Pretty sure it's just that Windows is horribly broken, privacy-invading, ad-ridden malware disguised as an operating system. I swear it seems like nobody at Microsoft not even once have asked the actual users for what they would like to see in the OS.
The video takes this one step further, and it has nothing to do with being 'out of touch' or something. The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to. Then it can track, tune and control everything we do, thanks to all the telemetry back and forth.
I wish people would engage with the content a bit. It's a huge claim (and scary).
> The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to.
This trend is not even limited to Windows.
We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
I don't know, I think a simpler explanation for Google's behavior is that monopolies act like monopolies. Combating spam and SEO junk is hard and expensive. Once they became synonymous with web search for most people they gradually cared less and less about product quality. If people will keep using the product no matter how bad the results get and how many ads get jammed in it's hard for a corporation like that to care.
Possibly, but it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of "Google is an advertising company" rather than a search company.
Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.
Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.
> it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired
I find that very hard to believe because it implies a level of foresight that we have not observed from Google. The notion that they degraded their own search on purpose for years to funnel people to AI seems very implausible, especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI, and that level of foresight would also imply that they should have beaten OpenAI to the punch instead of reacting to ChatGPT.
> especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI
This would be a calculated financial bet on their part. This kind of risk taking is not limited to SV startups.
I realize companies under late stage capitalism aren't typically known for having foresight past one quarter, but that doesn't mean some of them can't have somebody optimizing for the long-term in a financial sense.
It's seems premature to rule this possibility out entirely.
Occam‘s razor says prefer the simpler explanation.
It is possible that Google as an organization had enough foresight to see that search would eventually be eaten by AI chat bots and so intentionally degraded the experience of search to encourage movement in that direction. And also that Google was too dumb to actually ship their chat bot first and capitalized on their choice to sabotage search.
It seems a lot more likely that the the decline in the quality of search is due to a combination of hyper-optimization for revenue and difficulty combating large scale spam farms.
> We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
So Google ruined search so they could give their market share to ChatGPT. 4D chess. Maybe 5D even.
If you have some explanation for how doing this makes any sense at all, please share. But I think you’re basically engaging in conspiracy theory by claiming Google intentionally reduced the quality of search to drive AI adoption.
It's not that hard to synthesize how business leadership would both optimize for the present of the pre-AI era while also continually refining their strategy as AI became clearer on the horizon.
You're jumping through hoops when this really isn't that complicated or far fetched in a business sense.
It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It is extremely farfetched because it would provide no present or future advantage to Google to do so. If they hypothetically wanted to intentionally degrade their search, they could always do that when they are ready for the switch to AI.
> It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It literally does though.
Furthermore, even if you reject that, in practice it could be as simple as Google funneling resources from maintaining search (which is obviously a never ending game of cat-and-mouse between forces of SEO, etc) to AI prospects, which would have the same outcome: neglect leads to degradation and dysfunction, and it makes their new venture more appealing. They obviously have enough capital to play such a game in the short-term and eat whatever loss necessary during the transition.
Google is well known by now for abandoning their products in favor of what they deem to be the Next Thing.
Microsoft has a handful big clients - Dell, Lenovo, HP being the top three. They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers and they need to be happy, not the person who buys the computer. When the computer becomes unusable, they'll just get another from the same brands and everyone, except the user, are happy.
Corporations don't run Windows. They run Outlook, Excel, and Teams. Windows and generic PCs (or thin clients and VDIs) is just the cheapest way to achieve that goal.
Corpos definitely run Windows. There are many highly technical people and advanced software that need Windows. Not every company employee is just a pencil pusher or bean counter.
This myopia in tech is so baffling to me. Windows has been around over 40 years and tech people still act like it will go away “any day now” just because they don’t like it.
Corporations will continue using Windows the same way they'll continue using mainframes (at least mainframes are interesting machines). If Dell, HP and Lenovo decide tomorrow to ship all laptops with Fedora by default, very few people will install Windows. Or notice it's a different OS. They'll just think that Windows 12 no longer has ads.
Corporations will continue to corporate. Active Directory is a powerful thing. SharePoint is another dependency that's hard to get rid of, even more so when it becomes the file server where all Office content is stored.
I have been waiting for this day since the move to SFF and thin clients. They've been threatening to do all compute in the cloud... at which point the OS, local or otherwise becomes irrelevant.
In fact, the thin client that drives my desk at [company] runs Linux with the Citrix client to connect to a VDI that exists somewhere in a datacenter we own, because regulations.
> They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers
I've got to disagree. Macs are a fantastic option as long as the software needed to do actual work is available. That's the real bottleneck and it's not something Dell, Lenovo, or HP have any power over.
They still ship a lot more computers than Apple. For most of the world, Apple is a niche product. I use it, and I love them, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking corporations will start buying Mac Minis to replace their desktops and thin clients anytime soon.
I am not fooling myself and I do not care what corporations would or would not do - I simply state that the reason there is such a pressure to use Windows is not due to Dell and other providers, but software providers - mainly Microsoft.
That… does not follow. Corporations simply aren't going to start buying Macs for all of their millions of rank-and-file corporate drones. Even if they wanted, and they don't, they're tied to the Windows ecosystem in all sorts of ways, even though the software lives on someone else's computer these days.
