Saying goodbye to the tech dreams Microsoft abandoned with Windows 11 24H2

With the release of Windows 11 24H2, it is time to pay our respects to the features and functions removed from Microsoft's flagship operating system. The most notable departure is that of WordPad, which was deprecated in 2023 and, according to Microsoft, "is removed from all editions of Windows starting in Windows 11, version …

[Art Slartibartfast]

Microsoft, i hate you even more now

Removing WMR is a slap in the face of users who invested serious money in VR. My HP Reverb G2 will become a useless paperweight once I can no longer hold on to Windows 10. It is not just me, but also the countless people in the simulation community who are affected by this decision.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Microsoft, i hate you even more now

I think there was a enough warnings back then though to go with a more open technology when it came to VR. Serious money should never have been invested in these closed, heavily monetized DRM solutions.

Anything that was working on i.e Linux, still works on Linux. Even though it is already in maintenance mode, OpenHMD is still the only project correctly pushing VR.

[Richard 12]

Re: Microsoft, i hate you even more now

We bought an actual HoloLens.

That's *ahem* thousand dollars down the drain. It only ever barely worked, and now it's landfill.

[BobChip]

Re: Microsoft, i hate you even more now

Is it just me, or does anyone else share my view that MS has now passed the point of being useless and/or irrelevant? Why would anyone choose to set up a business IT structure using such difficult and unreliable software when there are alternatives of proven superiority and reliability, and at much lower cost if required. I.e. using existing hardware inventories for a start. MS seem to have gone out of their way to make their offerings fundamentally unattractive in the marketplace, and not just by insisting on new hardware throughout.

A doctor would now be concerned that his patient was showing pronounced suicidal tendencies......

Thoughts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Microsoft, i hate you even more now

As an ERP guy who has made a career out of consulting / coding Navision, I would have a few choice words for Microsoft. In my time in the field, I have seen ERP leadership at Microsoft change every two years or so. They had a strategy (and I guess they still have one), but all in all, it never was one for the customer - in the "here and now" sense. They always seemed to aim higher and showed a serious disdain for cost incurred. Where I work now, we joke about upgrade paths. It would cost 7 figures (or something in that range) and years to get the same functionality and performance - on a different technology platform. That they don't really talk about anymore. For the beancounters and enterpreneurs this is sort of a no-brainer: Don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Windows Mixed Reality" - if that's where Microsoft is living it could explain a lot...

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Incredibly poor decision

That's seven years of support in up to date Windows, nine once it goes out of support. WMR headsets were released October 2017.

I'll grant I got a complete bargain Lenovo WMR headset for 150 quid during a Black Friday sale, and after the WMR integration with Steam matured it's been very solid. Still terrible support for more premium headsets.

VR is going to be one of the worst possible preservation targets in the future - it's already in a terrible state if you want to every VR app/game out there, multiple headsets are required, even from the same vendor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Incredibly poor decision

It is being replaced with an AI-based model - 1-2years.

It does sting, doesn't it? But from that pain learn. Learn never to buy that kind of stuff again.

The tech is still a long way off. The new Meta glasses are a start but they are too chunky. When they look like the smart ones Meta did with RayBan or someone similar, it will be big news.

Be still. ChatGPT6 will, as we mentioned a few months back, be able to generate a reality for you at 8k. All that is needed in the glasses is a wifi chip, camera, speakers and touch panel. The AI can stream the 3D world in real-time for you.

[MonkeyJuice]

Re: Incredibly poor decision

Given you need a minimum of 90fps and stupidly low latency to avoid being in a vomit comet sim, 8k laggy interactive streamed data coming from a remote server would be... challenging.

Neural radiance fields are a cool trick for static geometry and lighting, but they are not going to displace polygonal geometry any time soon.

God knows how an LLM would generate one though.

[Pascal Monett]

Great idea, Redmond

Remove a tool included since forever for free and impose a paying replacement.

I'm not saying WordPad was the bee's knees, but having the gall to remove it and officially state that now you have to pay for Word to get the functionality is something that only the marketing department could possibly think is a good idea.

But I'm sure that the strain of supporting that decades-old code you haven't touched in years is reason enough, right ?

[Irongut]

Re: Great idea, Redmond

You could try Libre Office, I hear that is free and capable of working on the same documents. ;)

[navarac]

Re: Great idea, Redmond

Yep, I moved to Libre Office on Windows to get away from an extortionate Perpetual Licence fee, and then the scourge of the subscription. Once I moved fully to Linux in 2020, the transition was not a problem regarding an "Office" type program. Not that it was much of a problem overall.

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Re: Great idea, Redmond

I remember when WordPad was basically demo code for the Microsoft MFC libraries.

That said, it was never a patch on "Write". "Write will eat anything." Happy days. Apparently they lost the source code for it and that's why it never made it into Windows 95. Which suggests to me they were using SourceSafe...

[gv]

Vertical Taskbar?

See title.

[navarac]

Throwing in the towel

Microsoft is throwing in the towel on a lot of stuff. Perhaps they have realised that they can make more cash with all the embedded Ads?

[MJI]

I like wordpad

for very quick simple documents

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: I like wordpad

Loads quicker too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which editor are we supposed to use now for editing alternate ntfs streams now?

[ComicalEngineer]

I just wonder how long before M$ moves to a full subscription model for Windows?

When you buy a WinXX machine it will work for a period and then demand a subscription to continue working....

[M.V. Lipvig]

I'm really surprised it hasn't already. Perhaps that is what Win12 will be.

[mcswell]

Notepad

For me, Notepad is so slow that it's unusable. I have a key remapper that does things like emit seven cursor down-arrows from a single keypress. Notepad takes several seconds to process those seven virtual keystrokes, and sometimes misses some of them.

Anyone else think Notepad is slow?

[Necrohamster]

Re: Notepad

> Anyone else think Notepad is slow?

No. It's a text editor, not a word processor.

[TReko]

Re: Notepad

The source code for Notepad used to be just a big Windows text entry common component.