11 ms·

Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

• RegW 9mo ago
  Is it just me that sees "Windows Recall" and thinks "Total Recall -> Arnold Schwarzenegger -> Terminator"?
• Shank 9mo ago
  > It appears this moment of pushback has resonated with internal teams: According to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, the company is now reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans changes to streamline or even remove certain AI features where they don’t make sense. Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features made sense in the ways that they were being added. There should not be any necessary work to "rollback" features that do not make sense, because they should have not built them in the first place. Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. Taste comes from knowing what not to build. Right now Windows is an unstable mess, filled with things that shouldn't have been built. The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
  • jgalt212 9mo ago
    > Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. How so? The forced feeding of AI is what Satya called for.
    • eviks 9mo ago
      He's at the top of the governance
      • jgalt212 9mo ago
        Yes, I hear your point. I guess I take failure of governance to mean that rules and procedures were not followed or never properly put in place--not that the head boss is promoting bad strategy and tactics.
  • QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
    The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
    • copilot_king 9mo ago
      [dead]
    • b3lvedere 9mo ago
      That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)
      • hparadiz 9mo ago
        If they actually did this they would vendor lock you into a custom DM after one or two iterations and then anyone not using that DM would be locked out of any real software. It's a Trojan horse.
        • bw86 9mo ago
          It would not make Windows a good project, but it would mean that hardware vendors would have to implement good Linux drivers. It could therefore help all other distributions, too!
    • slekker 9mo ago
      Imagine they got their smart engineers to improve and refine Wine (and adjacent tools), rather than pushing out slop, it would be truly amazing
    • delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
      > The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and... > windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'. You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.
  • pixelpoet 9mo ago
    > The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful. Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome. The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
    • dartharva 9mo ago
      I don't know about Windows, but it will take a lot more enshittification than that to burn down the Office brand. Excel alone carries it to dominance.
      • pixelpoet 9mo ago
        The Office brand is literally gone, they renamed it to "Microsoft Copilot 365 app". Check https://office.com https://office.com
        • withinboredom 9mo ago
          Copilot is such a dumb brand name. At least to me, it confers that I need to be a pilot and that it requires training to be one. I just want to be productive, not fly a plane.
          • xattt 9mo ago
            Also, the Copilot is “waiting in the wings” to take over your job.
            • whywhywhywhy 9mo ago
              At least the name is honest.
  • dartharva 9mo ago
    You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong. As an OS, Windows died with 10.
    • twilo 9mo ago
      Died? It’s been working perfectly fine for me for years now.
    • tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
      Their customers for Windows are enterprises, OEM's, Azure users and now advertisers. Direct consumers probably don't register in any internal reports.
  • batrat 9mo ago
    But, but, what about those managers? What they are working on? Making explorer better? or AI AI AI?
    • eviks 9mo ago
      Yes, Explorer is better now- it's preloaded to mask how bad it is
  • _heimdall 9mo ago
    It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.
    • hubertdinsk 9mo ago
      Why not both? Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader"). Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
      • Eddy_Viscosity2 9mo ago
        I imagine it went like this: CEO: Put AI everywhere/ Engineering Staff: There's a lot of places where it doesn't make sense to do this. CEO: Do it or find somewhere else to work. The problem of pushback at the lower levels is that it is completely ineffective when the top levels are set on something.
        • malfist 9mo ago
          As a point of data for your statement, Jassy has repeatedly said that teams that have higher AI adoption are safe from layoffs. Use AI or lose your job is the blunt message
          • ryandrake 9mo ago
            What a wild business metric. Apparently not measuring productivity, profit, or even vague "impact." Just "AI adoption." Imagine your boss said that your job was safe if you switched over to using Python instead of whatever language you're currently developing in.
            • malfist 9mo ago
              For sure, my org adopted KPIs for 95% AI usage measured weekly, and it was reviewed. Not 95% rolling weekly average, 95% each and every single week. I personally witness managers being called out why their team of 8 one week suddenly had only 7 people using AI that week. Take a vacation and your manager had to answer for it. Use an AI tool that they couldn't track, well, your manager had to answer for that too and probably had to harass you to use a measurable tool. It was complete nonsense. Wound up leaving, partly over it. Nobody wanted to hear the emporor had no clothes and it made more sense to get out before that made my a layoff or URA target.
  • CuriouslyC 9mo ago
    I think Windows 11 is the Trump moment. Even if they right the ship, Linux is good enough or good enough is on the near horizon for most use cases so people are jumping ship. There's also bleed from people being tired of Apple's lack of software innovation.
    • tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
      I think they will find it very hard to right the ship. I suspect they have forgotten how to write good software.
      • thewebguyd 9mo ago
        > Forgotten how to write good software Given their current fixation on writing windows components in React Native, I suspect they have a talent problem internally. From the outside looking in, it looks like anyone who knew windows (and office) internals really well are gone, and the new talent they bring in can't deal with the legacy so now they don't touch it, and are building on top using web tech.
    • pjc50 9mo ago
      The trouble with Microsoft is that even if the ship is holed beneath the waterline it will take a long time to sink.
  • tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
    >Taste comes from knowing what not to build. Jobs was correct when he said that Microsoft has no taste.
    • elboru 9mo ago
      And now Apple started to lose it.
      • tempodox 8mo ago
        They’ve been losing it for many years now, it just has become impossible to cover up now for even the most casual observers.
    • layer8 9mo ago
      Apple has now joined them in that, though.
      • tempodox 8mo ago
        Just like Windoze, macOS is not software any more, it has become a platform for rent seeking and money extraction. That shifts the priorities noticeably.
    • pjmlp 9mo ago
      Tahoe...
      • tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
        I’ll take that over Windows.
        • pjmlp 9mo ago
          At least the Apple developer related podcasts complaining about what is broken are entertaining.
  • onetokeoverthe 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • vachina 9mo ago
    Everyone was just following the boss (Satya)
  • eviks 9mo ago
    > Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. It does, imagine how much faster it's going to be in the next model version!
  • hulitu 9mo ago
    > The question ... should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again. We never, ever, learn from "lessons learned". They are there, just as a generic way, to tell other teams, that there might be some issues. I deleted "Microsoft" from the quote because this, unfortunately, applies to a lot of companies.
  • funkyfiddler369 9mo ago
    > because they should have not built them in the first place At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places. No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
  • hibikir 9mo ago
    A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work. If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see. This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp. People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing. So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
  • observationist 9mo ago
    QA? Hardly even know 'er! Windows 11 makes Windows Vista look polished and competent. They're not even trying anymore.
    • pjmlp 9mo ago
      QA teams were all fired in 2018, and devs asked to take over.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• OsamaJaber 9mo ago
  The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit. A Copilot button in Notepad doesn't solve a problem anyone has Good to see them pulling back, but the test will be whether the features they keep actually earn their place in the workflow instead of just being there because someone had a KPI to hit
  • BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
    Notepad had been perfect for 20 years. Morons fucked with it.
    • fredoralive 9mo ago
      You probably wouldn’t like 20 year old Notepad’s habit of leaving Unicode BOMs everywhere, or only supporting CRLF line endings. They did improve it a tiny amount circa Windows 10. Does Windows 11 Notepad still choke on loading large files?
    • henriquecm8 9mo ago
      I actually liked some of the addictions to notepad, like tabs, reopen files, keeping unsaved files, and the unsaved changes indicator in the tab. But I think formatting, grammar and ai are going too far for notepad, if I want to do something that need those I would use Word.
    • whynotmaybe 9mo ago
      I used notepad for quick edit of simple files OR copy pasting and removing formatting. Copilot excluded, who decided that it was a good idea to have multi tab notepad that remembers unsaved files between executions ? "We solved that, just go into settings to toggle that behaviour !" Who decided that notepad had to have a full settings page ? "Just use the feedback hub" ? So basically, you removed Wordpad and now regret this decision and are slowly turning notepad into Jeff Raskins' Archy ?
  • greggoB 9mo ago
    > The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit Much of the way AI has been forced upon the world by MS and the likes makes it very difficult to separate the two. The trend of enshittification leading up to LLMs has also not been a solid basis for trust. So yes, for a lot of people, the underlying technology isn't necessarily an issue, but it's kind of hard to imagine it being presented in a non-problematic way given the above, which I suspect is a big part of why there's a growing sentiment of distaste with anything AI now.
• Lucasoato 9mo ago
  This is absurd, the fact that Windows has 70% if global desktop operating system market share makes them their most important moat, why are they deliberately taking actions and steps to make it worse? They added ads, forced updates, mandatory Microsoft account activation, so much unwanted AI slop... Think about it, if it was another more competitive company, they would be charging for the AI service and the onboarding experience would be totally different. It seems like the management is totally disconnected from their product.
  • lloydatkinson 9mo ago
    I think the summary is that "product owner" types and other agile simulacrums wanted it simply because they viewed it as an easy win towards KPI and other performance metrics. The most damning proof of this is Copilot in Notepad, and that half-attempt at renaming the entire Office suite to simply "Copilot" (they seemed to reverse this a few days later).
    • badgersnake 9mo ago
      I think that’s a little harsh. When the CEO groupthink network says AI all the things, what are the PMs supposed to do?
    • mishac 9mo ago
      urgh. What is old is new. "Copilot" is the new omniname, what ".NET" was for a previous generation.
  • pjc50 9mo ago
    The moat is still secure. So the strategy is to loot as much value as possible from within the moat. After all, where are the corporate customers going to go?
  • jeppester 9mo ago
    The problem is that we allowed them to control the PC OS market so tightly. Had there been any sort of real competition, then they would have had to care about their users. At this point I just hope that they don't manage to turn the ship before Linux has gotten a real foothold in the market.
• zx8080 9mo ago
  AI overload? It's called "a complete shitshow".
• lloydatkinson 9mo ago
  I'm hopeful but will wait and see just how much they change. If they remove Copilot from Notepad, I think that would be a reasonable indicator.
