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Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

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Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#511

Post by philistine »

tremon wrote: post #90
ptero wrote: post #11

Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats. But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use. Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engine…

It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business…

Microsoft has indeed lost their way with Microsoft, but not in the sense that they became evil ghouls. They've always been evil ghouls. No, what's happened is that Windows became a minor part of Microsoft's profits. The whole company is not focused on Windows the way Apple is with the iPhone.

The higher ups no longer care about Windows as a product itself. They only care about Windows as a storefront to their other efforts (OneDrive, Office, Copilot, etc.)

Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#512

Post by falcor84 »

harvey9 wrote: post #389
falcor84 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer. It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from the…

It should be possible to get creative and business work done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of what a file is.

This is actually an interesting example. To me it sounds like it actually should be less confusing to a person who has no preconceived notion of what a file should be, and only wants to save their work and reopen it later, not worried about what shape the saved object takes.

On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never actually had any interest in figuring out where and how these tabs get persisted - it just works.

Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#513

Post by hannahoppla »

someguyiguess wrote: post #310
voidUpdate wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is a javascript library. Javascript needs its own runtime. Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire javascript runtime for no reason?

Only someone who has not tried to write stuff in "native windows" would ask this question. If you want a real answer, go try and develop a Windows native application real quick. I'll wait...

Windows 7 was not written in react, it looked great and worked great. Get those guys to write the UI for Windows 11.

Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#514

Post by II2II »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #355
bayindirh wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. I run almost everything under Linux. All my daily driver and work-related desktop systems are Linux for more than two decades now. Heck, we don't have any Windows machines used for work in the datacenter. However, I wanted to highlight that Linux is not "there" yet, and telling "just use Linux, duh" doesn't solve all the problems a user has. For photography and graphic arts, Linux can handle many if not…

And if you are a professional photographer, Darktable falls short by a thousand cuts. It is not even close to Lightroom, let alone Photoshop.

That's the thing, not everyone is a professional photographer. Open source tools are fine for many of us. They are also great to get a taste of a field, to learn the basics, without a massive investment.

You don't have to be everything to everyone. You just have to satisfy a need.

Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#516

Post by cratermoon »

Macha wrote: post #7

It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11. I think the only way this gets b…

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate

I get the impression that many companies are working through this with AI-assisted coding. How bad can the product get before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing programmers and deploying AI slop? For products like Windows and Office, the subscription model and enterprise account revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before they even have to apologize and roll back.

Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#518

Post by HideousKojima »

rob74 wrote: post #484
autoexec wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions It's imperfect. We have way more choices in domestic partners than we do with operating systems but I think there are a lot of similarities though too. User-hostile software like Windows is intentionally designed to develop dependence and learned helplessness in users. Windows will gaslight you. Microsoft will victim…

One more similarity is how hard it seems to be to break up with an abusive partner: when I saw the "Windows anounces Recall - Linux increases its Steam market share by 25%" meme, I checked under https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ , and yes, in May 2024 it went up - from 1.9% to 2.32%. But in February 2025, it was back down to 1.45%. It has rebounded since, to 3.38% in January this year, but dropped to 2.23%…

[dead]

Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#519

Post by bonoboTP »

harvey9 wrote: post #389
falcor84 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer. It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from the…

It should be possible to get creative and business work done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of what a file is.

Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.

Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.

Re: Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

#520

Post by dpark »

kakacik wrote: post #308
bonoboTP wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be 420k/yr. To get to 4 million you need 25000 users. That's quite a big company.

So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold.

Your corp has 95 thousand employees but bats an eye at 16 million dollars?

Also yes, volume licensees generally get massive discounts.

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