I get the impression that a lot of the old guard are long gone from the Windows team or have no influence. Raymond Chen is still around but not sure how much he actually works on Windows day to day.
Microsoft was founded in 1975. 1981 was the first DOS release. 1985 was the first release of Windows. 40 years working on windows is a long time, I would be surprised if anyone for the original team is left at this point. Even someone joining out of college in 2000 is now 25 years in, is 57, and could feasibly be retiring....
True. I meant to say that it feels like the people who know what's going on have long departed and it's junior web developers left to pick up the pieces.
I doubt the various shitty parts of Windows (not the forced AI/whatever) is due to malice, unless you mean employees maliciously trying to destroy the company.
I would say the malice is from management, investors, and product leads. Developers just do what they are told. Microsoft is choosing enshitification versus quality. CEO needs to pump that stock and having enterprise locked into without alternatives helps them.
I grew up with Microsoft and now you have to pay me to use their products. I would never choose their OS for product hosting. Even their embedded / IoT is trying to force a Microsoft account and push against local user.
This is true with a lot of companies. If you made people actually use their own product (do they?!) maybe they'd think twice before doing boneheaded things
Then again, I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem
If you made people actually use their own product (do they?!)
Yes, they do. Unfortunately even MS employees are powerless to do anything about the crap that gets shoved into Windows by other employees working at the company, and the ones who complain about it are quietly shown the door or have already left of their own will, leaving only those who are completely apathetic or...
Then again, I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem
Exactly. That and the desire to remain in the country --- part of the reason why companies like H-1Bs so much is because they are going to be far more docile and less willing to resist doing things they feel are wrong.
I remember I was at a Python conference some years ago and every Microsoft dev I saw had a MacBook. So no, I don’t think they use their own product internally.
As an aside, I used to know a number of MS heads who ran Windows on Mac Intel machines because they preferred the hardware (~2014 MBP) and/or because they ostensibly worked at Mac shops and were handed one upon entry.
With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal. Azure, Office and Copilot will sustain them.
Nvidia is doing something similar where they're just extracting as much as possible out of AI companies and not caring one bit about consumers.
>With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal
How does whatever microsoft is doing to windows line up with that?
Hmm, it does line up with that from my perspective too.
It's just a different way to say "you're the product, not the customer" if you look at the statement from a neutral perspective - the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.
>the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.
Who's the "whale" in this context? Windows users who subscribe to copilot? Enterprise? Advertisers?
Enterprises are the whales. Microsoft sells user management, Office, Copilot, Outlook, etc... all bundled together for more per seat per year than a consumer will spend or generate in the whole lifecycle of their device. Nevermind Azure.
So consumers are mostly ignored, except as a testbed to shove AI and ads.
I'm not so sure about that. If Microsoft actually removed all the cruft, then they would need around 5% of the employees currently working on it. They'd all be unemployed.
Windows is now less than 10% of their revenue, last I saw. I think Windows is more valuable to keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, than as a source of direct revenue.
It could be a nice OS, if Microsoft didn’t go out of their way to make it awful.
I run Active Directory at home, for various reasons. I’ve got Group Policy in a good enough shape now that I’m not terribly troubled by Microsoft’s enshittification but it took substantial effort to get there, and it requires some work to maintain.
When did any manager get promoted for keeping software stable?
Just look at google and their chat softwares... you either make something new, or someone else does and you're left behind... be it ads in their start menu, spyware "AI", or paid solitaire.
It’s not about giving you a clean experience, it’s about setting you up as a constant cash cow hooked into and paying for all their services.
I hate adobes current business model and for that matter fusion360 as well. It’s all internet required bullshit but it’s making them tons of money and there are no viable alternatives.
I believe once( this is an urban legend) a manufacturer in a middle income country considered going with Linux to save money and Microsoft flew out a sales rep next day to put a stop to it.
Microsoft likes it when you get a "deal" and buy a pro key for 10$. Whatever, you'll subscribe to half a dozen Microwave services ideally paying them 30$ to 40$ a month forever.
The last thing they want is you to try Linux.
However, I had the joy of watching multiple Linux desktop environments crash when I switched to my Bluetooth headphones.
Cinnamon and Budgie both crashed. No one knows why. I had to switch to Mate and then spend another 20 minutes trying to get it look ok.
No typical user wants to deal with this. They'd assume Linux doesn't work and move on.
It's not like Windows hasn't had a slew of bullshit like this over the years. Especially around audio and peripherals. It still changes my default headphones every time I log in, doesn't recognise my standard audio interface, it's a crapshoot if my USB devices are all recognised every boot.
This is not good to hear, at my work we have the production technicians activate the occasional Windows 7 PC via the phone. We do it this way as these are specialized embedded PC’s that won’t connect to the internet. Flippant comments to “just use Linux” are not understanding the realities of keeping 20yr old software in the medical, offshore drilling, etc industries.
"Just use Windows" seems to be more problematic than "just use Linux" here. Though there is hope that WINE will reach enough feature parity for many applications, accessing external hardware is the hardest thing to emulate.
Building products on top of Windows seems to limit the lifetime of the product to whatever support Microsoft seem to be willing to provide.
The best time to migrate off Windows was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
> Flippant comments to “just use Linux” are not understanding the realities of keeping 20yr old software in the medical, offshore drilling, etc industries.
I make such comments. Tell me: what exactly is problematic about medical, offshore drilling, etc industries which makes it difficult or impossible to switch?
... wanna hire me to work on that? I am convinced that, whatever the cost is, it will be cheaper than using software on a very-outdated very-proprietary operating system for another couple of decades.
To name a few (presumably): drivers, proprietary protocols, vendor warranties/support, licensing/relicensing, paying you to do the work, waiting for the work to be done/tested, paying for workforce re-training, justifying this to management etc.
All these reasons suck, but they’re all reality in one industry or another sadly.
I put up with so much Windows crap over the years, and Windows 11 was the final straw. It’s not even the gaming OS anymore as Linux feels snappier and more stable for running games.
After using Windows just about everywhere else, I moved my main desktop/gaming rig to Linux about a year ago. (The last Windows install I have is my retro PC.)
