not eat into VS sales, thus plenty of tools will never have a VSCode version. Example, you cannot do graphical debugging of parallel code, use visualizers, or do profiling analysis in VSCode.
- ezst 11mo ago
  > They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP. I really don't see the problem with LDAP. If they make an overlay for it and it's needlessly complicated, that's just par for the course. Have you experienced SharePoint?
- Lapel2742 11mo ago
  > Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. Sure it was. Just as OP wrote: > From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign.
- raxxorraxor 11mo ago
  Ancient LDAP is probably the best they still offer. A far superior way for internal auth and vastly superior for companies that need on premise infrastructure. Nobody wants internal apps that auth through AWS or GCP. I hate registering a shitty app and use their modern auth flow. No security gain for additional maintenance. For that matter, this is a main reason why Windows is so established. The logistic problem of distributing user accounts on several machines. And no, a virtual and slow cloud Windows is not an alternative for anyone that wants to be productive.
- KoolKat23 11mo ago
  Satya was definitely an improvement, a breath of fresh air. But the last few years, they've started dropping the ball. Everything is half-assed (new outlook), or releases too soon burning goodwill (new teams), or a miss being pushed on people (copilot integration). (strangely, perhaps my perception, this is roughly when the Mac M1 came out).
- steve1977 11mo ago
  > He also fully embraced open-source Embraced as in this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- steve1977 11mo ago
  I wish we still had ancient LDAP tech at work...
chistev 11mo ago
Solitaire is no longer free?
phito 11mo ago
They said Microsoft not windows. Modern dotnet is a good example of something Microsoft has been doing right. Windows on the other hand...
auggierose 11mo ago
> Solitaire is now a subscription service That is a joke, right? Right??
- int_19h 11mo ago
  Nope. Minesweeper, too. Well, the games are still free, the subscription is to remove the ads. But you have to subscribe for each game separately, and it's a per-device subscription. Yes, Microsoft really is that petty when it comes to nickel-and-diming users these days.
  - auggierose 11mo ago
    Can't believe anyone is subjecting themselves to this on their own free will.
  - ludicity 11mo ago
    This is so fucking insane that I don't even know where to start. I'm hoping that even this is a joke.
    - jstanley 11mo ago
      https://www.pcworld.com/article/2820462/microsofts-solitaire-subscription-expands-to-minesweeper-and-beyond.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2820462/microsofts-solitaire...
- megous 11mo ago
  Well, you can have a subscription for switching a relay in your car, so that current flows from the battery to some wire, so that your seat heats up. It's a sign of the times...
  - auggierose 11mo ago
    That should be criminal.
internet_points 11mo ago
> I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8. That's a phrase I would never have thought I'd see. I remember Windows 8 as being generally despised when it first came out.
- int_19h 11mo ago
  There's no bottom. It can always get worse.
- keyringlight 11mo ago
  On the UI side of things the trouble with 8 was the push towards touch as the latest shiny object to chase, coming a few years into the boom of smartphones/tablets. The start menu was full screen with no option and many OS applications were either full screen only or by default until you clicked a new title bar button. The 8.1 release pulled back from a lot of that.
pcdoodle 11mo ago
[dead]

ares623 11mo ago

It’s do or die. Any ounce of doubt will cause the entire house of cards to collapse.

luke727 11mo ago

> Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.

dimensional_dan 11mo ago
Maybe it can finally get the new lines correct for a given application? ;-)
- userbinator 11mo ago
  A choice of line endings was one of the few good things they did to Notepad, but that was in the Windows 10 era.
  - RestartKernel 11mo ago
    I remember it being pretty nice to explicitly choose encoding too.
torginus 11mo ago
This is the funniest thing, considering it lacks 90% of the features included freeware text editors written in some student's spare time back in the 90s. It's basically a fancy textbox. Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)
- pjmlp 11mo ago
  They can, the problem is that apparently they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development experience, so they get interns that have grown in US universities with macOS and Linux, which sundenly have a Win32 developer role. That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET. I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
  - int_19h 11mo ago

jen729w 11mo ago

Meanwhile have you used the latest Excel for Mac? 1. Open a sheet. Type anything. 2. Hide Excel (Cmd+H). 3. Bring Excel forth. 4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds.