• Frieren 9mo ago
  Good, maybe Microsoft will start investing to solve real problems and develop better products. Microsoft have been de-investing in its own companies to put more money into AI. Yes, they have made cuts on highly profitable business to burn money on AI. I hope that they reverse before they fire everyone that was able to build useful software.
• nubinetwork 9mo ago
  They'll pretend to care and change a few things for 6 months, but they'll just keep doing it. /shrug
  • mrdevlar 9mo ago
    Yeah, this is a public relations effort. Corporations, especially ones that have spent an obscene amount of money on AI companies aren't going to change their direction. They have to justify that spending to their shareholders.
• g947o 9mo ago
  Remove copilot buttons from (new) Windows laptops and we'll talk.
  • mystifyingpoi 9mo ago
    Huh, I just noticed that my laptop has one. Never recognized it.
• nusl 9mo ago
  This entire thing seems very iffy. Not much in the way of concrete info, a lot of speculation, and I seriously doubt that MS will suddenly switch directions. It's just being modified/refactored into smaller suppositories over time rather than the large infrequent ones they seem to have used.
• TheChaplain 9mo ago
  Not surprised it took so long, the decision makers seems to be quite out of touch with the user base. Which makes me believe that their "walk back" is just to change the packaging of the same old "slop" being shoved down their customers throats.
• zkmon 9mo ago
  Too little, too late.
  • bartread 9mo ago
    Yeah, and you know how to know this is true? This story has already dropped three quarters of the way down the front page and has a grand total of 72 points. Topics that people really give a damn about on this site often garner 1000 - 2000 points and stay on the front page for 36 hours or more, but nobody cares about this. They’ve already lost the HN audience and there’s certainly an element of where we go everybody else eventually follows, because I suspect we skew influential in the companies we work for.
    • GrinningFool 9mo ago
      Did they ever have the hn audience? Over the years I've gotten the impression most folks here are primarily Mac and Linux for daily drivers.
      • bartread 9mo ago
        A lot of Microsoft stories have got a lot more traction than this one although, yes, I agree, the community skews anti-Microsoft. Nevertheless, I’d bet many of our employers are Microsoft shops to a greater or lesser extent.
• lovegrenoble 9mo ago
  Please, delete all AI from my Windows
  • eimrine 9mo ago
    Not your property, sorry.
    • NullPrefix 9mo ago
      This PC, not My Computer
      • timbit42 9mo ago
        My as in My[crosoft] Computer
• CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  Trying to bake AI into the OS was so dumb. Make the OS super agent friendly, surface as much data as possible in agent accessible way, and perhaps create a journalling config management system so agent actions can be rolled back. Then sit back and let people build cool shit on your base and let people market your product for you.
  • nxobject 9mo ago
    Agree – "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"
    • BizarroLand 9mo ago
      If they had made it opt-in and available, I might like it. Hell, I might love it. But when they overstep and shovel their crap into MY computer against MY will? Piss off. I was already using linux in many ways, now it's my daily driver as well.
• mhd 9mo ago
  So Copilot in Office is the new "Hall of Tortured Souls"?
• Havoc 9mo ago
  They need a more fundamental mind shift frankly. It’s not an AI problem but rather a ram stuff down users throat even when they clearly don’t want it problem. See broken start menu that does a web search instead showing your apps. See forced online install. See one drive everywhere. Toning down the AI a bit won’t be enough
• PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
  Can we walk back on whatever is causing my 3060 computer to work slower than my windows computer from the 1990s? Or my phone?
• zthrowaway 9mo ago
  I can’t believe I’m going to type this, but I miss the Ballmer days. Current leadership has somehow made this company even worse.
  • Telaneo 9mo ago
    It's a bit like Bush. Sure, what happened back then was indeed stupid, but we didn't know how bad it was going to get.
    • okanat 9mo ago
      For both cases, the previous bad management was calculatingly evil but there was reason. Now it's pure emotional response and acting like rabid animals that lost every single notion but attacking and harming anything they see as a target.
    • eviks 9mo ago
      Not only did we know, but the "stupid" part is one of the major causes of how bad it's getting, so in retrospect the "stupid" looks even worse.
  • baal80spam 9mo ago
    Eh, I am pretty sure that if Ballmer was at the wheel today we would see AI literally everywhere in Windows.
  • jayflux 9mo ago
    What we’re seeing today with Windows is more representative of the times we’re living in rather than because of who’s the CEO. I don’t doubt for a second Ballmer would also be jumping onto the AI hype train if he was still running the show.
  • sockmeistr 9mo ago
    If you haven't seen it before, I'd recommend Dan Luu's blog post about Ballmer: https://danluu.com/ballmer/ https://danluu.com/ballmer/
  • 9mo ago
• yurii_l 9mo ago
  It's a shame, I was dreaming of getting a chat-based operating system. (sarcasm)
• Malipeddi 9mo ago
  I will believe it when I see it. I have been feeling really helpless and hopeless recently about Windows. So hopefully this news turns into something real.
• Mindwipe 9mo ago
  I'll believe it when I see it. Windows many problems are the results of five years of terrible strategy and not caring about if users actually like your platform. It will require sustained effort over a long period to fix.
