> It appears this moment of pushback has resonated with internal teams: According to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, the company is now reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans changes to streamline or even remove certain AI features where they don’t make sense.
Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features made sense in the ways that they were being added. There should not be any necessary work to "rollback" features that do not make sense, because they should have not built them in the first place.
Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. Taste comes from knowing what not to build.
Right now Windows is an unstable mess, filled with things that shouldn't have been built. The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
> The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).
There's no way MS employees at all levels don't know. It only doesn't know organizationally. It's just the boring old incentive alignment problem.
There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.
> The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.
I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.
> The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
You’ve never worked at MS, have you? PMs aren’t asleep at the wheel. They are doing their job because their performance reviews are tied to adding these top-down goals into the team’s roadmap. That’s the horrible part.
> burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
And there's no real evidence of any kind that they positive motivating vision for them other than AI right now.
Sure they want to hide their embarrassment at this second, but I'm not hearing any vision for a future where they make a product designed for someone like me. They don't want me anyore and they've made that quite clear through generations of hostile decisions
They might be getting the order to RIP it out because Of the cost - autocompleting peoples word documents still uses tokens which, last time I checked, were anything but cheap.
I think it’s governance. It can make sense to ask to put AI into everything. But then you also need to check it’s done in a useful way. MS leadership seems to have skipped this step.
The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Unlike IE, the NT kernel was never bad and is still (presumably) in a pretty good shape. It's the userland that's gone insane. Someone should just port the Windows 7 shell to the newest kernel and call it a day.
The difference is that Microsoft didn't receive any direct revenue off of IE and Google had a lot of levers to use (they weren't under antitrust scrutiny at the time) to continue to eat away at IE's market share. It was smart for MS to give up on maintaining their own browser and downright brilliant for them to use their competitor's own browser against them.
On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.
The problem with windows is not the kernel, as it is preety solid, but user space.
Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.
That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)
> The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high.
That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...
> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.
You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.
> because they should have not built them in the first place
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work.
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong.
I think Windows 11 is the Trump moment. Even if they right the ship, Linux is good enough or good enough is on the near horizon for most use cases so people are jumping ship. There's also bleed from people being tired of Apple's lack of software innovation.
Too late, idiots.
Just as Windows 10 was being retired, you ran the craziest anti-marketing campaign I've ever seen and successfully coaxed me into switching my daily driver to Linux. Until this year, I've been using windows my ENTIRE life.
I'm in the same boat, have to use Windows at work. In addition to whatver MS is doing, every workstation is encumbered with various EDR and antivirus software.
Literally installing Arch right now as I read this. Same deal, been using windows as my daily driver all my life but have been running Linux servers since late 90s (and did daily drive RedHat back in the day).
My work env was just VS Code + WSL and I realized the most pain points came from using Explorer and trying to admin the machine with the fractured landscape of sys admin tools. For me it became very obvious that windows is only going to get more bloated and less “my” machine going forward, why stay on this platform if I’m already spending most of my day in a Linux environment (that I’m already familiar with).
I have a feeling it's too little, too late, even if it's completely true and sincere, which I doubt at this point.
I can't help but wonder if they're in the process of losing an entire generation of tech enthusiasts to Linux and maybe MacOS. And the rest of the world tends to slowly follow the tech enthusiasts.
Windows 10 is my last Microsoft Windows operating system. Between the fact that I had to turn of TPM in the bios so that I wouldn't wake up one day turn on my computer and see Windows 11. The massive bugs that prevent things like power off. The insane push for AI in everything (notepad? really?).
I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
The real issue was never AI in Windows
It was AI with no clear user benefit. A Copilot button in Notepad doesn't solve a problem anyone has
Good to see them pulling back, but the test will be whether the features they keep actually earn their place in the workflow instead of just being there because someone had a KPI to hit
Windows 10 searching the web started it all for me - not AI. Followed by constantly changing/moving the option on how to disable it. Use Edge, Onedrive, help finish setting up your PC (by logging in), constant disrespect of me the user.
W11 local accounts only with terminal hacks sealed the deal along with valves contributions to linux.
The dumbification of Control Panel to Settings was one of the factors for me.
I'm not sure if Control Panel is still available, hidden away somewhere, but I've since moved on to pastures that only seen to get greener when compared with the Microsoft Windows paddock. They're somehow finding new shades of brown on a monthly basis.
> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit.
I find it handy here and there. HOWEVER... There is no clear way to get rid of the thing. MS has added tons of features and then burry them in really obtuse ways to get rid of them if you can at all. That is the core of MS's user backlash. It makes people feel like they are not in control of their hardware. When I feed the machine 32 gig of ram and 8 to 12 is already taken up on fresh start something is seriously broken.
The second issue is people feel windows is not keeping up with its competitors (Linux, MacOS). They are throwing features in. When the benchmarks are where they are slowing yielding to their competitors.