hulitu 11mo ago
> 4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds. It is because is drawing the 3D surface with your Excel cells. It's not Microsoft's fault that you didn't buy a decent graphics card. /s

userbinator 11mo ago

"again"? What they did in the past seems absolutely neighbourly compared to what they're doing now. Get a VM of Windows 9x/2k/XP to experience what "good Microsoft" was like.

ako 11mo ago
Windows NT
- hulitu 11mo ago
  > Windows NT Windows NT what ? Microsoft was always the same.
  - BoredPositron 11mo ago
    Windows 2000 was generally a good operating system.
    - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
      It was also the last operating system from Microsoft that didn't require activation. It was full of vulnerabilities though. I used to take a laptop with some specialist software to clients and in the end I started running it in a VM so I didn't have to deal with my machine becoming infected from my clients dodgy networks.
  - ako 11mo ago
    Windows NT -> Experience what a good microsoft OS was. Especially around NT 3.1, NT 3.5 their goal seemed mostly to have a good competing OS.
    - hnlmorg 11mo ago
      Sure, if you ignore all the anticompetitive bullshit they pulled to blackmail high street stores into removing BeOS, DrDOS, Linux and others from their shelves. And the stunts they pulled to kill other IMs. Or how they crippled the web for a decade due to killing competing browsers, building Windows lock-ins into IE (eg ActiveX controls), fragmenting Java, and then leaving IE to die themselves. Or how they lied about Windows 98 requiring IE4. Or how they didn’t give a crap about OS security until halfway through the life of XP. Leaving literally millions of people vulnerable to a plethora of different forms of attacks from malware to direct hacking on open Telnet ports. Or how they tried to land grab IRC with their comic book GUI. Which, in fairness, was a novel app. But unfortunately it was another embrace, extend, extinguish play. Or how they tried to kill ODF with their own faux-open document format: OOXML Or their constant stream of FUD messaging about Linux being “communism”. Yeah, MS were really noble in their goals to create a good OS. /s It’s a pity they couldn’t even manage to do that well given every iteration of Windows has been bloated, buggy, and years behind the competition in terms of performance and capabilities. Windows was never a good OS. In fact I’d go further and say Microsoft have never release a good OS. Even their versions of BASIC sucked compared to the competition. Microsoft have always been good at negotiating with businesses. It’s why Azure is used in governments, why Windows is the “business platform”, and why 9x beat the competition in the 90s despite being consistently the worst in class for basically every metric you could think of. Windows didn’t succeed because it was good. Microsoft succeeded because Bill Gates was ruthless!

latentsea 11mo ago

> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation. Am I reading that right?

cmckn 11mo ago
You sure are: https://www.theverge.com/news/799312/openai-chatgpt-erotica-sam-altman-verified-adults https://www.theverge.com/news/799312/openai-chatgpt-erotica-...
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  It's probably a ploy to get people to verify their identity.

jscyc 11mo ago

I opened my outlook android app today to find they'd replaced the archive button in the bottom toolbar with a "Summary by Copilot" one. It wasn't enough that the only colourful button is the Copilot one on the right. Thankfully they still let you reorder the buttons, so I moved archive back and hid that unwanted summary in the overflow menu.

RobotToaster 11mo ago
Once your coworkers start using copilot to turn what should be a single sentence email into six paragraphs, you'll need that to summarise it into a sentence. Progress!
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  Yeah, but it will be very polite and full of corpospeak, which means that it is very insightful.
everdrive 11mo ago
>Thankfully they still let you They "let" you do fewer and fewer things with the computer you "own" every year.

RobotToaster 11mo ago

Never thought I'd miss Steve Ballmer

jack_tripper 11mo ago
Windows under Steve Balmer: "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" Windows under Satya Nadella: "Kindly provide your credit card and personal information sir"
- someguyiguess 11mo ago
  It’s only a matter of time before MS starts asking us to send Wal*Mart gift cards.

