Fans ?
The Cult of Windows 11
Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'
Microsoft boss Satya Nadella told investors during an earnings call last night that the company needs to "win back" its fans. Nadella was referring to its consumer business as Microsoft has become acutely aware that customers are unhappy with the quality and stability of its flagship operating system. Microsoft published …
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Friday 1st May 2026 01:45 GMT Drew Scriver
Re: Fans ?
Windows has gone downhill, but Office is even worse.
Back in the day Microsoft was able to capture the market because companies like WordPerfect thought they were, well, perfect and didn't need to innovate any further.
Sadly, MS has become today's WordPerfect and they've stopped innovating their Office suite.
Just a few years ago the question used to be "Can G-Suite / Google Apps do that" and the answer would be "nope".
Today it's the other way around.
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Friday 1st May 2026 07:27 GMT LybsterRoy
Re: Fans ?
As an old fogey & WordPerfect fan I would have said the reason Microsoft was able to capture the market was because they spent lots of money telling everyone "point and click" was so much better than having to learn keystrokes.
I do agree that WYSIWYG also helped, however, when I wasn't pissing around putting pretty pictures and graphs in WordPerfect was so much faster.
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Friday 1st May 2026 23:59 GMT Fluffy Cactus
Re: Fans ?
Nadella does not understand what is wrong with Windows 11
RECALL is an insane security problem for any professional and company that has to deal with and keep SENSITIVE PERSONAL DATA safe! How can he not know that?
TELEMETRY: An absurd and unreasonable attack on safety, privacy, human dignity, reason, conscience! Give the people what they want, NOT WHAT THEY DON'T WANT!
ENCRYPTION IN OUTLOOK: It does not work at all for 100's of millions of people! You are advertising a system that does not work? Why? No shame? Repeating a lie? What's wrong with MSFT?
They don't explain that! Not even their COPILOT is allowed to say how it works, or why it doesn't! There is no human working at MSFT allowed to talk about it! This is based on Personal Experience,
not weird conspiracy stuff.
I use Win 10, until it dies. I cannot use Win 11, because I have personal trust issues with Nadella, Smith, the lawyers and marketing liars of MSFT.
I feel about MSFT the way the Canadian Prime Minister Carney feels about Trump!
That's how badly wrong they are!
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Monday 4th May 2026 14:54 GMT Mad_Bob
Re: Fans ?
I’ll add to that list :
* Persistent use of dark patterns to fool users into saving things in the cloud both in Office and more generally in Onedrive via file dialog boxes. Want to turn on autosave? To the cloud with your data!
* Dark patterns to get users to use Edge as the default browser
* Alarmist dialogs about backing up profiles (to the cloud, who would have thought?)
* Recurring prompts after updates to enable above and further trash.
* Constant UI “improvements” that are just plain annoying.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:26 GMT QET
Re: Fans! Fans! Fans!
Some ol' fashioned manure spreaders were basically just directing a stream of liquid shit towards what's essentially a centrifugal fan in order to spread it on the field while being towed by a tractor.
Nowadays though, it's more tactical, in that it's directed out to hose ends that are almost drug along the ground right above the plants roots.
Less nutrients loss and also less stank.
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Friday 1st May 2026 07:28 GMT LybsterRoy
Re: Fans! Fans! Fans!
-- Some ol' fashioned manure spreaders were basically just directing a stream of liquid shit towards what's essentially a centrifugal fan in order to spread it on the field while being towed by a tractor. --
Can we run one of those through HoC and see if it improves things?
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Friday 1st May 2026 16:01 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: Fans! Fans! Fans!
The more old fashioned ones simply took a pile of manure and flailed some chains through it, as seen here and here. I used to use one back in my teens - the spreader and tractor were both older than me, and we didn't have the luxury of a) a powered loader or telehandler (mostly we filled it by pushing the wheelbarrow up a ramp and tipping it straight in), or more importantly b) a rear window on the cab (you very quickly learned to drive into wind, especially when the manure was fairly liquid.)
Along the rotor there are a load of chains, but at each end there are fixed bars (with a hinged outer section) which would work no matter how full it was. So a full load of dry manure would empty from the ends, with the end chains freeing up once the fixed bars had "dispensed" some of the contents.