• Waterluvian 9mo ago
  AI feels like the ultimate “a solution in search of a problem.” Forms of it are very powerful and have a lot of uses for sure. But there seems to be an enormous amount of top-down “figure out how to fit AI into our product/processes” for both producers and consumers.
  • Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
    For sure, and mainly because the stakes are so high - they invested billions into it. But despite AI being very popular - loads of people ask ChatGPT or Gemini before punching in two words into a search engine - it's hard to monetize, or the monetization does not cover costs let alone investments made. AI tools are here to stay but they'll be scaled back a lot. Plus, there's still so much investments made into it that there's enough free plans or free alternatives (remember DeepSeek?), and you can't compete with free.
• glimshe 9mo ago
  We, customers who were annoyed by these AI "improvements", knew we'd eventually get here. We hated these features from the get to. Now I'm curious: will the executives, paid millions because they are visionaries well ahead mere mortals like us, be fired for this pathetically stupid strategic push?
• major505 9mo ago
  At this point I dont trust common sense in anybody inside Microsoft. They are doing dumb shit for about 5 years now, and killing MS Office, a brand thats market leader for more than 30 years prooves that anybody who had conservative opinion on how software should be built have already abandoned the ship or was kicked out of it. Now is being run by "visionary" marketing people, and the only way left is down.
  • blibble 9mo ago
    5 years? try 10 Windows 10 released with the ability for the user to not consent to updates REMOVED the direction of travel from that point on was clear consent was no longer necessary the OS is purpose is no longer to serve the owner of the computer, it is there to serve Microslop's whims and that was the point I went full linux everywhere
    • major505 9mo ago
      Its a fair point.
• tokai 9mo ago
  Was this push for AI in Microsofts products just to get user number to go up, so investors don't pull out of the AI bubble?
  • moi2388 9mo ago
    I think it was just to get managers and product owners excited, so they get their companies to buy azure compute for AI.
• pico303 9mo ago
  Recall is a bloated waste of time that completely misses the point. Why not instead let me snapshot a set of apps and docs/projects that are open, then snapshot a different set of apps and what’s open, and let me flip between the two (or three or four)? This way I could sort out my setup for home versus work, or between multiple clients/customers, and be able to quickly jump between common layouts/apps depending on context. But to be honest, this is probably beyond what Windows APIs are capable of, since Windows can’t even remember what directories I was working in across apps. I’m not sure why I need to know the history of screenshots that is Recall. Maybe this was simply the best they could do? That said, Windows 11 is such an AI-fueled privacy dumpster fire that it’s getting replaced by Linux on my gaming PC this month. Then I’m only stuck on Windows for work, and even then I can still write code on Mac or Linux.
• major505 9mo ago
  Too be honest, thres is too much wrong with win 11 to save it at this point. Is not only AI bullshit in my notepad. The excess adds, intrusive online stuff, terriblee performance for basic tasks like the File Explorer or even opening a menu. Making everything a damn web page... One clear example is outlook. Talk wathever you want, outlook, is the indistry standart for e-mail. And while not perfect it was very usefull. Then they keep pushing the new interface on everybody throats. The new interface takes like 1 gb of RAM when in use, agaisnt 200mb of the traditional one, while offering less options. Why would anyone who really cares about e-mail use that shit? People who just casually use e-mails dont use Outlook, they use the webmail. They choose to ignore the users, and push top down changes into them. But the market dont really works this way for most people. Not every tech company needs to be like Apple.
  • a1o 9mo ago
    It’s amazing how much worse outlook got and how fast it got so much worse. It also can’t handle screens with different scales, it sometimes inexplicably fails to render an email, printing can produce files of different size - using the web version produces smaller pdfs than the desktop version. I miss thunderbird a lot since the company forced Outlook use and also removed the classic outlook option - or maybe it only has the weird white space version now.
    • major505 9mo ago
      While I did enjoy thunderbird its lack of hability to use microsoft outlook protocol for e-mail and calendas, always keeped me from use it. Also, to be honest, I dont trust mozilla anymore than microsoft these days.
• Telaneo 9mo ago
  The thing that bothers me the most about this is that I actually have faith in the people actually developing Windows. I'm not at all aurprised that they are rebelling against stupid non-features. But that rebelling doesn't amount to anything, since managers and decrees from the top funnel all effort into the most user-hostile results possible. If MS rehires their QA teams and listen to the people on the ground, I'd imagine the very same devs who put AI in Notepad would be very happy to give us features we actually want.
  • ReptileMan 9mo ago
    Lions led by donkeys, geniuses led by pointy haired bosses.
  • saratogacx 9mo ago
    You say that but they rewrote the start menu and task bar from scratch. Something you see cried for over and over again by folks who think that rewriting is easy. The end result is a painful, inflexible, and overly opinionated piece of UI that is slowly re-learning lessons learned by it's fore barer and is likely to never be as capable of what it replaced. From beta people wanted to resize and reposition it and that feature is still nowhere to be seen after 5 years (including public preview). I have little to no confidence that the develpers currently in the Windows org can, collectively, build their way out of this in any time frame that feels reasonable.