I work in e-waste recycling, and it's my first Windows-free job. A family friend called me for advice on her old decrepit laptop. I told her about my work "laptop": a Surface Pro tablet with Linux. I just sold one to her, partially on the security and privacy advantages of Linux.
I think “king” may be overstating it somewhat. While it’s true that there are some big titles with anticheat that won’t work on Linux, there are quite a few major titles that work fine, and in practice I’ve been able to use Linux as a gaming system for awhile now without issue. I primarily play Overwatch, The Finals, ARC Raiders, Rocket League and Age of Empires.
I think the success of the Steam Deck has really helped the situation, and the titles that are broken because of anticheat are not important enough to me to keep a Windows system around.
Linux has working EAC. Any software not working on Linux is a Policy decision by the seller, not lacking features on the buyer.
Oh and rootkit level EAC? Expect that to go away on Windows too when MS finally gets sick of Crowdstrike and that ilk causing self inflicted Denial of Service attacks on whole economic sectors.
This is begging the question. Games on linux lack kernel anticheat because linux isn't very popular. Once linux is popular enough, then they will figure out a way to do anti cheat on it in a way that they consider acceptable. Valve already considers VAC good enough, because they want to support linux. Anti cheat on windows works the way it does because that's what's available on windows, on linux they'll figure out some other way.
The anticheat needs to be server-side to be credible, i.e. the game should be designed to only provide the information that client needs for fair play. I know this isn't easy, but it should be the goal.
Client still needs to know coordinates of opponents and other objects that could be in their view within the next 200ms, and once the client knows those, a cheating client can reveal opponent positions. You can't enforce that server side without adding huge mandatory lag to all clients.
Personally I have been playing it on Arch Linux since release and it has always worked just fine, besides it being a deeply janky game regardless of OS.
I should have a valid license for windows, my Win 8 Pro license (which I paid full price for, like $150) should have worked for Windows 10 (and then transfered to 11) but it's not working anymore for whatever reason, I probably upgraded without disabling the key somewhere or whatever. So when I use Windows I have that "activation required" nag watermark now. When microsoft finally remotely kills my unactivated windows 10 install (a week from now? 6 months?) I'm just not going back. The only reason I dual boot these days is fusion 360 CAD and there's a steam install on there so it's probably showing up as a windows install even though I haven't played games on there in probably years.
Windows will probably continue on forever simply due to inertia but this "you have to have a web login to use your private computer" b.s. is going to turn off a lot of consumers, and this will be the watershed moment where Proton/Wine finally moves from 5, to 10 or 15% of users
I'm not sure anyone at Microsoft has any endgame in mind for Windows. The devs are just working on what they're being told to work on, which aren't the parts conducive to happy consumers, while the execs are working on instinct and telemetry without context, and thus are basically flailing with no actual goal in mind beyond the next quarter. Add in that there's little hope for Windows' market share to increase in any large way, and that there thus isn't much reason to spend loads of money or dev time on improving Windows, and there's no wonder that we've come to this point.
Keep milking the cash cows to pay for the new growth area (AI). Convert maximum % of Windows users into subscription service consumers (e.g. cloud storage, Office 365, future paid AI capabilities.)
Microsoft's cloud/AI services are high-margin and lock users into a subscription, i.e. a consistent revenue stream.
Windows is to be a marketing/cross-selling channel for those businesses first and foremost.
They very likely foresee the demise of PC as a platform altogether and are trying their best to shepherd us into their other products.
Replace personal PCs with thin clients that give you an RDP session to Azure? I'm pretty sure a cloud only / subscription based "agentic" OS is the goal for windows. And, conveniently, hardware prices are through the roof until (hopefully) the AI bubble pops.
They’re using their legacy OS and Office business to subsidize services (LinkedIn, GitHub, npm, vscode, teams, azure, etc).
Consider what our industry will look like once the surveillance as a service/enshittifcation that’s been implemented for windows is ported to those things.
Try switching away from the services I mentioned, and you’ll see why the strategy makes sense.
The endgame is obviously to sell you Office 365, and Xbox Game Pass. Every Windows user who isn't giving them ARR equals one skeptical eyebrow from wall street.
I boot to Linux, but have a Windows 11 VM. I haven't spun up the Windows VM more than once a month for many months (maybe a year?). And that's just to update windows.
Hm, when I set up the pre-installed Windows 11 on my mother's new laptop, I was able to set it up without any Microsoft account at all (she never had one and doesn't want one). I remember that it was possible by running some command at one point during the setup process. Is that also gone by now?
As someone who hasn't used Windows in a long time, could you explain the benefit of doing a double install like that? I.e., if you stopped at step #1, it's activated, so what purpose does step 2 serve?
I never thought it would happen, but now I use Linux about 95% of the time. These days, I rarely touch Windows. It feels like Microsoft’s higher-ups never found a clear direction for the OS, focusing more on saturating the market than on maintaining quality. :(
I've been running openSUSE tumbleweed myself for years, and recommend Linux to like-minded power users. OP is preaching to the choir.
How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.
What do you all do to help them out of this madness? Is Ubuntu/Fedora/etc the best option for seniors? My dad's entire career was in Silicon Valley 1.0 where Excel/Outlook was his bread and butter and feels married to Windows, but ever since leaving the workforce those skills are more of a hindrance than an asset.
Now that he's retired, he still uses Excel to plan vacations for example, but Windows is riddled with this BS and I am powerless to help him navigate this anti-consumer behavior. It's incredible that Microsoft is shooting their most loyal customers in the foot with this BS.
Do you all help your parents remotely? What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?
Senior care and technology is going to be a gold rush over the next couple decades. Society is not prepared for the only generation who grew up on the internet to regress into mental infirmary while still believing technology is an essential need.
For those of you who haven't already had to deal with today's 70 year old MCI sufferers and technology, it is already a complete shitshow, and that generation lived half their adult lives without mobile technology.
Imagine finding 12 renewing subscriptions to malwarebytes and other security suites. Or having to burn credit cards every month because they can no longer tell the difference between ads/scams and actual needs. Microsoft, of course, helpfully shovels those scams straight to them via the operating system now. The corporations of America have figured out that milking our elders is good for a quick buck, and it is in their interests to make sure no safety nets are in place. Once they are required, they'll game whatever that system is too.
It is all the control battles our parents fought with their parents over driving, but now it is about the phone/tablet/computer, but not being able to take the phone away as a practical matter because the (first) world expects everyone to have them.
SSO and recovery keys are a problem for proxy account administrators - especially with the banking and medical sectors which still rely solely on SMS. Sites such as login.gov won't allow multiple accounts to have the same phone number. So if both you and your parents need accounts for social security, you as the caregiver can't use your phone as the second factor for their account.
For added fun, many organizations, including banks and the US Government/various federal pension boards, refuse to recognize a power of attorney letter, either. The entire modern situation leaves caregiver children having to commit technical TOS violation/fraud/perjury just to get accounts reset or to (re)gain access to submit address changes.
> For added fun, many organizations, including banks and the US Government/various federal pension boards, refuse to recognize a power of attorney letter, either.
Ouch! That's got to make things hard!
That's thankfully not a problem where I live. Here the problem is more that the banks might be a little over-eager to take agency away from seniors, since once they get a whiff of their grandson helping them with their banking and what not, they lock their account and claim to have broken their TOS or the law regarding not having other people control their account, and that if you want people to do that, you need that power of attorney.
Honestly, this is a lot better than the alternative of not being vigilant enough, and I'd honestly argue that it's better to let there be as little shame as possible in handing over your banking to your next of kind, so that when it starts getting really bad, it's not too late. But this obviously gets very individual very quickly. One senior will handle their banking just fine until their 105, while the next gets Alzheimer at 55, while the next starts to have to put a lot more effort into doing it right at 75, but they don't have any next of kin they can trust to not slowly empty their savings account once they get the power of attorney.
Thanks for bringing up the point about power-of-attorney, I'll have to dive into that as well.
I dread the day I have to get more involved in their healthcare from afar, precisely because of the technology gap. The money grab from big-pharma is going to unrelenting
> How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.
The mom and dad gen are all on iPads or just phones from what I can tell. Very few people there use PCs for their personal computing (work is another matter, but mostly not relevant to this discussion), and those that do are more power user-y. This group largely don't need help beyond edge cases in my experience.
The grandma and grandpa generation are mostly the same story, but there's a lot more who have more or less just bailed completely outside of the absolute essentials (online banking, literal phone calls). Some are still on PCs out of a desire to not change things too much, but I'd imagine switching them over to an iPad is probably an overall improvement once you can get past the unwillingness to shift over to another system. The fact that Windows 11 is such hot garbage will hopefully aid in convincing people of that.
For those who still want a PC, there's Linux. My grandma is on Mint, but that's just because I'm her personal tech support. If I weren't around, she'd have bought a Windows 11 machine from whatever idiot at the local electronics store. I can't imagine that would have gone very well. She'd have probably bailed completely on computing if it came to that.
Very few people in this group of people need software beyond what basic Linux can provide, so Linux should be able to provide a better environment than Windows, but that are loads of potential edge cases, but they're all very small, but all very annoying if you find yourself in one.
> What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?
Mom and Dad: 'Hey, can you help me with this website?' -> 'It's broken, try again tomorrow.' or 'Try that button there.'.
Grandma: See previous.
'How do I do [thing that hasn't changed since Windows 95]'?
'What do I do here?' -> 'Read the message on the screen and act accordingly.'
'My mouse doesn't work!' -> 'Check the batteries.'
Most of these later issues are because she treats the computer mechanistically, one unchanging step at a time, so if anything doesn't go to plan, she functionally panics. I don't know how to solve this problem, but it seems endemic to me given how common of a trope it is in stories from computer savvy people helping the not-so-savvy.
I can't remember where I heard about it, but it probably comes from the fact that a large-ish portion of the population can't connect concepts to things that don't have tangible forms. Thus, all the invisible processes inside any computer (files, memory, networking) that any computer savvy person will be aware of, don't exist and don't make sense in the mind of the not computer savvy, since it has no tangible form. You can find a similar case with office phone systems. Transferring a call is apparently hard for a number of people, since a call isn't a tangible item, doing anything with it makes zero sense. At best you can get them to place calls on hold, but that's only because their office phone will have buttons with blinking lights that say 'Line 1' and 'Line 2' on them, and they can thus easily connect the light blinking with the call on hold. Suddenly it's tangible, and thus it can make sense.
As much as Windows is deeply flawed, the user interface challenges with Linux are difficult to overcome. Until there is a version of Linux where you don’t have to open the console, Windows will keep its market.
> Until there is a version of Linux where you don’t have to open the console
This is already the case from the Grandma use case, i.e. nothing more than a web browser and maybe Thunderbird and an office program. The terminal issue doesn't come up until you start getting into people who know just enough to be dangerous (myself included).
The larger issue is that computers with Linux pre-installed are (within a rounding error) not a thing, and thus Grandma can't go out and buy one. And even if she could, would she place her bets on a (to her) completely new computer system? Not without help or solid recommendations from trusted sources.
I used to work at Microsoft in the Windows team (XP/2003/Longhorn/Vista/7).
The product today doesn’t feel like the product I worked on; I feel no connection to it, and every time I think that there’s nothing they could do to make me dislike it any more, Microsoft has another “hey, hold my beer and watch this” moment.
The problem with the old Microsoft this that it was run by engineers who didn’t understand user experience. The problem now is that it’s run by MBAs who dont care about users, just licenses.
Upgrading to Windows 11 tomorrow for my new gaming pc. Really looking forward to it. Mostly so I can use the new Phone Link functionality to get my iMessages on my desktop.
Do yourself a favor and stick to Windows 10. ISOs are still available on Microsoft's website and you can use local accounts and activate ESU using any of the scripts available on GitHub.
we should all come together and collectively kill the idea of using a windows based operating system unless they get their stuff together and give us an AI free, bloat free, single page with 10000 settings configurable for privacy and security and a promise of updating only once a month with full opt out
i recently upgraded a computer. windows 10 deactivated itself due to the hardware change. i tried everything i could to reactivate. microsoft support told me my only solution was to buy a new license. microsoft treats its customer with contempt.
At that point, find a reseller site and buy a key for cheap or just don't activate Windows at all. I don't think you lose much "features" when leaving it unactivated. It's not worth your time to deal with Microsoft support over Windows activation keys in 2026.
OEM licenses are for the computer, not the motherboard. The online activation historically hasn't worked if you change motherboard, but the phone line folks would always activate it for you if you explained that it was the same computer with a different motherboard.
i bought a builder license from newegg in 2017. unfortunately i was not diligent about saving the product key. this was actually the third time i had been in this scenario after changing hardware. no idea why it wouldn’t work this time around.
i do feel the ecosystem isn't broad enough for linux to become consumer facing. E.g., if you buy a random chinese made writing tablet and tried using it on linux, it has less than even chance of working straight out the box.
Similarly with bluetooth, wifi (for laptops), etc.
The problem is that OEM are locked into windows, so you have the chicken/egg problem where OEM won't want to spend effort on linux compatibility without a large customer base, and customer base won't grow unless they know for sure it is always going to work for _any_ piece of hardware they might purchase.
May be steam machine and valve could be the push it needs to establish a large customer base.
Windows 11 is a thin client for the Microsoft cloud. It's not surprising that you have to activate it online, and that you can no longer use it without a Microsoft account. That's the whole point.
People who complain that Windows isn't what they want are missing the point. Windows isn't for you. macOS, Linux, and more obscure choices still exist for general purpose computing. SteamOS or various Steam focused Linux distros exist for gaming. ChromeOS exists as a less offensive and more reliable thin OS.
Trying to force Windows into being something it isn't is a waste of your time.
This is just so bizarre. Like 90% of the people wouldn't even know you COULD activate without an MS account and the remainder will just use Rufus to bypass restrictions. So what is MS actually "fixing"?
Nothing wrong with Windows Server Core, which has zero UI. Managed totally with Powershell, which once you get used to it, is an excellent shell/scripting language.
My version of that is to just use a (high-end) Chromebook. The OS never gets in the way, can’t remember the last time I had to change a system setting or manually upgrade anything
Microsoft could have made Windows:
able to run on any hardware
free for basic usage, paid for commercial usage
lightweight, simple, stripped of all cruft and extras
consistent in it's UI and cleaned up from 40 years of inconsistencies
But they didn't - so people are looking for alternatives.
As much as I like many Windows versions, the corporate idiocy of the company behind the OS is indeed something else.
I get the impression that a lot of the old guard are long gone from the Windows team or have no influence. Raymond Chen is still around but not sure how much he actually works on Windows day to day.
Microsoft was founded in 1975. 1981 was the first DOS release. 1985 was the first release of Windows. 40 years working on windows is a long time, I would be surprised if anyone for the original team is left at this point. Even someone joining out of college in 2000 is now 25 years in, is 57, and could feasibly be retiring....
True. I meant to say that it feels like the people who know what's going on have long departed and it's junior web developers left to pick up the pieces.
You mean 1990. Someone graduating college in 1990 would have been about 21. That was 35 years ago, so they would be about 56 in 2025.
Math is hard.
Cmon man, it's a comment not a research paper. Off by one isn't worth a follow up snark
Never ascribe to stupidity, that which has been proven to be malice.
Yeah, they delivered whatever they delivered on purpose. Sometimes I imagine MS is playingn Lemmings with their users to reach their corporate goals.
I doubt the various shitty parts of Windows (not the forced AI/whatever) is due to malice, unless you mean employees maliciously trying to destroy the company.
Hanlon’s razor applies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
I would say the malice is from management, investors, and product leads. Developers just do what they are told. Microsoft is choosing enshitification versus quality. CEO needs to pump that stock and having enterprise locked into without alternatives helps them.
I grew up with Microsoft and now you have to pay me to use their products. I would never choose their OS for product hosting. Even their embedded / IoT is trying to force a Microsoft account and push against local user.
Or are they trying to move users onto other platforms, more modern platforms that users are more comfortable paying for.
Desktops existed before punching in your credit card numbers was a common thing, that history is hard to shrug.
Xbox for gamers, mobile for everyone else and business editions of windows for the enterprise.
This is true with a lot of companies. If you made people actually use their own product (do they?!) maybe they'd think twice before doing boneheaded things
Then again, I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem
If you made people actually use their own product (do they?!)
Yes, they do. Unfortunately even MS employees are powerless to do anything about the crap that gets shoved into Windows by other employees working at the company, and the ones who complain about it are quietly shown the door or have already left of their own will, leaving only those who are completely apathetic or...
Then again, I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem
Exactly. That and the desire to remain in the country --- part of the reason why companies like H-1Bs so much is because they are going to be far more docile and less willing to resist doing things they feel are wrong.
I remember I was at a Python conference some years ago and every Microsoft dev I saw had a MacBook. So no, I don’t think they use their own product internally.
The only thing worse than work-from-office is mandatory work-on-windows.
If only there was something Microsoft’s developers could do about that…
As an aside, I used to know a number of MS heads who ran Windows on Mac Intel machines because they preferred the hardware (~2014 MBP) and/or because they ostensibly worked at Mac shops and were handed one upon entry.
"I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem"
They don't make money (put bread on the table) by selling Windows any more. That is soooo 2000s.
Income is from data mining and from subscriptions to cloudy offerings that are mostly MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
Oh, and hyping their perceived value to the point that the term "meme stock" is no longer just a joke.
With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal. Azure, Office and Copilot will sustain them.
Nvidia is doing something similar where they're just extracting as much as possible out of AI companies and not caring one bit about consumers.
Consumers need to remember how to wield a pitchfork
That’s a funny way of spelling “guillotine”.
The challenge is that consumers in the case of Windows don’t generally choose Windows. Someone else chooses it for them.
>With the way the economy is going (some call it K-shaped) it's more profitable to squeeze as hard as you can and extract as much as possible out of whales versus trying to have mass market appeal
How does whatever microsoft is doing to windows line up with that?
Hmm, it does line up with that from my perspective too.
