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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.