    • Telaneo 9mo ago
      I have faith that rewrite was done because some exec told them to do it, rather that out of a desire to make a better start menu. The result is shoddy work from someone who clearly didn't want to do it, and got told 'no' when they had ideas which would genuinely improve the experience.
• stego-tech 9mo ago
  Too little, too late, and too specific in scope. Windows 11 is awful not merely because of the AI bullshit being shoehorned into everything, everywhere (CoPilot in Notepad? In Paint? Are you serious, Microsoft?!), but also because of all the other completely unnecessary changes made to the OS. A curated selection of real-world examples from my recent gig making a hardened Windows 11 image for a physical product line: * Kiosk Mode via the shell launcher delays logon times from <5s to 30-180s - just by turning it on, even if it doesn’t actually enable kiosk mode! * Local changes via registry keys don’t “stick” consistently, even when the machine is entirely offline * Offline activations using hardware keys fail across vendors without anyone knowing why (other than Microsoft, for the cost of a support call) * Existing Windows 10 powercfg scripts and config files do not work with Win11. Our workaround was manually calling the exact same command twice, back-to-back, to force-apply a change. * Installing language packs via the command line by any means available (Powershell’s add-windowscapability, DISM’s package installer, lpksetup, etc) do not actually populate the GUI with those packs as an option until we reinstall them from the GUI again. * Adverts are everywhere, even on IoT LTSC Enterprise Honestly, Microsoft completely lost the plot as to what an operating system is supposed to do in favor of turning it into an advertising and user surveillance machine masquerading as a useful OS. I hate it.
  • mirsadm 9mo ago
    Besides the general awfulness of Windows that you describe, have you looked at C:\Windows recently? It is an unorganised mess with multiple different case styling all over the place. I get this is not that important but I can't help feel it illustrates just how little care is taken behind the scenes. The whole thing seems like a nightmare to deal with. I had a fresh install of Windows on a new computer which refused to install updates until I ran a bunch of commands in the "terminal". The whole thing is beyond fixing at this point.
    • direwolf20 9mo ago
      C:\Windows has always been that way. There's no demand for it to be organised in any way other than unique filenames.
  • 9mo ago
• t1234s 9mo ago
  For people who work in very classified/secure environments (designing weapons systems, rev eng UFO's, etc...) does M$ offer some version of windows without all of the AI crap and bloat?
  • caminanteblanco 9mo ago
    I think the windows 11 IOT LTSC release is what you're looking for https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...
    • SSLy 9mo ago
      No, not the IoT client build, but the Server build with Desktop enabled.
  • GaryNumanVevo 9mo ago
    Yeah absolutely, but you'll never be able to install / license that version of Windows
  • AndroidKitKat 9mo ago
    The latest Windows 11 Pro for Workstations builds appears to still support workgroup or domain joins without requiring a Microsoft account. In terms of the OS still shipping with crap, it is still there but since there's no Internet connection the crap is largely useless.
• watermelon0 9mo ago
  I don't like this. Bad user experience with AI and general enshitification of Windows was the push that many people needed to at least try Linux, and for companies to take Linux a bit more serious as the desktop platform.
  • BLKNSLVR 9mo ago
    I would also cheer on Microsoft to accelerate Windows into an immovable object. Can they go back and restart from Windows 7?
  • kingstnap 9mo ago
    I think the more important platform is Laptop right now. Linux on laptops has battery life issues because unfortunately modern/hardware software makes it so "good battery life" is a knifes edge configuration.
• protoster 9mo ago
  Too late, idiots. Just as Windows 10 was being retired, you ran the craziest anti-marketing campaign I've ever seen and successfully coaxed me into switching my daily driver to Linux. Until this year, I've been using windows my ENTIRE life.
  • ActionHank 9mo ago
    I recently started a new role and have to use Windows for work. I am seriously thinking of looking for another role because it is such a HOG.
    • protoster 9mo ago
      I'm in the same boat, have to use Windows at work. In addition to whatver MS is doing, every workstation is encumbered with various EDR and antivirus software.
      • ActionHank 9mo ago
        Throw in some docker workloads and it's a party.
  • stainablesteel 9mo ago
    this isn't new, microsoft has been doing this to its customers for years
    • protoster 9mo ago
      For sure, but 11 is on a whole new level in my experience.
  • mrdevlar 9mo ago
    Windows 10 is my last Microsoft Windows operating system. Between the fact that I had to turn of TPM in the bios so that I wouldn't wake up one day turn on my computer and see Windows 11. The massive bugs that prevent things like power off. The insane push for AI in everything (notepad? really?). I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
• markus_zhang 9mo ago
  As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/server). Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games. Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
  • theYipster 9mo ago
    I love the care and polish that went into the Microsoft Windows XP Welcome/Tour app that played after install. That was the peak of the summit—quality wise.
    • markus_zhang 9mo ago
      Yeah, there was a lot of good memories. And it does have a 64-bit version so not a too-bad option as a retro-OS. But I think we need to find retro hardware for it to work properly.
      • theYipster 9mo ago
        Actually I just installed it over the weekend in a QEMU/KVM VM on my modern desktop. Took about 20 minutes, and works very nicely. You can give it up to 4GB of RAM. Now, I can't use it for much (aside from playing the welcome tour,) because the last thing I want to do is expose it to the internet... On the other hand, I hear there is a modern browser that is maintained for it.
  • 9mo ago
• notepad0x90 9mo ago
  It's the same geniuses that come up with the worst product names possible. Like they came up with a really good product name and inverted the value to use the opposite. The problem is that the engineers and coders that ran microsoft are no longer doing so. Their leadership is too disconnected. It's the same recipe of enshittification you see all over, marketing, sales take over along with consultants and MBA's. Except, I think in Microsoft's case there are still enough people who know about the technology to be dangerous, they're not entirely clueless, they just know enough (like about AI in this case) to be dangerous. Regardless of the sentiment on HN and elsewhere though, even excluding enterprise usage, I doubt windows' marketshare will suffer more than 10% YoY.
• a1o 9mo ago
  I doubt the higher ups in MS even use windows, they probably have MacBooks.
  • mizuki_akiyama 9mo ago
    Honestly, they probably do.
• theturtle 9mo ago
  [dead]
• nashashmi 9mo ago
  I understand the approach Satya took initially. He had a big investment in AI. He saw a theoretical value in AI supporting productivity. And he pushed his developers and creators to imagine and mock up ideas how AI would deliver. Obviously the last part was disappointing. In hindsight, the push was far too aggressive, and too mediocre. We have a lot to learn from this try, about ourselves and about others. Integration 2.0 will be or needs to be a bit more skewed towards low hanging fruits. I want a copilot for the help menu, and for the 1000 commands not in the toolbar, and a copilot enhancement to the search bar (which came from google!). And a natural language interface to bring up templates, open files, and look for images. Apple could have done this AI enhancement with settings, and added a start button to open apps. As for "privacy", that is the first scream that comes out from people who have never touched the product. Assurety should have been made that all data would be local. This runs contrary to the "data is the new oil" direction, but it would have been a good way to entice the skeptics and eventually swallow them whole to give up their privacy (insert evil laugh here).
  • ReptileMan 9mo ago
    He is just Marissa Mayer level of competence without the hotness.
  • hedora 9mo ago
    There’s no way to set up Windows to respect your privacy at this point. Windows 10 was the turning point on this. They charge you for the software, and charge you again by stealing your data. They even used to have a whitepaper explaining how any MS employee can remotely pull any file from any windows machine with managerial approval.
    • nashashmi 9mo ago
      So you are claiming that all AI in any form would be MS-retrievable?
      • hedora 9mo ago
        I’m saying they’re not going to ship privacy preserving AI.
• eboy 9mo ago
  [dead]
• antisthenes 9mo ago
  What's concerning isn't that they pushed AI and then walked it back. What's concerning is that they lack judgment and proper insight into why pushing it in the first place was a bad idea. If your OS truly is a product, users should not be beta-testers. This isn't an indie kickstarter game.
• madhacker 9mo ago
  Microsoft needs to double down on its ubiquitous AI initiative so that more users can discover the joy of Linux.
  • pjmlp 9mo ago
    As someone that uses Linux distros since 1995, I have had lots of joy getting it to work on various kinds of hardware, during weekends and long nights.
    • enopod_ 9mo ago
      Ah the good old days. Investing an entire weekend to make your pci soundblaster card work. Nowadays you just install an iso from a thumb drive, it takes 30 mins and everything works out of the box. So boring!
      • pjmlp 9mo ago
        Pity that I am yet to have that boring experience on laptops, even if sold with Linux pre-installed, the fun continues.
      • timchristie 9mo ago
        Is there a consensus on the best ‘boring’ distro nowadays? It’s been ~15 years since I last installed linux (Linux Mint on a netbook that couldn’t run the pre-installed Win7), and am now curious about repurposing a gaming PC for software development.
        • Gander5739 9mo ago
          Fedora, maybe?
• major505 9mo ago
  In the end is hardto see why they banked so heavy into it. When open AI started t o make promisses and everybody saw what it could do, Microsoft invested heavily on it, seeing some of the largest increase in its shares, and in consequence on big fat bonus for its executives. NOw that the hype is naturally going down, and people are encountering limitations in what modern AI can do, and having more realistic expectations, Microsoft hype train stoped in middle of the hill climb. They pretty much exchanged gradual increases in revenue for a quick but ultimally short term profit.
  • Pay08 9mo ago
    I genuinely think that an "agentic" (I hate that word) OS would be incredibly useful. But both how Copilot was integrated into Windows and it simply being a terrible model destroyed that possibility.
    • major505 9mo ago
      I think it can work. In about what? 10 years, maybe more. Tech is simply not yet on the same page as a star trekk computer that you can talk and make it work. And the main thing that needs to change for it to work is, that AI agents need to run locally, with your own agent without needing cloud processing. Maybe when we get into this point, is when it will make sense, from a pratical and private way. Now what could work is making a traditional OS, but exposing ways of its power users maketheir own IA agents with the OS data, and this way choose what they want to share wth the cloud.