It's just a different way to say "you're the product, not the customer" if you look at the statement from a neutral perspective - the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.
>the whale being the actual customer, who changes all the time depending on what Microsoft MBAs think might have the highest potential value they can extract.
Who's the "whale" in this context? Windows users who subscribe to copilot? Enterprise? Advertisers?
Enterprise.
Enterprises are the whales. Microsoft sells user management, Office, Copilot, Outlook, etc... all bundled together for more per seat per year than a consumer will spend or generate in the whole lifecycle of their device. Nevermind Azure.
So consumers are mostly ignored, except as a testbed to shove AI and ads.
> consistent in it's UI and cleaned up from 40 years of inconsistencies
... While also maintaining their famous backwards compatibility?
That's an OS for the users.
Windows is an OS for the people who use the users.
The employees inside really wanted to build this. The company decided not to.
I'm not so sure about that. If Microsoft actually removed all the cruft, then they would need around 5% of the employees currently working on it. They'd all be unemployed.
>free for basic usage, paid for commercial usage
And lose all the OEM license money?
Do they make more money from OEM licenses, or from bombarding Windows users with OneDrive and Copilot 365 advertisements?
Windows is now less than 10% of their revenue, last I saw. I think Windows is more valuable to keep people in the Microsoft ecosystem, than as a source of direct revenue.
won't someone think of the shareholders?
Luckily Linux exists.
I'll add, with no disrespect intended to BSD, because they're serious OSes, but GPL is also a really good thing to have
It could be a nice OS, if Microsoft didn’t go out of their way to make it awful.
I run Active Directory at home, for various reasons. I’ve got Group Policy in a good enough shape now that I’m not terribly troubled by Microsoft’s enshittification but it took substantial effort to get there, and it requires some work to maintain.
When did any manager get promoted for keeping software stable?
Just look at google and their chat softwares... you either make something new, or someone else does and you're left behind... be it ads in their start menu, spyware "AI", or paid solitaire.
When did any manager get promoted for keeping software stable?
A few industries reward that. Telcos and other parts of critical infrastructure come to mind.
I worked for a telco for four years. It was horrifically stupid and rewarded the dumbest possible outcomes.
Is goal is increase revenue! Create project to roll out fibre to a new rural community. Sign up all 40 houses in that community at $100 a month.
Project cost $10 mil.
Bonuses and promotions for increased revenue!
It’s not about giving you a clean experience, it’s about setting you up as a constant cash cow hooked into and paying for all their services.
I hate adobes current business model and for that matter fusion360 as well. It’s all internet required bullshit but it’s making them tons of money and there are no viable alternatives.
lol, what's your point really? alternatives exists since very long time.
That would require empathy.
This is the reason Windows is essentially free.
I believe once( this is an urban legend) a manufacturer in a middle income country considered going with Linux to save money and Microsoft flew out a sales rep next day to put a stop to it.
Microsoft likes it when you get a "deal" and buy a pro key for 10$. Whatever, you'll subscribe to half a dozen Microwave services ideally paying them 30$ to 40$ a month forever.
The last thing they want is you to try Linux.
However, I had the joy of watching multiple Linux desktop environments crash when I switched to my Bluetooth headphones.
Cinnamon and Budgie both crashed. No one knows why. I had to switch to Mate and then spend another 20 minutes trying to get it look ok.
No typical user wants to deal with this. They'd assume Linux doesn't work and move on.
Yeah, but now we have AI to handhold people in troubleshooting Linux issues, so huzzah, the golden age is upon us.
It's not like Windows hasn't had a slew of bullshit like this over the years. Especially around audio and peripherals. It still changes my default headphones every time I log in, doesn't recognise my standard audio interface, it's a crapshoot if my USB devices are all recognised every boot.
This is not good to hear, at my work we have the production technicians activate the occasional Windows 7 PC via the phone. We do it this way as these are specialized embedded PC’s that won’t connect to the internet. Flippant comments to “just use Linux” are not understanding the realities of keeping 20yr old software in the medical, offshore drilling, etc industries.
"Just use Windows" seems to be more problematic than "just use Linux" here. Though there is hope that WINE will reach enough feature parity for many applications, accessing external hardware is the hardest thing to emulate.
Building products on top of Windows seems to limit the lifetime of the product to whatever support Microsoft seem to be willing to provide.
The best time to migrate off Windows was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Windows 7 activation was cracked long ago and you already paid MS for it, so I would just go that route.
> Flippant comments to “just use Linux” are not understanding the realities of keeping 20yr old software in the medical, offshore drilling, etc industries.
I make such comments. Tell me: what exactly is problematic about medical, offshore drilling, etc industries which makes it difficult or impossible to switch?
... wanna hire me to work on that? I am convinced that, whatever the cost is, it will be cheaper than using software on a very-outdated very-proprietary operating system for another couple of decades.
To name a few (presumably): drivers, proprietary protocols, vendor warranties/support, licensing/relicensing, paying you to do the work, waiting for the work to be done/tested, paying for workforce re-training, justifying this to management etc.
All these reasons suck, but they’re all reality in one industry or another sadly.
I put up with so much Windows crap over the years, and Windows 11 was the final straw. It’s not even the gaming OS anymore as Linux feels snappier and more stable for running games.
After using Windows just about everywhere else, I moved my main desktop/gaming rig to Linux about a year ago. (The last Windows install I have is my retro PC.)
I work in e-waste recycling, and it's my first Windows-free job. A family friend called me for advice on her old decrepit laptop. I told her about my work "laptop": a Surface Pro tablet with Linux. I just sold one to her, partially on the security and privacy advantages of Linux.
This was me after decades of running Windows. I'm now firmly on Debian (13).
Until Linux has an alternative to anticheat, gaming on Windows is still king.
And until Linux implements similar abstractions in the Kernel akin to Filter Drivers in Windows, Linux will never have a proper anticheat.
I think “king” may be overstating it somewhat. While it’s true that there are some big titles with anticheat that won’t work on Linux, there are quite a few major titles that work fine, and in practice I’ve been able to use Linux as a gaming system for awhile now without issue. I primarily play Overwatch, The Finals, ARC Raiders, Rocket League and Age of Empires.
