
Suggested action:
Deprecate (or defecate) Recall and CoPilot.
The Microsoft axman just claimed another victim. Less than three years after it appeared in the Windows Insider Dev Channel, the Suggested Actions feature is being deprecated. Microsoft quietly confirmed, via its Deprecated Features list, that Suggested Actions would not be pursued in Windows. Its addition was spotted by a …
Microsoft keeps broadcasting to everyone that the folks creating these "new features" don't use them themselves. One sees this most clearly everytime something in the OS (or Office) that used to take one mouse click (or one right-click) gets changed to requiring 2 or 3 clicks.
Who comes up with this sh*t?
Seriously...an OS, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program...these are all quite basic office tools and not too hard to implement. Sure, the first few releases are going to need some improvements, but after, say 5 or 10 years, barring any quantum leaps in processor features (for the OS), they should be fairly stable. Microsoft, however, seems to delight in adding what I would call "fluff features"...e.g.: The Ribbon, Clippy, rearranging the screen layout, introducing new and incompatible scripting languages and file formats.
I suppose, when you can't do anything more to improve the basic product, the only way to sell more of it, is to intentionally crapify it, then announce a "new, improved" version.
Honestly, if Windows wasn't so deeply embedded in business, we'd all be looking for alternatives.
Variant 1: Allow us to completely turn it off, giving us two more rows of icons space.
Variant 2: Restrict is to local history only, never ever anything fro theee webs.
Variant 2.1: Make it one row, save the space for word "Recommended", giving us one more row of icons. There is too much white-space anyway, see control panel.
Every single time Microsoft tries to do something 'helpful' it's worse than useless, so predictably nobody uses it and eventually it dies. The only exception I can think of is the Windows Update Diagnostic Wizard (or whatever they called it) that would find out why Update wasn't working and fix it. It actually usually worked! And then they killed it because not enough people used it because they didn't know it existed.
This didn't start with Clippy, either, it started with Microsoft Bob (and possibly earlier). Nor did this end with Clippy, they learned nothing. Suggested Actions was just one of the latest abominations before Copilot and Recall came along.
It was also quite obvious that the people at MS who are foisting this shite on us are not using it themselves because, again, worse than useless. In particular, every single one of these bad ideas should have a 'never show me this twaddle again, you twat.' It's interesting to compare to iOS/macOS where the new stuff can be annoying but it's also obviously used by the people making it and there's (almost?) always a way to turn it off.
MS Peon: Sir, Suggested Actions has gone completely insane
CEO: oh god, whats it done, suggested that people should get naked and get BUSY with each others nethers?
MS Peon: No sir, it said we should actually LISTEN to our customers and stop dicking around with the interface, taskbar layout and control panel.
CEO: KILL IT. FUCKING KILL IT NOW WITH FIRE! KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT!
Too many features are blatantly released to utilise a Microsoft account, Bing or MSN. Old features are often retired to make way for newer, more cloudy versions that only do useful stuff with an account.
I remember a time when, by default, the search results would be stuff on your computer, the start menu found your apps, and the apps saved stuff on your computer. Web content happened in a browser.
The early warning sign for me was Windows Live Mail, where it would sign you in to a MS Account to send a photo email.
OK, there are certainly some advantages to cloud sync and cloud services - but somehow Microsoft make it feel creepy and pushy.
The features all require surveillance because the analysis is on MS systems. These types of useless features are simply to make it legally obvious to users that the minutae of their computer interactions are being monitored by MS to build a detailed profile of each user.
Pre-crime will be interesting when the real-time analyses from, say, MS, FB, your ISP, gmail, youtube, search engines all point to a person likely to kill their spouse...
Typical Borkzilla.
Copying a piece of text is a select text-CTRL-C affair. You want to replace that with a bloody "assistant" that is going to take me through three popups and five mouse clicks to end up not getting me where I want to go ?
Fuck off and die.
"fixing what wasn't particularly broken"
Windows and accomplices just generally borken then?
While I still had infrequent occasions to use a Windows box to test services I invariably installed Classic Shell for my own sanity. At other times when I was confronted with a stock standard Win 10 box I was always appalled anew by the UI.
Being a minimalist by nature and wanting as few distractions as possible my window managers have been 9wm (hpux10.2), oroborus (hpux,linux) and now openbox with cwm being a contender - the contrast is stark - windows is just one enormous monolithic distraction.
Yes, this!
Can't count the number of time I've inadvertantly saved a file to OneDrive when I intended to save it locally. This "deck shuffling" seems to have started after COVID...certainly wasn't there when I was on Win7, and not at the release of Win10, IIRC. It's pretty clearly an attempt to drive up use of OneDrive and get you used to using it instead of local storage...perhaps part of a slow but determined push to get everyone onto Office365?
Retired, and happily using my Linux system at home, so thankfully this crap isn't an issue for me.
Which could happen in the insider versions of Server 2025. As domain admin. With file server shares mounted (of course not production, throwaway test environment). I think they fixed that in the release versions since the feedback on the forums on that were still in a civilized tone, but exactly what you imagine.