Very reliable machines compared to some of the alternatives. The main one at the time was a trailer with a chain conveyor which would drag the load to the rear, where a pair of flail carrying shafts would break it up and fling it about. Apparently, the chains would always break when fully loaded, requiring it to be emptied by hand before it could be repaired. The main problem with the rotaspreader was that the chains would wear and eventually break - not good when silage took over from hay as the chains (or especially the big lump of metal on the end) would make a mess of the chopper which was only designed to chop grass into small pieces (picking up a chain could strip a complete set of blades off the drum and take hours to fix as it usually broke some of the bolts as well.)
Though I do prefer Blaster Bate's description of how to empty a cesspit
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Thursday 30th April 2026 18:53 GMT ErikOnTech
Re: consumer business?
Yes, but let's be honest: the only real reason to use Azure is to support a Windows-chained userbase. We're already 100% macOS / Linux on desktops and laptops, and other orgs are looking in that direction. Entry-level Mac Minis are pretty solid and well-priced devices (once you figure in support overhead) for clerical work.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 13:31 GMT Dave K
Well, well, well. Years of treating customers with contempt is finally beginning to catch up with them. Enshittification can only go so far before people start to increasingly leave in droves.
Still, its not too difficult to fix. A single "off" button for Crapilot, stopping the relentless adverts, allowing local accounts during setup, allowing choice of browser without SCOOBE and other tricks setting it back to Edge.
Then a few simple features like moveable taskbar and they should be a fair way there. Will they actually to this, or will it be empty words? We'll see...
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Thursday 30th April 2026 14:51 GMT Like a badger
Years of treating customers with contempt is finally beginning to catch up with them. Enshittification can only go so far before people start to increasingly leave in droves.
I'm unsure about that. I think that we see this as IT professionals, but most people aren't like us. I wonder if Nad's problem is that people are now much more OS agnostic and device agnostic in how they do things or access content? Many find a Chromebook entirely acceptable for modest needs, or phones, or tablets, are comfortable switching between Apple, Android and Windows products? Essentially, the OS has become commoditised, nobody really cares too much about Windows, but not because of enshittification, but because they simply don't care at all?
That'll be a much tougher one to crack, because people then don't want a "better" OS, they just want it to work, and not to bother them. Arguably that's all an OS should do, but we've been through a few decades when Windows made itself the unwanted star of its own show?
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Partly, but when a user's workflow runs through Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, there's a natural bias to platform that on a Windows machine, whether there's a real reason to or not. That's where most start, unless cost has them considering Chromebooks as a cheaper alternative.
Microsoft's brand attachment isn't based on giving users reasons to actively want Windows. After losing much of their lock-in, they're coasting on inertia and assumptions. Which works...at least for a while.
But the enshittification risk goes deeper than those directly alienated.
Even if most users don't care about enshittification, how many Windows PCs aren't sold every time the "tech person" in a family or social circle says "Just buy a Mac", proceeds to complain about Windows, says they don't use it anymore, then assures the low-info user that Mac or Chrome will work?
If the pissed off admin or power user is an ex customer, do they even show up in Nadella's product research toplines? Or does each of them cause tens or hundreds of lost Windows PC sales for reasons which never get heard in the boardroom?
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:55 GMT Dave K
I get your point, but I do think it is beginning to piss off some agnostic people as well.
My sister isn't a tech officionado and has used various Windows machines over the years, plus a company Mac or two.
However, lately I've had a lot more complaints from her about her latest Win11 laptop. She's had a couple of dodgy updates that have half-bricked it and have needed her to go into recovery mode to roll things back and get it working - plus the faf of Bitlocker keys to get that far. She's also complained at me a couple of times about how it keeps pleading with her to subscribe to OneDrive and Office365 even though she prefers iCloud due to her iPhone.
Fact is, even amongst less tech-savvy relatives, I'm seeing increased irritation rather than love for Windows 11 - not something I ever came across in the Win7/XP days as those OS's just worked reliably without nags and annoyance. I didn't hear "I love Windows 7", but I didn't hear complaints either.