The third issues is backwards compat is not as good as it used to be. They made backwards compat one of their key selling points. That is breaking in hundreds of subtle ways that piss people off. If I am going to lose my software to time rot why am I staying with this thing that randomly changes what the start menu looks like every 6 months and I have to figure out again where they put things. Plus now there is this copilot thing chirping all over the place.
CoPilot is not the issue, it is a symptom. It is the total lack of awareness MS has about its user base. It has been this way since windows 8 first launched. I use windows to launch my software and do things. There are 2 other viable OS's out there that do the same thing. If MS had put an advert into the message popup saying 'hey copilot is ready for your machine would you like to turn it on' they would have probably been in a better position. Instead it is on by default and you just get to deal with it. So now feel like 'gee thanks' hey what about these thousands of other issues? How many times are you going to break remote desktop again? How many weird directx 7/8/9 shims do I need to make my game launch this time? Oh an fix the backwards compat tool. It is broken too.
Windows 11 needs a 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on fixing as many bugs as they can. Lower the memory and CPU usage to as low as they can. Fixup the hundreds of backwards compat issues I see all over the net. Just well tested bug fixes.
You probably wouldn’t like 20 year old Notepad’s habit of leaving Unicode BOMs everywhere, or only supporting CRLF line endings. They did improve it a tiny amount circa Windows 10.
Does Windows 11 Notepad still choke on loading large files?
The way the code assistants like opencode / claude / etc are improving with good models, I could easily see some kind of Copilot-like utility driving the whole OS in a pretty useful way to automate all kinds of tasks, just... not today.
Just like Google shoving the shittiest version of gemini into search results, Microsoft is shoving mostly useless half-baked AI features into Windows. There must be some kind of insane culture of just wanting to ship before it's done and assuming users won't notice it's crap, rather than waiting for a truly good experience.
> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit
Much of the way AI has been forced upon the world by MS and the likes makes it very difficult to separate the two. The trend of enshittification leading up to LLMs has also not been a solid basis for trust. So yes, for a lot of people, the underlying technology isn't necessarily an issue, but it's kind of hard to imagine it being presented in a non-problematic way given the above, which I suspect is a big part of why there's a growing sentiment of distaste with anything AI now.
As someone that uses Linux distros since 1995, I have had lots of joy getting it to work on various kinds of hardware, during weekends and long nights.
Ah the good old days. Investing an entire weekend to make your pci soundblaster card work. Nowadays you just install an iso from a thumb drive, it takes 30 mins and everything works out of the box. So boring!
Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)?
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
100%. MSDN is the definition of saying nothing with as many words as possible. I guess if you wanted a case for why LLMs are helpful, MSDN is a good one haha
That seems likely. Someone got a directive to "increase Copilot adoption" so they rebranded Office to Copilot and now they can show their boss a graph for Copilot adoption that goes to the right and up and get a promotion for it and everyone's happy.
Ballmer was kinda the best Microsoft CEO for Windows, IMO. He didn't get the Justice department's attention in either the states or Europe, and he started building alternate revenue streams (XBOX, Windows Phone) without destroying the core product. Sure, MetroUI had no place in Server2012, but that was less egregious than the AI-everything and multiple settings menus
Nadella is a marvelous Microsoft CEO for Linux though. Credit where it's due
Ballmer's biggest mistake was staying on during the worst financial crisis and also fumbling the phone business. I know some of the bad decisions can all be traced back to start of Win8 design language which happened under him.
wel, I was fired (after multiple rounds of downsizing our team from ~200 people to 20 people) by the new guy Satya back in the day, so yeah, I prefer Ballmer's approach as well
Yeah, this is a public relations effort. Corporations, especially ones that have spent an obscene amount of money on AI companies aren't going to change their direction. They have to justify that spending to their shareholders.
Microsoft had gained my goodwill as a linux user when they didn't immediately destroy github and embraced open source
I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again.
I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners
Readit News
Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features made sense in the ways that they were being added. There should not be any necessary work to "rollback" features that do not make sense, because they should have not built them in the first place.
Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. Taste comes from knowing what not to build.
Right now Windows is an unstable mess, filled with things that shouldn't have been built. The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).
There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.
Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.
I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.
You’ve never worked at MS, have you? PMs aren’t asleep at the wheel. They are doing their job because their performance reviews are tied to adding these top-down goals into the team’s roadmap. That’s the horrible part.
My Labrador says a/ he’s neutered c/ dogix user b/ his teams always begin with empathy: people (and retrieves) over outcomes
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
They already made money.
They know what works to make money by convincing CEO VP PM devs. I do hope they jump to the next company (please meta or apple) and do their duties.
They also missed the boat on mobile, and I suspect they didn't want to miss the "AI" boat this time around.
Where I come from we prefer monkeys throwing darts.
