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.
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?
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.
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.
Windows was fiercely hated for a long time for being extremely buggy, low quality, high price, weak security (a later concern), and Microsoft’s general anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices.
Things improved slightly for a while and maybe the generation of Mac/linux using tech workers never suffered through the worst of it, but Microsoft seems to be back on track with their old ways.
For over three decades Microsoft offered a free planned obsolescence to PC manufacturers. Windows got heavy and slow after a couple of years and needed a hardware upgrade which generated billions of revenue and all were happy. This continues till today and is the reason that MS increases the Windows bloat and HW vendors keep installing them.
If they installed Linux, we would still have our 12 yo PC until now. The year of Linux desktop will never come due to this reason.
Personal Computing was never in a better position.
Linux is a joy to use. Self hosting is easy as hell, with an abundance of tools and applications available. You can buy old refurbished machines that are still pretty amazing home servers for cheap.
Hell, even AI help with that. It's pretty good at making scripts and detailing step-by-step what you need to to get things running.
I strongly prefer my Linux machine but use Windows mostly so that I can run Quicken. I feel doubly trapped: can't get off Quicken and thus can't get off Windows.
I'm only very slightly less reluctant to get an Apple machine (though the M* chips tempt me) and there will probably be incompatibilities between the versions of Quicken.
I think I should probably rip off the band-aid and migrate to:
+ spreadsheets (more control/future proof)
+ gnucash or similar (and risk that going unmaintained)
+ Wine
+ something I've not considered
Big tech apologists: “while I used to enjoy playing Starcraft on Windows XP, it’s become clear that computing is no longer ‘personal’ and society needs some guardrails around it. I’m okay with sacrificing some liberties to protect the children.”
The way I see it, there is very little creativity in big business. Fund an interesting new concept, or fund a formulaic sequel? Same thing every time.
So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.
I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.
Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?
The last line was really good. I may have differing opinions on some specifics but I loved this line:
"The personal computer movement was about empowerment not dependency"
I still don't understand all of the hate. In my eyes Windows has never been more capable and stable.
- Windows Terminal is actually pretty dang good
- There's actually a package manager built in now with WinGet
- Hyper-V comes with pro and is incredibly powerful
- While WSL2 isn't great at times, it does fill in a lot of gaps and working with Docker is pretty seamless
- Ever since Windows Defender became standard, cleaning up relative's machines has basically turned into disabling some startup apps and removing spyware-like browser extensions
- With 11 the UI actually feels reasonably consistent for the first time in a long while. There's still some core applications that need a rewrite (Disk Management, Format, RegEdit, Device Manager, Event Viewer), but it feels like real progression when compared to 8/8.1 or 10
- Backwards compatibility is quite simply unmatched
There's some areas that have regressed or have been omitted for _some reason_:
- If you're going to push Microsoft 365 family subscriptions, I never want to have to download TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc. Give me some capable remote assistance tool. It's obvious this is ignored so they don't piss off partners.
- NTP synchronization shouldn't be behind the location access permission. I understand why it is, but then make location access more granular.
- Disk performance could be much better
- NTFS is so antiquated. It's time for another filesystem. I want native overlay support, checksumming, not-ass permissions (though tbf nobody gets this right)
- Windows + D is just a key shift to the right from ctrl C so I hit it all the time. It would be less infuriating if hitting it again actually put all of the windows in their previous state / stacking order.
- I usually sign in with my Microsoft account when I setup my PC, but ffs let me create a local user. If you want to put signing into my Microsoft account in my face, do it at first login not at first setup.
Serious (related) question: is the the state of window 'snapping' equivalent to or better than Windows 11 in any *NIX, non-tiling WM desktop environments?
I had to restore my son's desktop PC last night from a USB stick. It didn't even have drivers for graphics over 800x600 or the wifi card. I was flabbergasted. It's windows 11, 2026, a 6-month old PC. I genuinely don't know how someone could sell something this awful with a straight face.
Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.
This all pre-dates AI. It's response to market forces and revenue growth.
With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.
There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.
So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.
Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.
In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.
Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.
For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.
AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.
So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.
The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.
This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.
130 comments
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.
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.
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.
> that monopolies act like monopolies
duckduckgo is also serving crap from some time, so no, it is not about monopolies.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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?
With these new age laws, these systems can legally ask for personal information, and I am sure as time goes, information required will expand.
As for Linux, seems systemd is all in on this, as for the BSDs, I doubt they will enforce these new laws.
Why would they want to do that (serious question, think about it)
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.
Things improved slightly for a while and maybe the generation of Mac/linux using tech workers never suffered through the worst of it, but Microsoft seems to be back on track with their old ways.
If they installed Linux, we would still have our 12 yo PC until now. The year of Linux desktop will never come due to this reason.
Linux is a joy to use. Self hosting is easy as hell, with an abundance of tools and applications available. You can buy old refurbished machines that are still pretty amazing home servers for cheap.
Hell, even AI help with that. It's pretty good at making scripts and detailing step-by-step what you need to to get things running.
I'm only very slightly less reluctant to get an Apple machine (though the M* chips tempt me) and there will probably be incompatibilities between the versions of Quicken.
I think I should probably rip off the band-aid and migrate to:
+ spreadsheets (more control/future proof) + gnucash or similar (and risk that going unmaintained) + Wine + something I've not considered
Can I play Kingdom Come II on Mint now? If not, are we moving there?
So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.
I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.
Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?
- Windows Terminal is actually pretty dang good
- There's actually a package manager built in now with WinGet
- Hyper-V comes with pro and is incredibly powerful
- While WSL2 isn't great at times, it does fill in a lot of gaps and working with Docker is pretty seamless
- Ever since Windows Defender became standard, cleaning up relative's machines has basically turned into disabling some startup apps and removing spyware-like browser extensions
- With 11 the UI actually feels reasonably consistent for the first time in a long while. There's still some core applications that need a rewrite (Disk Management, Format, RegEdit, Device Manager, Event Viewer), but it feels like real progression when compared to 8/8.1 or 10
- Backwards compatibility is quite simply unmatched
There's some areas that have regressed or have been omitted for _some reason_:
- If you're going to push Microsoft 365 family subscriptions, I never want to have to download TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc. Give me some capable remote assistance tool. It's obvious this is ignored so they don't piss off partners.
- NTP synchronization shouldn't be behind the location access permission. I understand why it is, but then make location access more granular.
- Disk performance could be much better
- NTFS is so antiquated. It's time for another filesystem. I want native overlay support, checksumming, not-ass permissions (though tbf nobody gets this right)
- Windows + D is just a key shift to the right from ctrl C so I hit it all the time. It would be less infuriating if hitting it again actually put all of the windows in their previous state / stacking order.
- I usually sign in with my Microsoft account when I setup my PC, but ffs let me create a local user. If you want to put signing into my Microsoft account in my face, do it at first login not at first setup.
Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.
With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.
There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.
So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.
Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.
In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.
Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.
For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.
AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.
So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.
The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.
This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.