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Friday 1st May 2026 13:18 GMT Glen Turner 666
" Take a generic laptop platform that can be manufactured at scale and put their own OS on it"
The biggest selling model of laptop computer in the world is the MacBook Air. It is very much "manufactured at scale". Moreover it is manufactured cheaply, with Apple's experience with making the massive quantities of the iPhone being very evident in the Air M-series. To date Apple have sold the Air laptop at a big markup over costs. The Neo suggests that Apple are going to trade off per-device markup for increased sales.
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Friday 1st May 2026 16:22 GMT I could be a dog really
I'll take your figures on trust.
One fo the things Apple has traditionally been criticised for is the cost. Part fo that is not having the low spec entry level models you can buy in the Wintel world. Generally, when compared with like specced models (especially laptops) from other vendors, the perceived high price turns out not to be so. See my post above (or below, or wherever it appears) about how the Classic flew out of the door - or would have, if we'd been able to get them.
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Friday 1st May 2026 16:19 GMT I could be a dog really
In the very distant past I used to (part) own and run an Apple Dealership. We kept telling our regional sales contact that they lacked an entry level model, and if they introduced one they would sell like the proverbial hotcakes. Eventually they introduced ... tada, the Mac Classic (alongside the LC and SI models.) If you know your Apple history, you'll know that puts us in the early 90s.
Up to that point, we had always ordered back-back (as in, customer asks for a Mac, we order it from Apple, we never bought for stock.) With the Classic, we could see it would sell and ordered for stock - only to find we couldn't get any because ... tada, despite us telling them how they'd sell, the warehouse full they'd shown us pictures of at the launch event ("yes, we have stock of them" they said) had all gone and there was a 3-4 month backlog ! We had lots of orders from customers, but couldn't get them.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Interestingly we had one or two customers buy an LC to use a bit like a laptop. People forget that "portable" computers tended to be big, heavy, underpowered, very expensive (perm any combination of at least 3 of those !) The LC was fairly affordable and could fit in a briefcase (without monitor, keyboard, mouse and all the cables etc.) All it needed was one setup of KVM at home, another on the desk at work, and you had the portability many laptops only ever see use for, but at a fraction of the cost of a portable (which Apple didn't actually have anyway at the time) and with better performance.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 19:03 GMT David 132
With an eye to eventually upgrading my workhorse PC, which is still on Windows 10, I put Server 2025 with the Desktop Experience on a sacrificial Skylake box last week. Honestly, I'm pretty impressed. A slick user interface, none of the Windows 11 crud, and even on that 10-year old PC, it runs beautifully. I may have a viable upgrade path now that doesn't involve Linux and Wine.
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Saturday 2nd May 2026 00:27 GMT Fluffy Cactus
Take just a simple MS Windows task like making a screen shot, then opening it in PAINT, cropping it to size, make a few comments on it, and use it as an image somewhere.
On Win 10, I can click SHIFT + PRTSCRN, open PAINT, select what I want, crop it, make a comment or an arrow pointing to something, save it, and be done.
On Win 11, that new laptop I only accidentally worked on, there is no longer a SHIFT+PRTSCRN option VISIBLY AVAILABLE, and when you copy something from a Notepad text, and
open PAINT to see whether it allows you to PASTE something into PAINT, and you find that the very basic button to accomplish that has been removed.
Result: Only an absurdly ignorant, lame, idiotic, sadistic software company would make such a change WITHOUT EXPLAINING IT! Well MSFT is exactly that company!
It is not that I am stupid and cannot learn something new, IT IS THAT THEY REFUSE TO EXPLAIN WHAT TAF they did THERE!
So, people like that should NEVER be involved in making software!
I am a person who will patiently explain all the steps necessary to accomplish a task, and since I am normal (relatively) I find such ruthless, evil, sadistic software creeps UNACCEPTABLE!
IT IS THEIR JOB TO EXPLAIN HOW SOMETHING WORKS!
Remember Windows 8 ? That was the MOST UNEXPLAINED PIECE OF SHAFTWARE EVER! Remember, if you will, that around 2015 or so,YOUTUBE already was known as a method
to explain things to the masses. MICROSOFT did not have a single piece of info on Windows 8 , when these horrible Win 8 laptops were in the store! How could they not know that? See?
So, both Nadella and Brad Smith do not understand that if you want to make software useful for the masses, then you friggin EXPLAIN IT TO THE MASSES.
And still, they do the very opposite, getting rid of humans, and pushing inhumane AI that shows its lack of conscience every day. That cannot possibly work!
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Thursday 30th April 2026 15:12 GMT Ossi
How about features that people actually want, have asked for for decades, and are still in the stone age. From the top of my head - a search system that actually works, tags and descriptions for folders, bringing back an easy way to create short cuts, a Quick Access menu in Windows Explorer that you don't have to scroll up to *every* *single* *time* because someone decided that the default should be to scroll to the bottom of the panel and put Quick Access at the top (a stupidity that's lasted decades). There are thousands more, and if Microsoft actually responded to their feedback system they'd know what they are. Instead, we get the 'deprecation' of actually useful features and the World's worst AI shoved down our throats. Anyone remember Cortana?
Any "fans" of Microsoft should seriously consider seeking help.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 20:59 GMT M.V. Lipvig
Just think of how low the install rate would be if new PC firmware wasn't locked down so that you couldn't install anything until you completed a Win11 install as I had to do last year. None of the online tricks to bypass would work either. Once it was set up it wss possible to access firmware to change to a USB boot, and install Linux but the PC was perfectly willing to do nothing until the end of time to get one more Win11 user tagged and bagged.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:43 GMT Doctor Syntax
"Still, its not too difficult to fix. A single "off" button for Crapilot, stopping the relentless adverts, allowing local accounts during setup, allowing choice of browser without SCOOBE and other tricks setting it back to Edge."
All the things you're against are what marketing insisted on.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 21:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
That's it: trust.
Even if they did offer a one-click off setting, and off really did mean off, how much time would it take to verify that? Would you trust an update to not turn it back on, whether by purpose or mistake?
Spent decades using heavily tinkered builds of Windows. I have zero confidence I could successfully police what my own computer does all the time. I have zero desire for a company to put me in that position.
Nobody at Microsoft seems to care about the trust factor. Their brand to me is essentially the same as spyware/adware/Trojan. Pretty difficult for a brand to win a customer back after it becomes that tainted.
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Friday 1st May 2026 16:30 GMT I could be a dog really
Some of us remember preivous upgrade fiascos. The way the system would ask "do you want to upgrade to ... ?" You'd tell it "No".
So they pushed another update (finding that people had blacklisted the first one) that asked again, and again, and again, ... Eventually, they pushed on that did it anyway, even if you'd said you didn't want it. Now I'm pretty certain that broke the law - as in, it ran something on your computer, and changed how your computer worked, that you has explicitly said you did not want.
It says a lot when people (have to) write bits of software to block your crapware from f'ing up what the user considers a usable system. All because you have decided that when the user said "No thank you", what they really meant was "yes please, go ahead and f'up my perfectly working system". When you've earned that level of mistrust, don't expect people to ever trust you even a little bit ever again.
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Friday 1st May 2026 09:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe satya should have thought of that before binning off all their QA teams
Many people do use Windows on their own devices too - for several reason - since the only real desktop alternative is Apple, with higher costs. Linux desktop does its best too to make people look for something else unlesse they have specific reasons to use it.
Still Nadella blinded by Azure easy money failed to understand the reason many use Azure is because they are Windows shops. Make people leave Windows, with bad desktop versions and increasingly expensive on-prem servers, and Azure may be impacted as well.
Sure, developing Windows, Office and other GUI applications requires skilled people - with very specific skills, and sure, they can be "expensive" - more expensive that deployng on Azure software written and maintained by someone else. But lose Windows customers, and you'll end to lose Azure ones as well.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 13:48 GMT Andy E
Hate it
Having had a Windows PC since Windows 95, I have seen windows evolve. Some of it was good with the highpoint being Windows 7. The enshitifcation since then has impacted the user experience to such an extent that I just don't like using Windows. First it was adverts for software being served up by Windows or Office applications and then that was then dialed up several notches by the endless prompts to use Co-Pilot.
I binned my Windows 11 PC and bought a Mac for home use.
The only Windows PC I have to use is the work provided laptop. I hate it.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 15:13 GMT KarMann
Re: Hate it
And evolve != improve. Evolution doesn't select for what might be best from our point of view. Just for what's most effective. It can certainly lead to organisms becoming what we would consider worse, in various ways.
ETA: Also, originally, 'evolve' pretty much did mean 'change'. It's only the past few centuries that it's come to be associated particularly with this whole gradual-change-by-random-variation-and-natural-selection thing. But it still has a broader sense in which it can be used.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 20:45 GMT EdSaxby
Re: Hate it
I was in the same boat. Fortunately, I have just retired and delightedly handed the Windows 11 PC back to my old firm and now live on my own Mac and Linux desktops.
For the year I was working on a Windows 11 machine I never knew from day-to-day whether I would run into a tech issue or not. worse, there often became multi-day issues where I was just staring into space or trying to figure out how it could do my job with pen and paper. I have never in my whole career had so much lost productivity due to basic tech issues.
My previous Windows 7 experience was generally flawless and uneventful.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 17:34 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
On some level I almost feel sorry for Microsoft
They need to produce an OS that works in a corporate environment with 10,000 desktops in a regulated industry where every key stroke of every machine needs to be centrally managed.
But they also need to work on a kids laptop to just play CandyCrush and a pensioner who just writes the parish newsletter.
And support those in-house DOS apps somebody wrote in 1988
It's as if Linux had to run on everything from a 100,000 CPU supercomputer cluster to a smartwatch
And they need to introduce enough new features every 2 years to persuade people to update and buy a new copy to pay for all the engineers adding new features
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Thursday 30th April 2026 14:40 GMT JWLong
Dear MicroSlop,
I just ended 4-1/2 years of selling off 19K shares of MicroSlop stock that I started buying in 86' for $0.08/share.
You want me back? I suggest you go fuck yourself first! I wouldn't go back if you offered free drugs to do so, and I don't do drugs anyway!
Now, feed this response into your toy CoPlop and see for yourself what the god damn problem is.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 14:40 GMT Jou (Mxyzptlk)
No reason to believe him.
OTOH after Vista came Windows 7.
After Windows 8(.1) came Windows 10. (Though Windows 8 ONLY the UI was messed up, but the improvements below were only visible to those who look beyond the GUI)
But Windows 12... Seriously, there are kernel level and near kernel level bugs introduced since 2021 woah this is bad. At least Ballmer was "I love this company yeah!" - But Satya? Really?
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Thursday 30th April 2026 15:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: No reason to believe him.
Microsoft execs don't seem to understand just how many admins and users are reading product announcements with a sense of dread, wondering what new problems they'll have to deal with for little-to-no gain in wanted features. When customers develop that attitude, of course they'll be thinking about the exits.
Reminds me a lot of the botched rollout and stalled uptake of IPv6. The sales pitch needs to be stronger than "Eventually you'll have to!"
Customers aren't just delaying upgrades over cost. The pessimism has set in and hardened. That's a very tough perception to reverse.
If they could honestly survey Windows admins, what percentage would cite "Security EOL" as the main motivation for their most recent upgrade?
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:27 GMT Press any key
Re: No reason to believe him.
I had a laptop with Windows 8.1 and I agree about it being only the UI that was the problem.
I set mine to boot / login to desktop and installed a decent start menu. After that it really wasn't very different to windows 7, although a bit less good looking.
It was though, quite jarring if I accidentally opened the windows start menu.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 15:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
I've communicated with M$ business supoort many times. You'd hope they would be more clued up than consumer support, but they aren't. Had one annoying case a few months back where Universal print wouldn't communicate with particular printers. I eventually worked it out myself - a particular protocol needed to be enabled. I went back to M$ and told them that this was the solution. The response was 'yes, that does need to be enabled'. So why the fuck didn't they tell me to check that, rather than let me waste hours working it out?!
I think the longest case I've had ran for about 13 months (a Teams issue whcih they alternately denied existed, or said would be fixed soon). I gave up eventually and changed our processes to work around the issue!
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:29 GMT James O'Shea
it took two tries but I got connected to someone who had a clue. He remoted in and did some stuff in the terminal/command prompt and in regedit, rebooted the machine three or four times, and killed the MS account replacing it with a local admin account and killed copilot and recall while he was in there. I could probably have done all that, except that I really don't like playing with regedit (my friend thinks that 'regedit' is a job at the Register, so there's no way that he would have been able to do this). It works now. My friend really wants to know why on earth it was such a problem to get local account and not to have copilot or recall or any of that stuff. And why did it require command-line and registry editing, instead of a simple 'click on uninstall'. If it wasn't for the fact that a lot of the apps he uses on a regular basis aren't available under Linux he'd have had me just put Ubuntu on the machine. As it is, he'll be getting a Mac when he replaces this unit.
If you get someone at MS who knows what he's doing, you will get stuff done, and you will get stuff done quickly. If you get someone clueless, nothing will be done and it will take a long time to do the nothing. There are far more 'agents' at MS Support who are clueless than who know what they're doing.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 18:51 GMT Ken Hagan
Not surprised that it was fairly easy, since if you do it at installation time it is easy. Genuinely surprised that an MS support person helped you do it.
And I think that's part of Nadella's problem. People who are familiar with MS no longer expect them to be helpful. Personally I think the rot started with Ballmer so that's a *lot* of bad moves that MS need to undo if they want to be that cool vendor that folks use by choice.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 21:59 GMT QET
Re: Personally I think the rot started with Ballmer
Well Win8 happened on his watch, so yeah.
Though that seemed like it originally came to be because upper echelon at MS felt their desktop & laptop OS was threatened by Android & Apple tablets, which IMO was the dumbest assumption they could've made.
Instead of sticking to what they knew well and spicing it up with what the users actually wanted...
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Friday 1st May 2026 15:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Personally I think the rot started with Ballmer
"Though that seemed like it originally came to be because upper echelon at MS felt their desktop & laptop OS was threatened by Android & Apple tablets, which IMO was the dumbest assumption they could've made."
They wanted to get into the phone / tablet market and seem to have looked at Apple, which has basically variants of the same OS (more restricted on the phones / tablets) on all form factors. But M$ made a complete mess of it and didn't follow Apple's lead in customising it properly for the form factor. So Windows phone was actually OK (but they later killed it off!). Windows 8 sort of worked on a tablet, but it really didn't work on a laptop, and really, really didn't work on a desktop! The way they tried to make the desktop an adjunct to the home screen with the big square tiles, and the way particular programs could have versions both in the new interface and on the desktop (e.g. Internet Explorer) was beyond confusing. It's no surprise it flopped - the bigger question is how it even got signed off in the first place as it should have been obvious to everyone that the UI was a mess.
And if the UI made no sense on a client computer, it made even less sense when shoehorned into Windows Server!
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Thursday 30th April 2026 15:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
I don't think they are going to get any 'fans', but they could make people hate them a lot less by simply making it easy to turn off all the AI crap in their products - i.e. a simple single toggle in Windows which will completely disable Coprolite in Windows itself and in Office, etc. Also a similar one in cloudy M$ accounts to turn it off there too.
Yes, I know it's never going to happen!
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:01 GMT steelpillow
"AI is the way ahead, so we just have to throw more AI at the problem."
"But it's the AI that users are complaining about most."
"So hide its presence from them, tell them it's gone from their experience, and give it more privileges than ever."
"Now that, I do like! Have you booked our places on SpaceShipThree yet?"
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:18 GMT David 132
Unfortunate wording, or not...
FTFA, emphasis mine: There are more than 1.6 billion monthly active Windows devices, but some of the users are revolting.
Bit harsh, that. We can't all shower daily and trim our fingernails, you know, what with having to spend so much time dealing with endless forced updates & their aftermath...
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Saturday 2nd May 2026 02:15 GMT coredump
A cynical person might suspect Nadalla somehow has convinced himself that it's his own trust being eroded, in customers.
E.g. he no longer trusts Microsoft customers to purchase and own a copy of Windows, thus they have to pay to rent cloud instances of it, or some similar scheme.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know if that's how Microsoft works these days, I'm just parroting stuff I've read, and possibly inaccurately. More importantly, if I never actually have to care if MS works that way, so much the better.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 16:58 GMT Throatwarbler Mangrove
Not consumers . . .