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
Sure they want to hide their embarrassment at this second, but I'm not hearing any vision for a future where they make a product designed for someone like me. They don't want me anyore and they've made that quite clear through generations of hostile decisions
They’d have nothing to gain from doing this, NT kernel isn’t the problem with windows.
On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.
Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.
That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...
> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.
You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.
Dead Comment
Jobs was correct when he said that Microsoft has no taste.
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
We never, ever, learn from "lessons learned". They are there, just as a generic way, to tell other teams, that there might be some issues.
I deleted "Microsoft" from the quote because this, unfortunately, applies to a lot of companies.
They're not even trying anymore.
As an OS, Windows died with 10.
It does, imagine how much faster it's going to be in the next model version!
How so? The forced feeding of AI is what Satya called for.
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Dead Comment
I am seriously thinking of looking for another role because it is such a HOG.
My work env was just VS Code + WSL and I realized the most pain points came from using Explorer and trying to admin the machine with the fractured landscape of sys admin tools. For me it became very obvious that windows is only going to get more bloated and less “my” machine going forward, why stay on this platform if I’m already spending most of my day in a Linux environment (that I’m already familiar with).
I can't help but wonder if they're in the process of losing an entire generation of tech enthusiasts to Linux and maybe MacOS. And the rest of the world tends to slowly follow the tech enthusiasts.
I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
W11 local accounts only with terminal hacks sealed the deal along with valves contributions to linux.
I'm not sure if Control Panel is still available, hidden away somewhere, but I've since moved on to pastures that only seen to get greener when compared with the Microsoft Windows paddock. They're somehow finding new shades of brown on a monthly basis.
I find it handy here and there. HOWEVER... There is no clear way to get rid of the thing. MS has added tons of features and then burry them in really obtuse ways to get rid of them if you can at all. That is the core of MS's user backlash. It makes people feel like they are not in control of their hardware. When I feed the machine 32 gig of ram and 8 to 12 is already taken up on fresh start something is seriously broken.
The second issue is people feel windows is not keeping up with its competitors (Linux, MacOS). They are throwing features in. When the benchmarks are where they are slowing yielding to their competitors.
The third issues is backwards compat is not as good as it used to be. They made backwards compat one of their key selling points. That is breaking in hundreds of subtle ways that piss people off. If I am going to lose my software to time rot why am I staying with this thing that randomly changes what the start menu looks like every 6 months and I have to figure out again where they put things. Plus now there is this copilot thing chirping all over the place.
CoPilot is not the issue, it is a symptom. It is the total lack of awareness MS has about its user base. It has been this way since windows 8 first launched. I use windows to launch my software and do things. There are 2 other viable OS's out there that do the same thing. If MS had put an advert into the message popup saying 'hey copilot is ready for your machine would you like to turn it on' they would have probably been in a better position. Instead it is on by default and you just get to deal with it. So now feel like 'gee thanks' hey what about these thousands of other issues? How many times are you going to break remote desktop again? How many weird directx 7/8/9 shims do I need to make my game launch this time? Oh an fix the backwards compat tool. It is broken too.
Windows 11 needs a 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on fixing as many bugs as they can. Lower the memory and CPU usage to as low as they can. Fixup the hundreds of backwards compat issues I see all over the net. Just well tested bug fixes.
Does Windows 11 Notepad still choke on loading large files?
Copilot excluded, who decided that it was a good idea to have multi tab notepad that remembers unsaved files between executions ?
"We solved that, just go into settings to toggle that behaviour !"
Who decided that notepad had to have a full settings page ?
"Just use the feedback hub" ?
So basically, you removed Wordpad and now regret this decision and are slowly turning notepad into Jeff Raskins' Archy ?
But I think formatting, grammar and ai are going too far for notepad, if I want to do something that need those I would use Word.
The way the code assistants like opencode / claude / etc are improving with good models, I could easily see some kind of Copilot-like utility driving the whole OS in a pretty useful way to automate all kinds of tasks, just... not today.
Just like Google shoving the shittiest version of gemini into search results, Microsoft is shoving mostly useless half-baked AI features into Windows. There must be some kind of insane culture of just wanting to ship before it's done and assuming users won't notice it's crap, rather than waiting for a truly good experience.
Much of the way AI has been forced upon the world by MS and the likes makes it very difficult to separate the two. The trend of enshittification leading up to LLMs has also not been a solid basis for trust. So yes, for a lot of people, the underlying technology isn't necessarily an issue, but it's kind of hard to imagine it being presented in a non-problematic way given the above, which I suspect is a big part of why there's a growing sentiment of distaste with anything AI now.
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
Nadella is a marvelous Microsoft CEO for Linux though. Credit where it's due
Now it's pure emotional response and acting like rabid animals that lost every single notion but attacking and harming anything they see as a target.
https://danluu.com/ballmer/
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I don’t doubt for a second Ballmer would also be jumping onto the AI hype train if he was still running the show.
I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again.
I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners