Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again. No customer validation on any of the AI cruft. No full OPT OUT. Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere.
I've been a Windows user from day one and I now see a future without it. Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, but this blind lust for AI, especially in bed with Altman who is pure con artist, is unforgivable.
Some of the investment sells recently are starting to look like the beginning of the end for OpenAI. That will have a wide range impact on everything.
I use Claude for coding (and mostly in WSL). OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation.
Microsoft was never not a full-blown evil corporation. What they had, at their peak, is some software that worked well. In the background, same evil corporation as ever.
There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did look less evil for a brief time.
That sounds consistent with their classic embrace-extend-extinguish process [1]. Embracing with no significant user-hostile moves is step 1, and then abusing competitors and users comes as step 3 of the process. They need to briefly look less evil in step 1 to maneuver into position for step 3.
Yes because they were embracing new markets. They've always followed this process but they made a big paradigm change at that point. This is why they suddenly "loved Linux". Because it was no longer a threat but a tool to them, as they were shifting from being an OS vendor to hyperscale cloud vendor.
The same way with other big American tech. Netflix operated for a decade at a loss and now that they saturated the market they are constantly asking more money for less content.
They needed to grab as much free code as they could to train their AI, so what better way could there be than setting up the GitHub honeypot for this sole purpose, evangelize The Greater Good Of The Open Source, and play along a bit as in "we do open source too, don't be shy to show your code to our gradient descent, erm, we mean world!"
It started long before that. Cloud meant they were under drastic threat of being abandoned, because the cloud was (and still is) dominated by linux compute.
DotNet were shook, and shook bad. They went all out to make their runtime "cross-platform" because they faced an existential thread from lamdba+node.
The rise of the MBP also saw their dotnet ecosystem under thread from the other end of the stick - the developer end. Visual Studio cannot run on macos, so competitor IDEs that can were rising in their numbers. Hence the push for VSCode to try and claw back some IDE market.
This is the funniest thing, considering it lacks 90% of the features included freeware text editors written in some student's spare time back in the 90s.
It's basically a fancy textbox.
Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)
They can, the problem is that apparently they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development experience, so they get interns that have grown in US universities with macOS and Linux, which sundenly have a Win32 developer role.
That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET.
I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
They laid off a lot of people with Win32 experience in the past couple of years. If that was really a problem they could just hire some of them back (or, I dunno, keep them in the first place).
I'm no longer at MSFT, but according to the people that are, the leadership is straight up saying that anyone who doesn't like AI coding has no place in the company now.
Unfortunely, they are making people like myself, that in general tend to have comments more pro-Windows, starting to consider the alternatives yet again.
Even .NET and C++ tooling getting spoiled with AI no matter what, see latest set of DevBlog announcements.
It's weird that Linux people are still seething to this day that the reason for Linux's lack of success on the desktop comes from the unfair pushing of Windows, when it's clear that Microsoft has been barely putting any effort into Windows, and gutting development save for AI stuff.
I'm sure Microsoft would be perfectly fine ditching Windows as long as they could keep pushing Teams, Azure AD and Office 365 to companies.
It's crazy how no one actually competently working towards a shared goal is invested in the desktop OS game any more.
Linux people still have some fire left in them, but lack organization and shared vision to deliver a high quality product in a timely manner. macOS is the best contender, but other than pushing weird mobile-driven UX design and locking down the OS, the macOS of today hasn't changed that much from the OS X of 20 years ago.
I'm a Linux user but I don't understand the drive of Linux users for it to be a mainstream OS. If it would be mainstream it would be more commercial, the users having less agency, having no choice in desktop environment and tied to commercial services. Because once it's big, big companies will want to make big bucks off the people using it. And most consumers actually like big tech companies taking them by the hand and choosing for them.
So in other words, Linux on the desktop will be a Linux I will hate. The closest thing to Linux for the mainstream we have is ChromeOS and I'm sure we all hate it. I sure do because I want nothing to do with Google services.
I do not know what is up with people and their aversion to help people be better (or at the very least more useful) at their job. Not just in IT, but even hard / physical labor-type jobs or w/e.
In a culture obsessed with individual success, helping someone else does not have any obvious upside, but plenty of clear downsides - what if he gets so good that I look worse in comparison? What if he stays the same and I look like a bad mentor? Why would I sacrifice my time for no practical reward? Etc etc.
Yeah I understand that and I was thinking the same things, but it honestly sucks. I have been in a position where I was supposed to be taught the work on the spot but instead they expected me to know everything and do what I have never done before and it is such a bad experience. :/
It costs money. You're paying that person to be doing something other than working. If you're not squeezing maximal productivity out of your workers, then you have failed as a manager and will not be getting that sweet bonus this quarter
>> they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development
They can hire pretty much anyone. They choose to not hire people with Win32 experience. They choose to implement hiring process which results in hire other kind of people.
Do you honestly think you could hire a staff a project (requiring hundreds) with young(ish) people of at least decent skills who all know Win32/COM/C/C++?
> this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
That may be, but there is PLENTY of people with the expertise to develop WinUI apps -- IMO, the glaring problem would be that Microsoft can't get their head straight on which UI to support in the first place!
WinUI, only Microsoft employees on the Windows team, and fools that aren't aware of all the WinRT tooling reboots since Windows 8 was introduced, buying into WinUI marketing of how great it is.
As one of the fools that thought WinRT was a great idea, what .NET 1.0 should have been, I doubt there are many of those left.
WPF wasn't brought back into active status at BUILD 2024 by accident.
But who is letting interns with no experience take architectural and technological decisions for a core feature such as the start menu? These are the people that should be blamed.
Yet Apple can find decent developers to work with their Apple-specific tools+tech.
Yeah, there's been complaints about some Apple's old polish and consistency being lost, but it's usually very nitpicky stuff, nothing compared to the complaints about Win11.
It's my daily driver. I have zero problems with it. I don't mind the Liquid Glass UX. I'm not blindly anti-Apple though, neither am I a fanboi. I've just legitimately not had any problems. There have been minor bugs, etc., but nothing broken. Definitely night and day from Win11....
You're only half right, a lot of these devs probably use Windows but since JSwhatever is the current lingua franca of programming it's easier to hire for
Out of curiosity, what does notepad++ have that kate of other texteditors does not?
Looking at the features there does not seem to be anything special, but a lot of people seem to love it so there is clearly something special about it.
For me it's the TextFX menu and the MIME Tools plug in. They offer very easy access to lots of handy features like changing case (upper, lower, proper, sentence, invert), remove/swap/replace quotes ('/"), removing trailing spaces, non-printable characters, and blank lines (or just extra blank lines), base64/URL/HTML/ROT13/UU encoding/decoding, all kinds of decimal/hex/binary/octal/text conversions, add/remove escapes, etc.
Having so much there in just a couple clicks is very nice!
If it comes down to FOSS/freeware stuff I am actually quite fond of Windows ecosystem.
Foobar2k, Paint.NET, Notepad++, IrfanView, WizTree, Ditto, TotalCommander, NAPS2 etc.
Linux has many options for any of those, but I always had a feeling that those options have less polish, or are less stable, or their UI is an afterthought etc. On Windows you have basically a single option for each application that most people go for, so documentation and online help is plentiful.
Without those, especially last one my productivity at my corporate work would be half at most. Editing a file in an archive within another archive directly, doing quick file comparisons of 2 files, syncing different dirs, fulltext recursive search... all with much better UI than Unix console counterparts (which I use too). And much more.
Simply the best tools on the whole market for me in given category, period.
There is something magical about those specialized, no nonsense tools using WINAPI, not chasing cross-platform, and maintained for decades, some of them since 90s. Snappiness, intuitiveness, stability, discoverability etc.
MPD, Krita, Vim/Emacs/Scite,NSxiv with scripts, any diff tool since the 90's, any file manager since Midnight Commander and so on...
Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...
Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time...
I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable.
I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.
I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone.
Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from
my damn bathroom.
And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...
That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.
I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions.
And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.
Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.
Is not about Linux, I don't use that Unix branch. I don't click neither on menues nor buttons. It's about usability and automation, something utterly lacking under Windows. Once you can use any remote or local filesystem seamlessly with your own scripts spawning at events, you are 90% done.
I've switched all my machines to linux in the past couple years.
I say with confidence that you will never be able to do file operations as quickly in a terminal as you could in a good GUI, like the Explorer from Windows 2000.
It's not even a competent textbox. Try to scan barcodes into it for example, or use it with Autohotkey. It has some sort of buffering issue and lags horribly whenever characters are input faster than a human.
The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open.
I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.
Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)
All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.
On my 5 year old work laptop it was so bad it was nearly unusable. I found that disabling the shell extensions they used to implement the new file explorer UI helped a lot with that.
It was, and worked well with rtf. I vaguely recall it being better than notepad if you were for example looking at strings in binary files, something like that, I forget...
IIRC Wordpad was the only always-installed program which could open text files with Unix line endings and display them properly. Until at least Vista, Notepad would treat them as if containing a single line.
They made the damned system volume regulator open with a visible delay now. You can click on it and observe it at 0 level, and then after some seconds it jumps to the actual position. After they threw out Win10 taskbar and replaced it with this rejected tablet atrocity in Win11, everything got much slower on it.
It's an amazing technical feat how they managed to introduce a graphical delay to it in Windows 10. I feel it actually took planning to work out how to introduce friction into easily the simplest conceivable app for no reason. It is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with Windows today.
They put a copilot button in Outlook. Which, when ask, gladly confesses it doesn't have access to your mail or calendar, completely negating any value it could possibly have.
The same with the AI thing Meta added to Whatsapp. After spending a while trying to search for a message whose exact wording I couldn't remember, but whose content was easily described, I thought I'd give the bot a try. Turns out it doesn't have access to my messages.
I expect MS will get there long before Meta does given they don't have the encryption issue to contend with.
Every time I see a new CoPilot button, or a toast nagging me because I've not clicked any of them and they think I really should want to, a phrase crosses my mind…
“Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”
> “Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”
I pasted this into Google to see what you were referencing, and was met with this full-screen, front page, all-important "AI Overview" (that of course takes precedence over actual search results)
> You're very welcome! If you have any questions about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's products, their marketing strategies, or need assistance with anything else, feel free to ask.
Don't play along by calling it "toast". It's a pop-up that's been re-branded to avoid the stigma of the old name, exactly like what companies do to themselves after causing a disaster like an oil spill.
You are conflating two similar but different UI elements.
A popup is a larger object, often a full window, that covers large parts of other elements or sometimes the entire screen. They are sometimes modal.
A toast is a smaller element, appearing (often by sliding into view upwards, hence the cutesy name) in or above a specific notification area of the application or the overall OS. These are much smaller, seldom modal and often convey useful notifications or warnings, unlike popups (especially modal ones) that are often either useless or actively, deliberately, in the way.
While it is correct to call then both popups if you wish, "toasts" are generally considered a specific subset.
To me the first would be called a modal window or a message box, while the latter is what I would call a popup. I guess different exposure with different UI kits.
For reference: you can get the regular notepad back by just uninstalling Notepad from the control panel (the new one, with big buttons and less features). Since it's possible using the regular UI without particular shenanigans, I assume this is fully supported.
So its gonna sound weird, but some companies really have strict policies and notepad there is ok, but notepad++ isn't. Usually, there is some way to get exceptions, but those tend to require more effort than it is usually worth it. I guess what I am saying it: it is not always by choice:D
Lots of organizations have a blanket ban on any third-party software that wasn't specifically approved by IT. Being free might help it get cleared but that's nowhere sufficient. Since Notepad comes with Windows, it's probably always there and never banned. (Although of course the cloud-based LLM integration might actually be a problem.)
With that said, I think I've also had NotePad++ made available by IT at all employers and clients that had me use Windows even when the desktop setup was otherwise quite restricted. It's a rather established tool after all and probably considered a safe and reputable bet even by somewhat conservative IT leadership.
If it's a windows-based server, there's probably little need to do much text editing, so installing Notepad++ wouldn't be needed or desired. Then, you suddenly need to copy/paste/amend some text, so you end up opening Notepad. My use of it is typically if I'm connecting remotely to the Windows desktop and am not sure if the keymap is correct when typing in a password, so I type it into Notepad to make sure I'm putting in what I think I'm typing.
I do, when I have tons of tabs in Nodepad++ and then need some other notes of different priority/context in explicitly another window that looks visually different to Notepad++ :)
Aaaand... thats about it, even Total commander's built in text editor is more powerful.
This is endgame. They are at the stage when everything in game is already done and they are lazingly trying to do some sidequests, like stacking the most cheese you can in a room.
> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation.
Considering that this is only with verified adults, how is this "evil"? I find it more evil to treat full grown adult users as kids and heavily censor their use of LLMs.
(Not to detract from the rest of your post, with which I agree).
That's true. Most of my local models are uncensored. I don't want that prude culture pushed on me. And it also stops AI from working correctly because a lot of stuff I talk about with my friends is sexual and it's so annoying for an AI model to keep closing up.
The whole "porn is a poison to society" narrative is very strong with conservatives now. A lot of them (here in Holland even) want it banned like it's Afghanistan and for everyone to have a family with lots of kids that has their dinner at 6pm after prayer.
I also don't subscribe to that. I'm polyamorous and sex-positive. And very LGBTIQ friendly. But I've seen that attitude a lot even in Europe :( especially from the emerging extreme right parties.
I don't really understand it either. Why is it any of their business what I do? I don't tell them they can't have a big traditional family. Why are they so preoccupied with me.
Couldn't agree more. I am cis-het in a long relationship, childfree by choice.
But don't think conservative ideology/politics is about making their rules your rules. Or at least being bound by their rules. I mean: If Musk doesn't like what someone says, they get blocked from Twitter (or in case of German political parties, downranked, so that the far right is ranking higher/being recommended more often on X). But they (like Musk) claim "free speech" for themselves. Meaning, they want to say what they feel like without consequences.
I found this interesting "law" by Frank Wilhoit:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Well in my country (Holland) I see a lot more hate. Even when I wear a rainbow wristband in June I get insulted by groups of extreme right guys. This didn't use to happen.
The thing is if you're not protected you don't really have free speech.
My point is not about morality. It’s about ROI focus and that OpenAI can’t and won’t ever return anything remotely close to what’s been invested. Adult content is not getting them closer to profitability.
And if anyone believes the AGI hyperbole, oh boy I have a bridge and a mountain to sell.
LLM tech will never lead to AGI. You need a tech that mimics synapses. It doesn’t exist.
I have also a hard time understanding how AGI will magically appear.
LLMs have their name for a reason: they model human language (output given an input) from human text (and other artifacts).
And now the idea seems to be that when we do more of it, or make it even larger, it will stop to be a model of human language generation? Or that human language generation is all there is to AGI?
Because the first couple major iterations looked like exponential improvements, and, because VC/private money is stupid, they assumed the trend must continue on the same curve.
And because there's something in the human mind that has a very strong reaction to being talked to, and because LLMs are specifically good at mimicking plausible human speech patterns, chatGPT really, really hooked a lot of people (including said VC/private money people).
LLMs aren't language models, but are a general purpose computing paradigm. LLMs are circuit builders, the converged parameters define pathways through the architecture that pick out specific programs. Or as Karpathy puts it, LLMs are a differentiable computer[1]. Training LLMs discovers programs that well reproduce the input sequence. Roughly the same architecture can generate passable images, music, or even video.
It's not that language generation is all there is to AGI, but that to sufficiently model text that is about the wide range of human experiences, we need to model those experiences. LLMs model the world to varying degrees, and perhaps in the limit of unbounded training data, they can model the human's perspective in it as well.
The words 'lead to' there cover a lot. I don't think we'll get AGI just by giving more compute to the models but modifying the algorithms could cover a lot of things.
Like at the moment I think during training new data changes all the model weights which is very compute intensive and makes it hard to learn new things after training. The human brain seems to do it in a more compartmentalised way - learning about a new animal say does not rewrite the neurons for playing chess or speaking French for example. You could maybe modify the LLM algo along those lines without throwing it away entirely.
Because always/never are absolutes that are either very easy or very hard to see through. For example, 'I will never die', 'I will never tell a lie', 'I will never eat a pie' all suffer through this despite dying being the most implausible. And it gets worse as we get most abstract:
'Machine will always know where to go from here on now'.
AGI might be possible with more Param+Data scaling for LLM. It is not completely within the realm of impossible given that there is no proof yet of "limits" of LLM. Current limitation is definitely on the hardware side.
This is what I'm talking about. The correct tech would enable the strands of information in a vector to "see" each other and "talk" to each other without any intervention. This isn't the same as using a shovel to bash someone's head in. AGI would need tech that finds a previously undocumented solution to a problem by relating many things together, making a hypothesis, testing it, proving it, then acting on it. LLM tech will never do this. Something else might. Maybe someone will invent Asimov's positronic brain.
I think _maybe_ quantum computing might be the tech that moves AGI closer. But I'm 99.9999% certain it won't be LLM tech. (Even I can't seriously say 100% for most things, though I am 100% certain a monkey will not fly out of my butt today)
Quantum compute would definite make a leap to moving closer to AGI. Calculating probability vector is very natural for quantum computer or more precisely any analog compute system would do. qubits==size(vocab) with some acceptable precision would work i believe.
The processing capability of today’s CPU’s and GPU’s is insane. From handheld devices to data centers, the capability to manipulate absurd amounts of data in fractions of a second is everywhere.
Maybe it is the algorithms. But just by doing a op for an 10^25 param llm is definitely not feasible on todays hardware. Emergent properties does happen at high density. Emergent properties might even look as AGI.
Yeah the disapproval/disgust I'm seeing everywhere, from pretty much every side that I keep my eye on, about OpenAI enabling erotica generation with ChatGPT is so frustrating, because it seems like just Puritanism and censorship, and desiring to treat adults like children as you say.
The issues that these pseudo-relationships can cause have barely begun to be discussed, nevermind studied and understood.
We know that they exist, and not only for people with known mental health issues. And that's all we know. But the industry will happily brush that aside in order to drive up those sweet MAU and MRR numbers. One of those, "I'm willing to sacrifice [a percentage of the population] for market share and profit" situations.
That's kind of patronizing position or maybe a conservative one (in US terms). There can be harm, there can be good, nobody can say at this moment for sure which is more.
Do you feel the same about say alcohol and cigarettes? We allow those, heck we encourage those in some situations for adults yet they destroy whole societies (look at russia with alcohol, look at Indonesia for cigarettes if you haven't been there).
I see a lot of points to discuss and study but none to ban with parent's topic.
I'm really not suggesting a ban, there's no way that would fly.
I'm suggesting restraint and responsibility on the part of the organization pushing this. When do we learn that being reactive after the harm is done isn't actually a required method of doing business? That it's okay to slow down even if there's a short-term opportunity cost?
This applies just as much to the push for LLMs everywhere as it does OpenAI's specific intention to support sexbots.
But it's all the same pattern. Push for as much as we can, as fast as we can, at as broad a scale as we can -- and deal with the consequences only when we can't ignore them anymore. (And if we can keep that to a bare minimum, that would be best for the bottom line.)
We did finally come around to the point of restricting advertising and sale of cigarettes, and limiting where you could smoke, to where it is much less prevalent in today's generation than earlier generations.
The issue is it becoming ubiquitous in an effort to make money.
I mean, their issue isn't that not enough users are using ChatGPT, so they need to enable new user modalities to draw more people in — they already have something like 800 million MAU. Their issue is that most of their tokens are generated free right now both from those users and stuff like CoPilot, and they're building stupidly huge unnecessary data enters to scale their way to "AGI." So yeah, everyone says this looks like a sign of desperation, but I just don't see it at all, because it would solve a problem they don't actually have (not enough people finding GPT useful).
If you re--calibrate from any lofty idea of their motives to "get investor money now", this and other moves/announcements make more sense: anything that could look good to an investor.
User count going up? Sure.
New browser that will deeply integrate chatGPT into users lives and give OAI access to their browsing/shopping data? Sure
Several new hardware products that are totally coming in the next several months? Sure
We're totally going to start delivering ads? Sure
We're making commitments to all these compute providers because our growth is totally going to warrant it? Sure
Oh, since we're investing in all of that compute, we're also going to become a compute vendor! Sure
None of it is particularly intentional, strategic, or sound. OAI is a money pit, they can always see the end of the runway, and must secure funding now. That is their perpetual state.
Looks like OpenAI can do anything it desires, but if an indie artist tries to take money for NSFW content, or even just make it for free publicly - they get barred from using payment processors and such.
I don't know if it's evil. It's more like desperate and stupid. They are rapidly losing their gaming dominance thanks to Valve. They've been losing the console wars. There doesn't seem to be a single person using Windows 11 that isn't being forced to in one way or another. Now they are forcing online accounts and injecting AI where it doesn't belong. How they still have willing customers is beyond me.
Many people are using Win 11 out of free will, until they alienate them. The main problem is that they are alienating developers, and that they don't focus on anything they do everything half-heartedly (even AI).
They abandoned the mobile phone market, where they couldn't decide to target businesess or consumers, so they let them both down.
Same happens on the desktop, they are quickly eroding the platform advantage they had and leaving both hobbyists and home users and enterprises without a reason to choose them.
They are pushing for the AI now, but in a way that is too controversial and is not acceptable nor for many individuals, nor for businesses, also doing so with forced hardware updates and high monthly costs.
XBOX is being abandoned. They did venture into the streamed gaming topic, but abandoning, guess because all those powerful GPUs are needed for AI.
Many core services are being abandoned, without alternatives, eg. Maps in windows was abandoned, without any successor. At least they could have created like a PWA wrapper for google/apple/osm, and put in a chooser facede on first start. It would have taken about 1 month for a single developer experienced in the windows relevant subsystems.
Windows is still reliable, stable, decently fast and secure, but that is useless when you abandon it as a platform, you don't attract developer talent, you don't have a unified UI/UX language that differentiates you (if not with anything els then with its consistency), does not provide a more streamlined deployment and update flow than competitors, etc. Windows had these advantages, and is repidly loosing these.
I opened my outlook android app today to find they'd replaced the archive button in the bottom toolbar with a "Summary by Copilot" one. It wasn't enough that the only colourful button is the Copilot one on the right.
Thankfully they still let you reorder the buttons, so I moved archive back and hid that unwanted summary in the overflow menu.
Once your coworkers start using copilot to turn what should be a single sentence email into six paragraphs, you'll need that to summarise it into a sentence.
Not in what concerns Windows development, I miss "Developers, Developers, Developers" dance.
UWP transition after Sinofsky was super bad managed, trying to rescue what was left of it as WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, killing C++/CX, C++/WinRT, .NET Native in the process is a bad joke on anyone that believed in the technology.
Don't believe the WinUI marketing, the only reason left to use it, it being a Microsoft employee, or someone that just can't let go of UWP remains.
The other day I installed Windows 7 on a VM for fun.. it was not fun at all. I got weird wave of nostalgic sadness, like being teleported back in time, I felt/remembered how things were back in ~2010, the culture, my university life, how things were with an ex gf, ALL of it. The OS is engrained in my mind and it was gorgeous seeing those aero effects and hearing the startup sounds again. It is so simple and easy. It felt good so see & use it again.
With Windows 11, although I mostly like the UI (rounded corners on a high dpi tablet also with rounded screen is amazing), it feels absolutely gross, in the corporate soulless sense. It feels mentally heavy top operate. I constantly had to battle it to get it to work the way I want it.
These days all my devices are running Fedora with KDE, which is just the best. You basically set it up once the way you like it, and it won't change by itself for months. It is a buttery smooth experience and have had zero need to go back to Windows yet.
If anyone want the same level one-ness with your computer like back in Windows XP & Windows 7 days, give KDE a try. Fedora is pretty simple distro to get used to if you want a good starting point.
I mentioned to a friend recently that W11 is so difficult to use compared to Linux like Mint nowadays. He didn't understand it, though he tried Mint a decade ago but kept using Windows 10, upgraded to 11, continues to have driver problems with his laptop, some weeks network card stops working some weeks his sound card drops out completely. He uses usb dongles intermittently, it reminds me how I used on laptop Linux 20 something years ago and even then it wasn't that bad. I feel preaching Linux is almost counter-effective, but I'm tired of being asked to solve his hw problems caused by bad W11 drivers.
In my experience the problem with Debian is that sooner or later you're bound to want to use something that is only 5 years old and therefore not included yet, so you end up having to install it from source or something else, but something doesn't quite work right so you have to hack it one way or another, and over time all this cruft adds up and you end up with a broken system caused precisely because the base distro refused to change fast enough.
I no longer use Debian, but when I did, I always used Debian Testing, never had any major issues that weren't my own fault, and packages are way more up-to-date. Worth trying if you're in that ecosystem still, and you want later stuff than 1-2 years old softwrae.
Lots of Linux software these days are also distributed as flatpack or appimage, and appimage in particular is dead simple if what you want has it available: place the file wherever on the path, make it executable, and done.
The abomination that was IE6 - it poisoned the internet at the time with developers designing specifically for it and its random bullshit bugs. The number of admin tools (e.g. SAN interface) that specifically required IE6 to run ActiveX or some monstrosity.
NT was Stable what was really missing in the MS world at that time. But a "good" OS? Other than stable I expect to be able to administer HW, fine grained permissions, and lots of out-of-the-box functionality. Compared with a GNU/Linux of the time, I have never hesitated in going for Linux (or FreeBSD at the time).
Sure, if you ignore all the anticompetitive bullshit they pulled to blackmail high street stores into removing BeOS, DrDOS, Linux and others from their shelves.
And the stunts they pulled to kill other IMs.
Or how they crippled the web for a decade due to killing competing browsers, building Windows lock-ins into IE (eg ActiveX controls), fragmenting Java, and then leaving IE to die themselves.
Or how they lied about Windows 98 requiring IE4.
Or how they didn’t give a crap about OS security until halfway through the life of XP. Leaving literally millions of people vulnerable to a plethora of different forms of attacks from malware to direct hacking on open Telnet ports.
Or how they tried to land grab IRC with their comic book GUI. Which, in fairness, was a novel app. But unfortunately it was another embrace, extend, extinguish play.
Or how they tried to kill ODF with their own faux-open document format: OOXML
Or their constant stream of FUD messaging about Linux being “communism”.
Yeah, MS were really noble in their goals to create a good OS. /s
It’s a pity they couldn’t even manage to do that well given every iteration of Windows has been bloated, buggy, and years behind the competition in terms of performance and capabilities. Windows was never a good OS.
In fact I’d go further and say Microsoft have never release a good OS. Even their versions of BASIC sucked compared to the competition.
Microsoft have always been good at negotiating with businesses. It’s why Azure is used in governments, why Windows is the “business platform”, and why 9x beat the competition in the 90s despite being consistently the worst in class for basically every metric you could think of.
Windows didn’t succeed because it was good. Microsoft succeeded because Bill Gates was ruthless!
They are very good at talking to businesses but even more important was their installed base. As they used to say "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
They won because they were first mover, not because they were the best because they weren't and they aren't. This is why they are so hell bent on copilot everywhere. They want to build an installed base again so they can milk it. But they're hardly the best. In fact what they are selling as copilot isn't even anything they made. It's just Chatgpt. Another interesting parallel with edge by the way which is of course just chrome.
They weren’t the first movers. They just managed to get IBM to sign with them after BASIC proved not to be IBMs long term version and CP/M struck out from any disk OS talks (though stories differ about exactly how that interaction went)
Microsoft didn’t even have an OS when they made that deal with IBM.
Hence why I said they’re good at negotiating with businesses.
Being first to market is actually less important than people think it is. It’s just history tends to remember the victors so everyone assumes they were first to market.
It was also the last operating system from Microsoft that didn't require activation.
It was full of vulnerabilities though. I used to take a laptop with some specialist software to clients and in the end I started running it in a VM so I didn't have to deal with my machine becoming infected from my clients dodgy networks.
It reminds me of the Xbox One release. They basically had the market with the earlier release compared to Sony's PS4, but then pushed the thing as a media/entertainment glorified roku box not gaming console. They didn't care what you want only what they wanted to sell you, and they were pushing NFL deals not gaming.
Nobody wants this Copilot everywhere, but they sure are pushing it anyway. It's like they completely forgot how to make a product and only know how to push their agenda using whatever monopoly is left.
> Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again
You lost me here. They ALWAYS have been evil and disrespectful of their customers. It's not just paid products, even their so called "open source" products like VSCODE and Github Desktop randomly add helpers to run in the background constantly (even on Mac) under the label Telemetry.
They paid good money for OpenAI, they want to make full use of it. RIP to all their customers who have to use their Office 360 suite. They will probably pull off an Adobe at some point :(
From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign. Solitaire is now a subscription service. I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.
Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. The real change was internally. Satya is well-known for eradicating the "Art of War" environment and bringing workers together. He also fully embraced open-source (Balmer hated OSS) and R&D has continued to innovate. (Still boggles the mind that F# exists and is awesome)
Prior to CoPilot, my only beef was that Azure needs a ground up re-architecture. They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.
It should be noted that while Satya opened the floodgates, it was already making inroads by then, just with a lot more paperwork. Some early examples of F/OSS predating Satya were ASP.NET MVC and PTVS.
At the same time, the insistence from up top that all divisions have to be profitable on their own means that in practice there has been a steady ongoing scale-back from F/OSS for several years now. Just look at the situation in VSCode: sure, the base platform is still open, but increasingly many first-party extensions have their pieces replaced by closed source functionality - Python language server, C# debugger etc. Related to this are the attempts to block VSCode forks by using prohibitive licensing terms and even inserting runtime checks for the same.
It always feels that whatever good .NET team manages, it gets killed by upper management decisions, like VSCode should not eat into VS sales, thus plenty of tools will never have a VSCode version.
Example, you cannot do graphical debugging of parallel code, use visualizers, or do profiling analysis in VSCode.
> They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.
I really don't see the problem with LDAP. If they make an overlay for it and it's needlessly complicated, that's just par for the course. Have you experienced SharePoint?
Yes, and I told you those professional services were nowhere to be found, while in AWS and Azure we actually got people on the phone, so do you want to have this discussion again?
Ancient LDAP is probably the best they still offer. A far superior way for internal auth and vastly superior for companies that need on premise infrastructure. Nobody wants internal apps that auth through AWS or GCP.
I hate registering a shitty app and use their modern auth flow. No security gain for additional maintenance.
For that matter, this is a main reason why Windows is so established. The logistic problem of distributing user accounts on several machines.
And no, a virtual and slow cloud Windows is not an alternative for anyone that wants to be productive.
Satya was definitely an improvement, a breath of fresh air. But the last few years, they've started dropping the ball. Everything is half-assed (new outlook), or releases too soon burning goodwill (new teams), or a miss being pushed on people (copilot integration).
(strangely, perhaps my perception, this is roughly when the Mac M1 came out).
On the UI side of things the trouble with 8 was the push towards touch as the latest shiny object to chase, coming a few years into the boom of smartphones/tablets. The start menu was full screen with no option and many OS applications were either full screen only or by default until you clicked a new title bar button. The 8.1 release pulled back from a lot of that.
I think the agentic idea is worth exploring. It could be useful.
However I would want it running fully locally (on my servers, absolutely not on Azure or any other cloud) and to have full control of where everything is stored and how it works. And have full control whether I use it or not. Absolutely no popups and marketing nudges to use it. That stuff tends to drive me away, it deeply annoys me and I only start hating the product.
But this will not happen with windows. Microsoft is purely a cloud company now and windows is just a sales vehicle for it.
I think that's the core problem more so than just the latest thing they're trying to push. But I'm not on this hype train. I don't need to have it today or have FOMO. Rven at work there's this push to use AI "or else we will become irrelevant soon". Which is partly driven by Microsoft as they are very close to our top dogs. Their "adoption" teams are constantly hounding us with their bullshit and I hate them so much. Also the colleagues who are evangelising AI (constantly shilling on Yammer and LinkedIn) are just working to make themselves irrelevant in the long term because AI is cheaper than colleagues.
I'll try it when it comes to Linux in a workable form and fully under my control. Just like I didn't use chatbots until they had workable performance on my own ollama server. And even then I don't use it that much. It's still early days. I don't get this pressure "keep up our fall out". I've been doing computing for 40 years and all the big things have taken at least a decade to actually "change the game". Like the dotcom crash. Eventually we fulfilled it's promises but it required other things to make it happen. Like the smartphone and the app.
I've been a Windows user from day one and I now see a future without it. Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, but this blind lust for AI, especially in bed with Altman who is pure con artist, is unforgivable.
Some of the investment sells recently are starting to look like the beginning of the end for OpenAI. That will have a wide range impact on everything.
I use Claude for coding (and mostly in WSL). OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation.
Seriously. And Satya just keeps on at full speed.