My guess is that Microsoft doesn't really care about the consumer experience at all. Rather, I suspect that some Fortune 100 C-level execs have had words with SatNad about Windows-related outages and either have started to talk about refunds or have started making flightless Antarctic waterfowl noises.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 17:51 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
So everything Microsoft do that makes them money, all the behind the scenes cloudy goodness, is Linux
Why do they persist in having 100,000 SDE in Redmond cranking out desktop Windows versions?
The only market the shareholders care about is monthly per-seat $$ from corporate clients. The half-dozen home users buying a $99 shrink wrapped copy of W11 in Bestbuy are irrelevant.
Corporate users don't care what OS they are using, so long as the shortcuts in Excel are the same after each update.
So port Office to Linux for the handful of Wall St power users that insist on local Excel. The Windows security central management tools work on Android so are probably already available on Linux. Offer an improved version of Wine for all the CAD tools etc that are local and Windows only - should be easy if you have Windows source code.
Then just make $$$ per user per month from all those online accounts for ever without having to think of a justification for Windows12
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Friday 1st May 2026 15:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
"So everything Microsoft do that makes them money, all the behind the scenes cloudy goodness, is Linux"
It isn't. I understand that the virtual switch stack in Azure is built on Linux, but the core Azure hypervisor is derived from Hyper-V (no not Linux related).
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Thursday 30th April 2026 18:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
If they want to get me back they'll need to remove coprolite, telemetry, ads, edge, TPU requirements and stop all spying. It would be a great move to release it under a free software licence, Selling free software is OK free software is about freedom not price. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
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Thursday 30th April 2026 18:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's barfware
Crappy UIs that keep changing.
Brutal resource hog.
Ramming features down the user's throat.
Terabytes of patches needed and it's still leaky as hell (if you don't believ me, simply wait until next Patch Tuesday or check how often Office 365 and Edge update as they don't even follow have a schedule).
Way too much time (read: manhours) lost with waiting for updates and patches to be installed.
Idiotic licensing models
So if you're asking me what's not to like about Microsoft products, my counter question would be simply: "what is?".
Placing some bullsh*t mea culpa in the press won't change that. Don't update your marketing, update the way you work and then the products. Nothing else will do.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 19:31 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Its simple really
You want people to come back to windows(especially since you're seeing linux creeping up to the critical point)
1. Stop the updates/ new features.
2. Give crap pilot/recall/telemetry/one drive the option to be off by default.
3. Patches have to work. you apply them, reboot(quite why a reboot is needed all the time gawd knows) and your PC wont brick itself/blue screen/need the patches removed ASAP
4. New features have to work, You install crap pilot, it has to work reliably, and not be subject to 47 updates in the first week, every one of which forces a reboot.
Sadly, a lot of the above would mean hiring skilled developers, along with a quality control department ... the very things senior m$ manglement has sought to cut to bring costs down.
But all m$ manglement see is the $$$$ rolling in from corporate customers, and until they start leaving m$, nothing will be done.
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Thursday 30th April 2026 20:52 GMT xyz123
Microsoft has fired 100% of its QA staff.
It now forcibly pushes out AI-generated patches, and the AI QA's its own homework.
It's why anyone who recently changed keyboards was permanently locked out of windows.
Basically the AI "patch" removed all keyboard drivers, rebooted the PC and schedulled NEW keyboard drivers for after a user logs back in.
Which they can't. because no keyboard (even in safe mode) so they can't enter a password OR pin.
Microsofts "solution" ? - just clean reinstall windows.
Even SadArse Nutella literally said "we are not an operating system company anymore - we are an AI Company"
Basically they're abandoning Windows as fast as they legally can, to concentrate on AI data centres.
So Windows 11 may genuinely be the FINAL version of windows
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Friday 1st May 2026 02:21 GMT Reginald O.
MS doesn't need personal comptuer users anymore...
MS has billions of dollars worth of contracts with corporations and governments. They don’t need personal computer users anymore. And it shows.
The company cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and the software is unreliable. Their commitment to mass tracking of users is ghastly to say the least.
So, a promise to win fans sounds like standard corporate double-speak, to me.
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Friday 1st May 2026 03:13 GMT billdehaan
Trying to win 'fans', not end users
In the 1980s and 1990s, Windows accounted for roughly 85% of Microsoft's revenue. Once Office took off, it became huge, and shared the stage with Windows, while helping drive its' growth even higher.
