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> 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
by Shank 8mo 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 8mo ago> Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. How so? The forced feeding of AI is what Satya called for.
- QuadmasterXLII 8mo agoThe 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 8mo ago[dead]
- b3lvedere 8mo agoThat 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 8mo agoIf 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 8mo agoIt 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 8mo agoImagine 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoThe Office brand is literally gone, they renamed it to "Microsoft Copilot 365 app". Check https://office.com https://office.com
- withinboredom 8mo agoCopilot 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 8mo agoAlso, the Copilot is “waiting in the wings” to take over your job.
- whywhywhywhy 8mo agoAt least the name is honest.
- dartharva 8mo agoYou 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 8mo agoDied? It’s been working perfectly fine for me for years now.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoTheir customers for Windows are enterprises, OEM's, Azure users and now advertisers. Direct consumers probably don't register in any internal reports.
- batrat 8mo agoBut, but, what about those managers? What they are working on? Making explorer better? or AI AI AI?
- eviks 8mo agoYes, Explorer is better now- it's preloaded to mask how bad it is
- _heimdall 8mo agoIt 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 8mo agoWhy 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 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoAs 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 8mo agoWhat 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 8mo agoFor 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 8mo agoI 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 8mo agoI think they will find it very hard to right the ship. I suspect they have forgotten how to write good software.
- thewebguyd 8mo 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 8mo agoThe trouble with Microsoft is that even if the ship is holed beneath the waterline it will take a long time to sink.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago>Taste comes from knowing what not to build. Jobs was correct when he said that Microsoft has no taste.
- elboru 8mo agoAnd now Apple started to lose it.
- tempodox 8mo agoThey’ve been losing it for many years now, it just has become impossible to cover up now for even the most casual observers.
- layer8 8mo agoApple has now joined them in that, though.
- tempodox 8mo agoJust 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 8mo agoTahoe...
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoI’ll take that over Windows.
- pjmlp 8mo agoAt least the Apple developer related podcasts complaining about what is broken are entertaining.
- onetokeoverthe 8mo ago[dead]
- vachina 8mo agoEveryone was just following the boss (Satya)
- eviks 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo agoA 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 8mo agoQA? Hardly even know 'er! Windows 11 makes Windows Vista look polished and competent. They're not even trying anymore.
- pjmlp 8mo agoQA teams were all fired in 2018, and devs asked to take over.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]