I think the success of the Steam Deck has really helped the situation, and the titles that are broken because of anticheat are not important enough to me to keep a Windows system around.
This is huge. I work in filmmaking and CG and a few apps still aren’t on Linux. I might just move anyway though. I’m so done with it.
Linux has working EAC. Any software not working on Linux is a Policy decision by the seller, not lacking features on the buyer.
Oh and rootkit level EAC? Expect that to go away on Windows too when MS finally gets sick of Crowdstrike and that ilk causing self inflicted Denial of Service attacks on whole economic sectors.
They can’t kick Crowdstrike out without permission from the EU.
It’s one of the bigger failures of antitrust enforcement I can think of
(I can think of much larger screw ups involving lack of antitrust enforcement, to be clear.)
This is begging the question. Games on linux lack kernel anticheat because linux isn't very popular. Once linux is popular enough, then they will figure out a way to do anti cheat on it in a way that they consider acceptable. Valve already considers VAC good enough, because they want to support linux. Anti cheat on windows works the way it does because that's what's available on windows, on linux they'll figure out some other way.
The anticheat needs to be server-side to be credible, i.e. the game should be designed to only provide the information that client needs for fair play. I know this isn't easy, but it should be the goal.
Client still needs to know coordinates of opponents and other objects that could be in their view within the next 200ms, and once the client knows those, a cheating client can reveal opponent positions. You can't enforce that server side without adding huge mandatory lag to all clients.
Not all gaming is multiplayer.
But I know what you mean. Another niche that really doesn't go well on Linux is VR.
Steam Frame coming this year, I’m sure Valve is throwing money at the Linux VR situation
Anticheat is sloppy engineering
> Until Linux has an alternative to anticheat, gaming on Windows is still king.
I'm glad none of the games that require this really appeal to me these days
Anyone know if Helldivers 2 works on Linux now? Because I'd say if I can't stick with 10 much longer then I'm just going to format that partition.
It worked on Linux since basically day 1, though I haven't played it in awhile so who knows if things have broken since then.
Yes: https://www.protondb.com/app/553850
Personally I have been playing it on Arch Linux since release and it has always worked just fine, besides it being a deeply janky game regardless of OS.
Ditto. No issues at all that my friends did not experience as well. (Long download/patching times).
“Crashes for me every 10 minutes into a game.”
I've been playing it on linux since I started. Just run steam, install, Start.
Happy diving.
I wonder what's their endgame. I mean, if it keeps getting worse, at some point they will really bleed users.
Even if for now the stats (e.g. steam hardware survey), show only a slight increase in Linux users (and a lot of them could be dual booting)
> a lot of them could be dual booting
I should have a valid license for windows, my Win 8 Pro license (which I paid full price for, like $150) should have worked for Windows 10 (and then transfered to 11) but it's not working anymore for whatever reason, I probably upgraded without disabling the key somewhere or whatever. So when I use Windows I have that "activation required" nag watermark now. When microsoft finally remotely kills my unactivated windows 10 install (a week from now? 6 months?) I'm just not going back. The only reason I dual boot these days is fusion 360 CAD and there's a steam install on there so it's probably showing up as a windows install even though I haven't played games on there in probably years.
Windows will probably continue on forever simply due to inertia but this "you have to have a web login to use your private computer" b.s. is going to turn off a lot of consumers, and this will be the watershed moment where Proton/Wine finally moves from 5, to 10 or 15% of users
I'm not sure anyone at Microsoft has any endgame in mind for Windows. The devs are just working on what they're being told to work on, which aren't the parts conducive to happy consumers, while the execs are working on instinct and telemetry without context, and thus are basically flailing with no actual goal in mind beyond the next quarter. Add in that there's little hope for Windows' market share to increase in any large way, and that there thus isn't much reason to spend loads of money or dev time on improving Windows, and there's no wonder that we've come to this point.
Keep milking the cash cows to pay for the new growth area (AI). Convert maximum % of Windows users into subscription service consumers (e.g. cloud storage, Office 365, future paid AI capabilities.)
Try the internet without an adblocker. The typical user will put up with a lot of pain.
So will the typical developer these days, unfortunately.
Microsoft's cloud/AI services are high-margin and lock users into a subscription, i.e. a consistent revenue stream. Windows is to be a marketing/cross-selling channel for those businesses first and foremost.
They very likely foresee the demise of PC as a platform altogether and are trying their best to shepherd us into their other products.
Replace personal PCs with thin clients that give you an RDP session to Azure? I'm pretty sure a cloud only / subscription based "agentic" OS is the goal for windows. And, conveniently, hardware prices are through the roof until (hopefully) the AI bubble pops.
They’re using their legacy OS and Office business to subsidize services (LinkedIn, GitHub, npm, vscode, teams, azure, etc).
Consider what our industry will look like once the surveillance as a service/enshittifcation that’s been implemented for windows is ported to those things.
Try switching away from the services I mentioned, and you’ll see why the strategy makes sense.
you will not own a computer, you will lease them, via a terminal.
and you will like it. so says MS.
The endgame is obviously to sell you Office 365, and Xbox Game Pass. Every Windows user who isn't giving them ARR equals one skeptical eyebrow from wall street.
Windows is absolutely insufferable now. Offensive, defective, regressive, clumsy, slow garbage.
I 100% agree, I dual boot myself and get reminded on how horrible the user experience is as opposed to Fedora with KDE Plasma
I boot to Linux, but have a Windows 11 VM. I haven't spun up the Windows VM more than once a month for many months (maybe a year?). And that's just to update windows.
How did we get here from W2K? It's hard to think of a time when you could use software without internet connection or a phone line.
Two decades of turning screws.
How about requiring a ms account to activate?
Have they closed the double install trick?
1. Install once with ms account and activate.
2. Reinstall offline with local account.
3. It will be activated when you go back online.
I suspect the remote server remember your computer hardware generated guid
Hm, when I set up the pre-installed Windows 11 on my mother's new laptop, I was able to set it up without any Microsoft account at all (she never had one and doesn't want one). I remember that it was possible by running some command at one point during the setup process. Is that also gone by now?