Today, Windows accounts for only about 15% of revenue. Microsoft is pushing everything to the cloud/Azure services, including Office. Windows is no longer seen as a core product, but simply as an on ramp to the services they want to sell.
Nadella's not worried about home users. While he'd obvious prefer they run Windows, if they use Linux to access their Outlook accounts and Office 365, that's fine. He'd much rather have a Linux user paying a monthly subscription for Azure services than a Windows user who just runs local apps. Microsoft make $25 off of the one time Windows licence, but recoups more than that per year for Azure users, regardless of what OS they run on their desktop.
While he can ignore home users, institutions and governments are another story. Linux migrations aren't just happening to disaffected gamers discovering CachyOS and Bazzite. Governments like France are investigating disassociating themselves from Windows and Microsoft services, too. Those are the customers Natella has to woo.
Microsoft's stone-faced dismissal of any and all criticism over the past several years, in the midst of a tsunami of incompetence and customers screaming at them has resulted in enough big players finally getting fed up enough to leave has finally got their attention. I suspect it will probably be too little, too late.
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Friday 1st May 2026 08:14 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Trying to win 'fans', not end users
"Nadella's not worried about home users. While he'd obvious prefer they run Windows, if they use Linux to access their Outlook accounts and Office 365, that's fine."
His problem with that would be that Linux users can't be roped into all that at first boot.
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Friday 1st May 2026 14:28 GMT billdehaan
Re: Trying to win 'fans', not end users
A huge percentage of the new Linux user community is switching to it explicitly to get away from Microsoft's policies.
I know a number of people who've been using Linux for years that use Office365, Outlook, and OneDrive; a couple pay for the 1TB of OneDrive space. They chose Linux organically, for technical reasons, not ideological ones. People like that can potentially be convinced to use Microsoft Azure services. Users that leave Windows because of Microsoft's strongarm tactics are essentially unreachable, as far as Microsoft is concerned. Even if they did clean up their act, reverse course, and address the privacy issues, those users are disinclined to believe them, and since they're not using Windows, they won't actually see any improvements, even if they do get implemented.
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Friday 1st May 2026 08:16 GMT Intuitech
Enforced Approach
As life-limg Windows user, at home and at work, I've always perceived Microsoft as arrogranr. This dates back to the Netscape/Internet Explorer saga, but more recently they have not listened to legitimate feedback from MSPs, PC builders, users. Their approach to enforce unwanted changes such as using a Microsoft account for the Windows setop, the Windows 11 upgrade requiring new hardware effectively pushed customers away.
There are good alternatives of there now, and competitors have recognised that listening to feedback (even from Microsoft customer base) works.
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Friday 1st May 2026 09:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
And one of the solutions found is to encourage skilled people to leave?
And maybe replacing them with off-shore ones with less skills and far less understanding of customers' needs? Sure, they could be cheaper, but are money the issue?
Looking at the published numbers - if true - Microsoft doesn't really need cut-costing measures, it needs more skilled people who do understand cusomers' needs and don't believe shoving more AI down their throats is the solution to live, univers e and everything.
Nadella did put the consumer division in a corner - and many decisions, like turning Outlook a web app running in Electron, with all emails stored in MS servers - are very difficult to understand from a customer-oriented perspective, the only reason is Nadella couldn't care less about customers and just need everything on MS server to feed his AI beast and lock-in customers (it it works).
Better late then never - but I'm not sure Nadella and his top level manager can understad what users really want - they are too much detached from reality, and sometimes I wonder if they do use Windows daily, or have assitants doing it all.
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Friday 1st May 2026 23:58 GMT John_3_16
No thank you M$...
Have had enough after Windows 7. Win 10 has had some success but the handwriting was on the wall. $$, spying & complete control of us & our systems are your only true goals now.
I forgot what a pleasure Computer Science could be after decades of fighting M$ with every year worse than the last one. FREEDOM. All of my computing needs are now satisfied with Zorin OS. It actually feels good to use my laptop again. It works for me. No telemetry. No spying. No difficult registration problems. No finger prints, facial recog, blood sacrifices required.
No thank you M$.