• ReptileMan 9mo ago
  After relentless pressure from Microsoft finally switched to Linux. I won't say it is smooth sail - but it respects your time and PC resources. Which Windows does not. Windows has had abhorrently slow Explorer, File Search and almost any end user interaction for couple of years now. And is so full of crap that can't be disabled or even don't know what it is doing.
• stainablesteel 9mo ago
  microsoft saw global enshittification and thought enshittifying enshittification would be a valid strategy to one-up their competition
• ghn345678 9mo ago
  I never thought I would have to give up Notepad on Windows for quick file edits. But now with AI in notepad, paint, snap tool, etc, I had to install and use third party alternatives all the time.
  • vrighter 9mo ago
    right click on notepad and uninstall it. Then the old notepad pops right back (it never left)
• verdverm 9mo ago
  Microsoft had gained my goodwill as a linux user when they didn't immediately destroy github and embraced open source I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again. I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners
• alkonaut 9mo ago
  Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)? And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this? Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
  • packetlost 9mo ago
    I got that feeling by looking at their C# docs. It looks like someone had a KPI that was "words of documentation written"
    • url00 9mo ago
      100%. MSDN is the definition of saying nothing with as many words as possible. I guess if you wanted a case for why LLMs are helpful, MSDN is a good one haha
  • MrMember 9mo ago
    That seems likely. Someone got a directive to "increase Copilot adoption" so they rebranded Office to Copilot and now they can show their boss a graph for Copilot adoption that goes to the right and up and get a promotion for it and everyone's happy.
• jpmattia 9mo ago
  Great. Let us hope that support for hardware without TPM is next. Creating several mountains worth of electronic waste was a terrible decision. And in the middle of the AI-induced memory shortage! Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.
  • GaryNumanVevo 9mo ago
    Motherboards have had TPM support (built-in/exteral) since like 2017. Are there a bunch of models that don't support a plug-in TPM? I guess the BIOS would probably be the next issue.
    • hedora 9mo ago
      The only thing my 2010 desktop can’t do well is run a local LLM. It can even run diffusion models. I spent a few hundred on a video card for it during the pandemic. Why should I want to add a TPM to it (assuming it’s even possible)?
    • p_ing 9mo ago
      fTPM is in the CPU [package], which has been the norm since around that point in time. Motherboard slotted TPMs should be a rarity, now.
  • p_ing 9mo ago
    TPM is necessary for security. Microsoft should not relent on this as the largest deployed consumer desktop OS.
• vee-kay 9mo ago
  This reminds me of a useful tool I encountered recently.. Winslop is an open source tool that removes Windows 11 bloatware, disables AI features like Copilot, and restores useful settings: https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop
  • hbn 9mo ago
    I'm terrified to use any of these Windows debloaters or do anything that gets me too far away from the default intended way of how Microsoft wants a Windows install to be because it's always just a matter of time before an update breaks things or you get impossible to diagnose behaviour since you disabled something and a new "feature" was written expecting that something to be there. Microsoft can barely make Windows function when you're using it as intended. I don't expect them to make it work after I messed with their semi-functioning mess.
    • vee-kay 9mo ago
      I am using Tiny10 for a debloated Win10 on my old PC last few years, and I faced no issues. Microsoft Office, Windows Updates, etc., all worked well. Of course, it is a sandboxed PC with VPN and good antimalware (Bit defender and MBAM) to protect it, as Microsoft has almost stopped giving Win10 updates (there's a workaround for an extension, but it may not be continued, as M$ wants everyone to migrate to crappy adware Win11). I had to reinstall Win11 on a newer PC, so I used Tiny11 for a debloated Windows installation, and it is working fine with the licensed Microsoft apps I use (Microsoft Office, MS Project, etc.) and other programs (game stores (Steam, GoG, Epic, etc.), video editing tools, programming tools, etc. But I don't really like Win11 as I had to do hosts blocking to block ads on it, and everything Win11 does feels a bit more clunky compared to Win10. I even had to use a Start Menu replacer app, as M$ enshittified/nerfed the Start Menu for Win11. As you rightly pointed out, these debloaters can be unsafe (if they are not open-source, so they are not validated for security issues and bugs; thankfully Winslop is open-source) and can cause Windows to misbehave. But I think such a debloater would be good for a dual OS setup (Linux and Windows). In 2026, I think I'll have to throw out Windows out the proverbial virtual window, and switch over to Linux on all my home PCs. I am running out of my patience with M$'s enshittification and nasty ads.