Al-Khwarizmi 11mo ago

> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation. Considering that this is only with verified adults, how is this "evil"? I find it more evil to treat full grown adult users as kids and heavily censor their use of LLMs. (Not to detract from the rest of your post, with which I agree).

logicprog 11mo ago
Yeah the disapproval/disgust I'm seeing everywhere, from pretty much every side that I keep my eye on, about OpenAI enabling erotica generation with ChatGPT is so frustrating, because it seems like just Puritanism and censorship, and desiring to treat adults like children as you say.
- poolnoodle 11mo ago
  It is not bad per se but in my opinion it shows that OpenAI is desperately trying to stop bleeding money.
  - logicprog 11mo ago
    I mean, their issue isn't that not enough users are using ChatGPT, so they need to enable new user modalities to draw more people in — they already have something like 800 million MAU. Their issue is that most of their tokens are generated free right now both from those users and stuff like CoPilot, and they're building stupidly huge unnecessary data enters to scale their way to "AGI." So yeah, everyone says this looks like a sign of desperation, but I just don't see it at all, because it would solve a problem they don't actually have (not enough people finding GPT useful).
    - Gerardo1 11mo ago
      If you re--calibrate from any lofty idea of their motives to "get investor money now", this and other moves/announcements make more sense: anything that could look good to an investor. User count going up? Sure. New browser that will deeply integrate chatGPT into users lives and give OAI access to their browsing/shopping data? Sure Several new hardware products that are totally coming in the next several months? Sure We're totally going to start delivering ads? Sure We're making commitments to all these compute providers because our growth is totally going to warrant it? Sure Oh, since we're investing in all of that compute, we're also going to become a compute vendor! Sure None of it is particularly intentional, strategic, or sound. OAI is a money pit, they can always see the end of the runway, and must secure funding now. That is their perpetual state.

pjmlp 11mo ago

> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, Not in what concerns Windows development, I miss "Developers, Developers, Developers" dance. UWP transition after Sinofsky was super bad managed, trying to rescue what was left of it as WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, killing C++/CX, C++/WinRT, .NET Native in the process is a bad joke on anyone that believed in the technology. Don't believe the WinUI marketing, the only reason left to use it, it being a Microsoft employee, or someone that just can't let go of UWP remains.

platevoltage 11mo ago

I don't know if it's evil. It's more like desperate and stupid. They are rapidly losing their gaming dominance thanks to Valve. They've been losing the console wars. There doesn't seem to be a single person using Windows 11 that isn't being forced to in one way or another. Now they are forcing online accounts and injecting AI where it doesn't belong. How they still have willing customers is beyond me.

fodkodrasz 11mo ago
Many people are using Win 11 out of free will, until they alienate them. The main problem is that they are alienating developers, and that they don't focus on anything they do everything half-heartedly (even AI). They abandoned the mobile phone market, where they couldn't decide to target businesess or consumers, so they let them both down. Same happens on the desktop, they are quickly eroding the platform advantage they had and leaving both hobbyists and home users and enterprises without a reason to choose them. They are pushing for the AI now, but in a way that is too controversial and is not acceptable nor for many individuals, nor for businesses, also doing so with forced hardware updates and high monthly costs. XBOX is being abandoned. They did venture into the streamed gaming topic, but abandoning, guess because all those powerful GPUs are needed for AI. Many core services are being abandoned, without alternatives, eg. Maps in windows was abandoned, without any successor. At least they could have created like a PWA wrapper for google/apple/osm, and put in a chooser facede on first start. It would have taken about 1 month for a single developer experienced in the windows relevant subsystems. Windows is still reliable, stable, decently fast and secure, but that is useless when you abandon it as a platform, you don't attract developer talent, you don't have a unified UI/UX language that differentiates you (if not with anything els then with its consistency), does not provide a more streamlined deployment and update flow than competitors, etc. Windows had these advantages, and is repidly loosing these.