Thanks for saying the same thing I have said? Do people even read before they post? Seems like the moment Apple is mentioned some folks just turn on a downvote + disagree autopilot, even when they agree?
Nah. I think the problem is that windows and macOS did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago. Everything since then has been lipstick on a pig.
If windows were a building, they need to stop tacking on more rooms like it’s a gaudy McMansion. If they really wanna keep working on it, work to make what’s already there more beautiful. Optimise. Reduce the install size. Clean up some of the decades of tech debt. Unify the different generations of UI toolkits. Write documentation. Port security critical parts to rust, where appropriate. Refine, don’t reinvent.
> did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago.
Certainly not; not by a long shot. Besides, most users don't even understand the potential of software. But why bother improving it if you still make money shipping crap?
I agree, I've been amazed watching people release after release upgrading to newer versions of Windows and office, when what they used them for functionally didnt change. I could never make sense of how people didnt see it for what it is, and accepted the continuous costs.
But hey, I guess that's capitalism, and people are captured by it. If it has a new shine, and everyone else is doing it, let's all jump over the cliff's edge.
In a couple years you won't have to bother with that. The device will connect to the ID chip embedded in your body when you're born. And this will be a one-time hard-wired coupling for that device when it is first turned on.
A bit of a tangent, but your worst case answer here is the culmination of all the secure boot and remote attestation concepts.
What would stop it is a combination of not being able to buy new hardware that will even boot the modified kernel, and not being able to get vintage hardware to connect to any public ISP etc. due to being unable to attest its validated boot chain information, signed by a required modern hardware OEM key.
So you would be stuck in some kind of underworld of vintage folks attempting mesh networking between themselves. Then, because of basic market forces/economics, there will be a dwindling amount of software that is able to run in such environments. It will become the esoteric realm of old-school hobbyists who don't need to run any commercial apps which require ABI/API features of the modern commercial OSs which require this boot chain of the modern commercial hardware, etc.
What they're trying to do is force web sites to require this "service". So if you're running Linux stripped of those packages, your browser will effectively be nerfed -- content hosted by companies doing business Europe or the Anglosphere would be unavailable or "kid safed".
Most people will eventually just give in when that happens.
They might force the Linux kernel to add a value 'age' to the couple username/password. Although in Europe OSS is exempt from age verification obligation.
Microsoft is declaring all users are now corporate drones. All your activity will be tied to your Microsoft account. All your files, images, and regular screenshots of your PC will be sucked into OneDrive. If your mouse has not moved in five minutes a manager will be notified.
Used to be that people who bought the OS were the customer. Now just like everything else these days, they're the product. And the OS still isn't even free.
Plus it's hard to buy a computer without paying the MS tax, unless you build one yourself.
That's an issue I would like to see legislated! In fact, in my country there is a law that prohibits bundled purchases: it's just that the authorities are not tech savvy enough to see it when it pertains to computers and Windows.
I'm being slightly absurd here since you need some sort of firmware to simply start up the computer and install an operating system, but here is my point: to most people, the operating system is part of the computer. The computer is simply an expensive brick without it. On top of that, a lot of the negativity towards bundling Windows originates from Microsoft's past monopolistic practices[1]. We certainly don't hear many people criticizing the bundling of macOS or iOS on Apple products or Android/Chrome OS on Android devices or Chromebooks. (There may be people who want to load alternative operating systems on these devices, but that is different from criticizing the bundling of the OS.)
[1] Is Microsoft forcing hardware vendors to install Windows even a thing these days?
It makes sense, if manufacturer provides support for Linux on the same laptop SKU. But that's very rarely the case. So selling laptop without OS seems like selling half-working product. When you're buying a car, it comes with a lot of software. ECU software, multimedia software (sometimes it's Windows CE) and so on.
I saw laptops selling with FreeDOS but realistically speaking I think that majority of these laptops end up with pirated Windows, so all it provides is increasing level of piracy.
Ideally laptop should provide a choice between Linux and Windows on the first boot. And easy way to buy Windows license if user chooses it.
Compared to a hypothetical world without computers with Linux preinstalled, presumably.
“Plenty” doesn’t really seem like a relative term here, but a statement that there are enough options on the market if someone wants to buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.
Users want a one time payment of $150, for a 50 million LoC software product, and then get 10 years of support.
Everyone here slinging mud, while getting paid out of the SaaS pot. Would windows be a better product if it was user focused but cost $40/mo? From Microsoft's POV it would probably kill numbers.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. What matters is being upfront and transparent. Microsoft could just have said the initial license is just that. If you want updates be prepared to pay.
As a single anecdote - I use Windows daily because I'm a C++ programmer in games and all console frameworks are Windows only. I also have to use MacOS every now and then to do some iOS deployments, and I don't understand how people use it daily - it feels like an operating system designed by someone who doesn't use it themselves.The UI is actually straight up horrible, not to mention window management if you don't have a touchpad - it literally makes me want to throw the stupid thing out of a window.
My point is - we're all comfortable with what we know and use the most. I imagine if I used Macs all the time I'd also think that Windows is stupid.