• CMay 9mo ago
  1. Find out what Co-pilot's reputation is among power users. 2. Realize that Co-pilot is bad and needs to improve up to Microsoft's highest gold standards of trustworthiness. 3. Ditch Co-pilot branding inside the OS. 4. Make AI features private and offline by default unless the local hardware cannot run the specialized tiny model for that task, at which point it goes online for it. It might be slower, but if it does the thing, it's ok. 5. Allow companies and power users to provide their own local models that hook into these tasks, so they can host AI servers within the company and these AI tasks never reach outside of the company. 6. Make AI features more specific, targeted and useful instead of simply integrating it into the various functions and throwing it at users like "here, you figure out what to do with this thing, we don't know." 7. Don't expect people to want to chat with it in every app, just find a task that you know it succeeds at and expose that task rather than letting users figure out what it sucks at. 8. Don't make the AI integration APIs a case of increased surface area privacy and security risk that 3rd party system apps can hook into, to mass extract information out of every app on your system easily. Put limitations on it. 9. Add features to specify where AI can go and cannot go, just like the microphone. Folders, apps, online services. Even if it does use Co-pilot online, let users sculpt it. 10. Make it explicit and obvious when AI features are operating offline or online. If users have decades of understanding that Notepad is a private offline app, preserve that expectation as much as possible. Just because Outlook and OneNote are very online-oriented apps, it doesn't mean they want their local experience to be online in every way. If you force AI to go over all my cloud files, notes and e-mail without my permission, that is sociopathic behavior and I will ditch you, Microsoft. Some day Co-pilot will probably be good. That isn't today. It's probably not this year or next year, but eventually. Until then, it needs to stay in a lane with freshly painted lines surrounded with sand barrels in case it wrecks. It's not that I'm entirely opposed to some Microsoft AI feature existing in Windows, but manufacturing a user assumption that it is everywhere all the time is bad not just for Windows, but for society as a whole. We've already seen how political and activist the public sphere became over the last decade, which reduces trust in the people who make software and services too. What do we do when Microsoft gets ideologically taken over and abuses its information access to people for political ends? Show you can be trusted. When I put a little food bowl down for you, don't scratch me and we'll go from there.
• tracker1 9mo ago
  Maybe it's a bad idea to build critical UI bits with React? I mean, I'm a big fan of React for a lot of things... but I don't think critical pieces of UI/UX interactions should be built with it at all. The taskbar, start menu, file explorer, desktop and system settings are areas that should be boring, consistent and just work. That hasn't been close to the case since Windows 7.. Windows 8 was the start of the decline and that was over 13 years ago. While I like some of the things that have come to Windows since then, there's probably twice as much to dislike. Hire/promote/raise someone to act as a UX czar for Windows all around... design a "final" UI/UX target that covers existing features (starting with a checklist of everything that currently can be configured everywhere)... and finish that design. Stop shifting gears and enshitifying the overall experience to wring every cent of "value" out of every user out there. Get a full release cycle or two with no new features... just solid bug fixes and a more consistent UI/UX. I know there's kernel features for new GPUs, improved storage and CPU interactions and scheduling... but the UI/UX on top of the kernel is a mess and it shows too well. Get your staff aligned on a common UX theme... I don't care if it's back to Fluent or something closer to where Win11 is, but at least get it consistent above all else. It's a mess. Fire half the managers... stop giving out bonuses based on new features in windows, and give bonuses on sections of config/settings that are marked as complete without falling back to legacy UI from the late 90's. Not that the 90's setup was that bad compared to the hybrid bastard we have today.
• nunez 9mo ago
  Between this, the paused NVIDIA deal and the reports of Claude Code within MSFT, I can't help but think that OpenAI is in trouble.
• 999900000999 9mo ago
  All I want is for this stuff to be a separate addon. Anyway, I re encrypted my Windows install a few days ago. Linux is still an adventure the moment you need to do anything difficult.
• gwbas1c 9mo ago
  Seems like Microsoft needs to take an ultra-conservative approach with Windows, and instead build AI in a "new" operating system that people can elect to use.
• krunck 9mo ago
  Don't be fooled into thinking that Recall like crap will not be part of all future Microsoft OS's.
• simianwords 9mo ago
  I really wonder what is happening inside where Microsoft does not release a single nice or product in years. What would happen to the morale? What would people proudly say “this is what my company built”? I’m trying to understand how they screwed up the AI thing so much. There’s so much innovation, creativity possible using AI, especially as an integration in the OS.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    At least within the Gaming division morale looks like that Chegg stock graph. > What would people proudly say “this is what my company built”? Umm, we built the anger among about our best fans. > There’s so much innovation, creativity possible using AI, especially as an integration in the OS. No pls, we are already cooked enough.
• Borborygymus 9mo ago
  Microsoft has long been a company where the left hand and the right hand are not well coordinated. It'll be interesting to see if they can reconcile the "everything must be AI" mantra from the executives with the crystal clear "we do NOT WANT THIS" message from their customers. Place your bets.
• disqard 9mo ago
  I'm reminded of Satya's glee in 2003, at having rolled out this AI integration across-the-board, before Google (which then scrambled to get in the game): "And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that'll be a great day" Hmmm, the "moonwalk" is a dance too...
• insane_dreamer 9mo ago
  It's honestly shocking to me that MSFT is still as profitable as it is. It must have deep Enterprise vendor lock-in that keep boatloads of $$ coming in. Is it just Office + Azure keeping it afloat?
• deafpolygon 9mo ago
  they’re not really..this is just pr spin to do damage control and mitigate the backlash.
• akimbostrawman 9mo ago
  They raised the heat too quickly and burned the frog. No worries they will temporarily reduce the heat until people are used to it to rise it once again just like people pretend now windows 10 is good.