npteljes 11mo ago

Microsoft was never not a full-blown evil corporation. What they had, at their peak, is some software that worked well. In the background, same evil corporation as ever. I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

close04 11mo ago
There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did look less evil for a brief time.
- npteljes 11mo ago
  Looks-wise, I agree, the "MS heart Linux" era was better than the current one.
- ptx 11mo ago
  That sounds consistent with their classic embrace-extend-extinguish process [1]. Embracing with no significant user-hostile moves is step 1, and then abusing competitors and users comes as step 3 of the process. They need to briefly look less evil in step 1 to maneuver into position for step 3. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
  - wkat4242 11mo ago
    Yes because they were embracing new markets. They've always followed this process but they made a big paradigm change at that point. This is why they suddenly "loved Linux". Because it was no longer a threat but a tool to them, as they were shifting from being an OS vendor to hyperscale cloud vendor. The same way with other big American tech. Netflix operated for a decade at a loss and now that they saturated the market they are constantly asking more money for less content.

zoobab 11mo ago

"No full OPT OUT" Well even if they have an "opt out" option, it's closed source software, so you cannot audit anything.

snarfy 11mo ago

It reminds me of the Xbox One release. They basically had the market with the earlier release compared to Sony's PS4, but then pushed the thing as a media/entertainment glorified roku box not gaming console. They didn't care what you want only what they wanted to sell you, and they were pushing NFL deals not gaming. Nobody wants this Copilot everywhere, but they sure are pushing it anyway. It's like they completely forgot how to make a product and only know how to push their agenda using whatever monopoly is left.

MYEUHD 11mo ago
> They basically had the market with the earlier release compared to Sony's PS4 The Xbox One and PS4 were both released in November 2013. If anything, it was the PS4 that was released a week earlier than the Xbox One.
hollandheese 11mo ago
You're mixing up the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One releases. Xbox 360 came out a year before the PS3.

neya 11mo ago

> Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again You lost me here. They ALWAYS have been evil and disrespectful of their customers. It's not just paid products, even their so called "open source" products like VSCODE and Github Desktop randomly add helpers to run in the background constantly (even on Mac) under the label Telemetry. They paid good money for OpenAI, they want to make full use of it. RIP to all their customers who have to use their Office 360 suite. They will probably pull off an Adobe at some point :(

duxup 11mo ago

Windows more often looks like an ad supported OS pointed AT ME rather than something for me to use to do anything.

MBerkley 11mo ago

Pure . This is clearly a opt-in feature and they make that abundantly clear in the article. Stop the dramatics.

sharts 11mo ago

Don’t they conduct research and tests with small groups of people before launching features? If so?’, then what the heck users are cool with these things?

eboynyc32 11mo ago

You only have yourself to blame. MS has been doing this for ages.

wkat4242 11mo ago

I think the agentic idea is worth exploring. It could be useful. However I would want it running fully locally (on my servers, absolutely not on Azure or any other cloud) and to have full control of where everything is stored and how it works. And have full control whether I use it or not. Absolutely no popups and marketing nudges to use it. That stuff tends to drive me away, it deeply annoys me and I only start hating the product. But this will not happen with windows. Microsoft is purely a cloud company now and windows is just a sales vehicle for it. I think that's the core problem more so than just the latest thing they're trying to push. But I'm not on this hype train. I don't need to have it today or have FOMO. Rven at work there's this push to use AI "or else we will become irrelevant soon". Which is partly driven by Microsoft as they are very close to our top dogs. Their "adoption" teams are constantly hounding us with their bullshit and I hate them so much. Also the colleagues who are evangelising AI (constantly shilling on Yammer and LinkedIn) are just working to make themselves irrelevant in the long term because AI is cheaper than colleagues. I'll try it when it comes to Linux in a workable form and fully under my control. Just like I didn't use chatbots until they had workable performance on my own ollama server. And even then I don't use it that much. It's still early days. I don't get this pressure "keep up our fall out". I've been doing computing for 40 years and all the big things have taken at least a decade to actually "change the game". Like the dotcom crash. Eventually we fulfilled it's promises but it required other things to make it happen. Like the smartphone and the app.