As someone who hasn't used Windows in a long time, could you explain the benefit of doing a double install like that? I.e., if you stopped at step #1, it's activated, so what purpose does step 2 serve?
To have a local account
The only way this epidemic of Microsoft would end if a Linux company has a monetary incentive to serve customers.
My mother doesn't need to worry about typing `chmod` into her android mobile terminal.
I never thought it would happen, but now I use Linux about 95% of the time. These days, I rarely touch Windows. It feels like Microsoft’s higher-ups never found a clear direction for the OS, focusing more on saturating the market than on maintaining quality. :(
Add it to the list. I won't install another Windows machine, after more than two decades of Windows at home.
I guess mildly privacy concious gamer was not one of target their demographics.
AFAICT this doesn't affect activating via a KMS server (incl. KMS emulators like vlmcsd), correct?
The negativity in this thread is amusing. I can’t take HN seriously anymore, you guys crack me up with your flimsy outrage and dramatic monologues.
I’ll be upgrading to Win 11 and activating it with an internet connection. And I won’t think twice about it.
I've been running openSUSE tumbleweed myself for years, and recommend Linux to like-minded power users. OP is preaching to the choir.
How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.
What do you all do to help them out of this madness? Is Ubuntu/Fedora/etc the best option for seniors? My dad's entire career was in Silicon Valley 1.0 where Excel/Outlook was his bread and butter and feels married to Windows, but ever since leaving the workforce those skills are more of a hindrance than an asset.
Now that he's retired, he still uses Excel to plan vacations for example, but Windows is riddled with this BS and I am powerless to help him navigate this anti-consumer behavior. It's incredible that Microsoft is shooting their most loyal customers in the foot with this BS.
Do you all help your parents remotely? What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?
Senior care and technology is going to be a gold rush over the next couple decades. Society is not prepared for the only generation who grew up on the internet to regress into mental infirmary while still believing technology is an essential need.
For those of you who haven't already had to deal with today's 70 year old MCI sufferers and technology, it is already a complete shitshow, and that generation lived half their adult lives without mobile technology.
Imagine finding 12 renewing subscriptions to malwarebytes and other security suites. Or having to burn credit cards every month because they can no longer tell the difference between ads/scams and actual needs. Microsoft, of course, helpfully shovels those scams straight to them via the operating system now. The corporations of America have figured out that milking our elders is good for a quick buck, and it is in their interests to make sure no safety nets are in place. Once they are required, they'll game whatever that system is too.
It is all the control battles our parents fought with their parents over driving, but now it is about the phone/tablet/computer, but not being able to take the phone away as a practical matter because the (first) world expects everyone to have them.
SSO and recovery keys are a problem for proxy account administrators - especially with the banking and medical sectors which still rely solely on SMS. Sites such as login.gov won't allow multiple accounts to have the same phone number. So if both you and your parents need accounts for social security, you as the caregiver can't use your phone as the second factor for their account.
For added fun, many organizations, including banks and the US Government/various federal pension boards, refuse to recognize a power of attorney letter, either. The entire modern situation leaves caregiver children having to commit technical TOS violation/fraud/perjury just to get accounts reset or to (re)gain access to submit address changes.
> For added fun, many organizations, including banks and the US Government/various federal pension boards, refuse to recognize a power of attorney letter, either.
Ouch! That's got to make things hard!
That's thankfully not a problem where I live. Here the problem is more that the banks might be a little over-eager to take agency away from seniors, since once they get a whiff of their grandson helping them with their banking and what not, they lock their account and claim to have broken their TOS or the law regarding not having other people control their account, and that if you want people to do that, you need that power of attorney.
Honestly, this is a lot better than the alternative of not being vigilant enough, and I'd honestly argue that it's better to let there be as little shame as possible in handing over your banking to your next of kind, so that when it starts getting really bad, it's not too late. But this obviously gets very individual very quickly. One senior will handle their banking just fine until their 105, while the next gets Alzheimer at 55, while the next starts to have to put a lot more effort into doing it right at 75, but they don't have any next of kin they can trust to not slowly empty their savings account once they get the power of attorney.
Thanks for bringing up the point about power-of-attorney, I'll have to dive into that as well.
I dread the day I have to get more involved in their healthcare from afar, precisely because of the technology gap. The money grab from big-pharma is going to unrelenting
> How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.
The mom and dad gen are all on iPads or just phones from what I can tell. Very few people there use PCs for their personal computing (work is another matter, but mostly not relevant to this discussion), and those that do are more power user-y. This group largely don't need help beyond edge cases in my experience.
The grandma and grandpa generation are mostly the same story, but there's a lot more who have more or less just bailed completely outside of the absolute essentials (online banking, literal phone calls). Some are still on PCs out of a desire to not change things too much, but I'd imagine switching them over to an iPad is probably an overall improvement once you can get past the unwillingness to shift over to another system. The fact that Windows 11 is such hot garbage will hopefully aid in convincing people of that.
For those who still want a PC, there's Linux. My grandma is on Mint, but that's just because I'm her personal tech support. If I weren't around, she'd have bought a Windows 11 machine from whatever idiot at the local electronics store. I can't imagine that would have gone very well. She'd have probably bailed completely on computing if it came to that.
Very few people in this group of people need software beyond what basic Linux can provide, so Linux should be able to provide a better environment than Windows, but that are loads of potential edge cases, but they're all very small, but all very annoying if you find yourself in one.
> What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?
Mom and Dad: 'Hey, can you help me with this website?' -> 'It's broken, try again tomorrow.' or 'Try that button there.'.
Grandma: See previous.
'How do I do [thing that hasn't changed since Windows 95]'?
'What do I do here?' -> 'Read the message on the screen and act accordingly.'
'My mouse doesn't work!' -> 'Check the batteries.'
Most of these later issues are because she treats the computer mechanistically, one unchanging step at a time, so if anything doesn't go to plan, she functionally panics. I don't know how to solve this problem, but it seems endemic to me given how common of a trope it is in stories from computer savvy people helping the not-so-savvy.
I can't remember where I heard about it, but it probably comes from the fact that a large-ish portion of the population can't connect concepts to things that don't have tangible forms. Thus, all the invisible processes inside any computer (files, memory, networking) that any computer savvy person will be aware of, don't exist and don't make sense in the mind of the not computer savvy, since it has no tangible form. You can find a similar case with office phone systems. Transferring a call is apparently hard for a number of people, since a call isn't a tangible item, doing anything with it makes zero sense. At best you can get them to place calls on hold, but that's only because their office phone will have buttons with blinking lights that say 'Line 1' and 'Line 2' on them, and they can thus easily connect the light blinking with the call on hold. Suddenly it's tangible, and thus it can make sense.
This is why Windows will get away with it.
As much as Windows is deeply flawed, the user interface challenges with Linux are difficult to overcome. Until there is a version of Linux where you don’t have to open the console, Windows will keep its market.
> Until there is a version of Linux where you don’t have to open the console
This is already the case from the Grandma use case, i.e. nothing more than a web browser and maybe Thunderbird and an office program. The terminal issue doesn't come up until you start getting into people who know just enough to be dangerous (myself included).
The larger issue is that computers with Linux pre-installed are (within a rounding error) not a thing, and thus Grandma can't go out and buy one. And even if she could, would she place her bets on a (to her) completely new computer system? Not without help or solid recommendations from trusted sources.
I wonder if Microsoft will ever turn ship with Windows, or will it all be a decline until it is no longer needed.
At this point it is really only just a vehicle to drive more traffic to office365 (or whatever weird name microsoft is calling it this week).
lets ask SEARS
I used to work at Microsoft in the Windows team (XP/2003/Longhorn/Vista/7).
The product today doesn’t feel like the product I worked on; I feel no connection to it, and every time I think that there’s nothing they could do to make me dislike it any more, Microsoft has another “hey, hold my beer and watch this” moment.
The problem with the old Microsoft this that it was run by engineers who didn’t understand user experience. The problem now is that it’s run by MBAs who dont care about users, just licenses.
Upgrading to Windows 11 tomorrow for my new gaming pc. Really looking forward to it. Mostly so I can use the new Phone Link functionality to get my iMessages on my desktop.
Do yourself a favor and stick to Windows 10. ISOs are still available on Microsoft's website and you can use local accounts and activate ESU using any of the scripts available on GitHub.
Even better, use the LTSC releases.
I’ve been using 11 on my laptop for years. I honestly think it’s fine. I spend 99% of my time in a game or IntelliJ.
is that fully functional, or still limited to 1:1 conversations?
Not sure l, I honestly haven’t looked at it since its initial release. Either way, 1-1s are all I really care about.
we should all come together and collectively kill the idea of using a windows based operating system unless they get their stuff together and give us an AI free, bloat free, single page with 10000 settings configurable for privacy and security and a promise of updating only once a month with full opt out
does this affect massgrave.dev?
Kills ONE official way to activate Win11/10 without internet. There's still KMS and other methods... Article title is slightly misleading.
Sure, it sucks about the phone activation thing, but frankly... STOP USING WINDOWS ALREADY.
i recently upgraded a computer. windows 10 deactivated itself due to the hardware change. i tried everything i could to reactivate. microsoft support told me my only solution was to buy a new license. microsoft treats its customer with contempt.
At that point, find a reseller site and buy a key for cheap or just don't activate Windows at all. I don't think you lose much "features" when leaving it unactivated. It's not worth your time to deal with Microsoft support over Windows activation keys in 2026.
I'm curious did you have an OEM license or a retail license? OEM licenses die with the mobo.
OEM licenses are for the computer, not the motherboard. The online activation historically hasn't worked if you change motherboard, but the phone line folks would always activate it for you if you explained that it was the same computer with a different motherboard.
i bought a builder license from newegg in 2017. unfortunately i was not diligent about saving the product key. this was actually the third time i had been in this scenario after changing hardware. no idea why it wouldn’t work this time around.
Good on them. Just hastening the inevitable shift to Linux. I don't even care what they do anymore.
> Just hastening the inevitable shift to Linux
i do feel the ecosystem isn't broad enough for linux to become consumer facing. E.g., if you buy a random chinese made writing tablet and tried using it on linux, it has less than even chance of working straight out the box.
Similarly with bluetooth, wifi (for laptops), etc.
The problem is that OEM are locked into windows, so you have the chicken/egg problem where OEM won't want to spend effort on linux compatibility without a large customer base, and customer base won't grow unless they know for sure it is always going to work for _any_ piece of hardware they might purchase.
May be steam machine and valve could be the push it needs to establish a large customer base.
Windows 11 is a thin client for the Microsoft cloud. It's not surprising that you have to activate it online, and that you can no longer use it without a Microsoft account. That's the whole point.
People who complain that Windows isn't what they want are missing the point. Windows isn't for you. macOS, Linux, and more obscure choices still exist for general purpose computing. SteamOS or various Steam focused Linux distros exist for gaming. ChromeOS exists as a less offensive and more reliable thin OS.
Trying to force Windows into being something it isn't is a waste of your time.
People should switch to Linux. I started using Fedora on Cosmic and it is great!
Mint is very similar to Windows UI
Finding more modern ways to be lame and making it easier for folks to either pirate (use shady activation methods) or move to other platforms.
This is the result of indification of microsoft as a whole.
The what now?
This is just so bizarre. Like 90% of the people wouldn't even know you COULD activate without an MS account and the remainder will just use Rufus to bypass restrictions. So what is MS actually "fixing"?
Windows server is the best Windows os (can be use as a client os) but it's still Windows shit.
Nothing wrong with Windows Server Core, which has zero UI. Managed totally with Powershell, which once you get used to it, is an excellent shell/scripting language.
Powershell is really good. For scripting you get the whole C# standard library and can write cmdlets in C# itself.
(as a person whose "year of the Linux desktop" was literally 30 frickin' years ago) Oh no! Anyway...
My version of that is to just use a (high-end) Chromebook. The OS never gets in the way, can’t remember the last time I had to change a system setting or manually upgrade anything
People who care about Windows, lol.