It’s hard to believe how despite all the telemetry, Microsoft still manages to be so out of touch with their users’ actual needs. It’s almost like there’s a hidden agenda somewhere.
The fundamental problem is that there is no singular, unified Microsoft; there is instead a loose confederation of warring tribes that happen to share a headquarters and a ticker symbol. And Windows is the battlefield on which these tribes hash out their disputes.
Tribe A thinks Windows should appeal to people who use and love open source software. Tribe B thinks Windows’ ubiquity makes it a great platform to run ads on. So instead of what most companies would do, which would be to figure out how these goals line up against a broader strategic vision of what Windows should be, at Microsoft they just let both tribes do their thing simultaneously until the leader of one tribe rises up high enough in the org chart to raze the other tribe’s villages and scatter its people to the four winds via a reorg.
This of course results in a deeply schizophrenic product, but that only matters to customers, and Microsoft gave up customers as a false god long ago. Now the only god that matters in Redmond is the God of Battle, and every PM sees his peers as obstacles that need to be cleared away for him to meet his destiny in Valhalla.
For a moment there I thought this post was written by Bryan Cantrill.
About the camps and their goals, the open source one is to some extent present, obviously, but the ad one I don't really see because I run Pro. There is a third camp that unquestionably won, though:
The "UX/UI designer" camp. I assume all the garbage running in the background behind obscure registry toggles (because real configurability is bad for UX) that's meant to make it easier for grandmas and end up making it worse for everyone else, like your computer isn't really fully yours (neither the resources of it or the freedom to decide to not run these daemons) comes from misguided UX designers who think they know better than you how a computer should be used and that they can earmark a fifth of your CPU at any time to do whatever they want.
The UI designers also won. Everything is a soulless black or white with one contrasting color. They managed to make this "There are two places you can modify settings with two disparate styles" because somehow that's better than one older looking but consistent place.
Even they lost. You cannot customize the colors in light mode even. Only dark mode allows it, and there of course the color is darkened.
The whole thing feels like a beta version. In fact, even Whistler betas were more polished than this.
OS cannot afford to break things, which apparently is MS modus operandi now.
It takes about 5 minutes of playing in settings to hit broken functionality. Bonus points if the breakage is forced by unchangeable domain policy in company.
I'm reading a book about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, and it's making me realize how many problems are born out of how complicated large human organizations are.
I mean, it's obvious when I write it like that, but I think we have this platonic ideal of a company (or a government, or the military) somehow being this omniscient creature when instead it is filled with flawed humans who are seeing the world through various soda straws pointed in different directions.
Speaking of telemetry: I'm surprised Windows 10 is even allowed to be used in government or big corporations outside the US. If people were as paranoid as the US administration is about Huawei, Windows 10 would be on a black list of never to be installed software. Yet here we are.
As time goes on I feel more and more like this is the case. Not just in Windows, but in any application, power users are a minority.
There's also the issue with power users generally turning off as much telemetry as possible. To Microsoft we're much less visible than the average person who leaves everything on the default setting.
>It’s almost like there’s a hidden agenda somewhere.
It's not so much as a hidden agenda as sacrificing their primary product to be advertising for a different product and concept that consumers soundly rejected, and Microsoft's been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Ads and telemetry were just things that their new features supported, but weren't the driving force behind those features.
Wind the clock back to 2011. Desktop and laptop PC sales are declining and tablets are the new consumer hit. People are buying iPads (and to a lesser extent Android tablets) at an alarming rate, and this might be the end of a reliable revenue stream for Microsoft if people are replacing their old desktops and laptops with said iPads.
So, Microsoft comes up with the vision that their products will do more than an iPad can. Instead of having a standalone tablet as the home's primary computer, you'll buy a Microsoft tablet- which will not only be Just As Good as the iPad, but it'll also function as your main computer when you need it to. They even went so far as to create their own brand of tablet, but the extra hardware that needed to be provided for Windows to run smoothly (and the keyboard) meant that it would cost twice as much as the iPad (there was a neutered version that was comparable, but had no applications and outside of Office wasn't a suitable desktop replacement).
But there's another problem. Windows isn't a good tablet OS- the interface has been designed for a mouse and keyboard. So they come up with Metro and the brand new WinRT API with which to create applications, and spend a lot of time getting it ready.
Of course, since the entire vision of the future is "one Windows for everything", it made perfect sense for any system running this new version of Windows to use Metro. After all, they had just spent millions of dollars developing it and didn't want it to turn into another dead product.
So they made the fateful decision to deprecate the (already very much existing) desktop UI support in favor of Metro. It didn't matter that the interface was wholly unacceptable for desktop use, though it was Good Enough for the majority of the userbase- because people would be using Windows tablets and touchscreens in the near future anyway, in addition to their new Windows Phones (which would get quick application support because WinRT was a cross-platform solution).
That didn't turn out so well (Windows Phone is no more, UWP won't see further support as far as exclusive features go, and the only noteworthy Windows convertible tablet remains the Surface Pro) but it took a few years for that to become apparent- cue Windows 8.1 and later Windows 10 (the return of the Start Menu being a token gesture, since it lacked most of the functionality of the old Menu out of the box). There have been no major UI redesigns since, and everyone there's probably just trying to pick up the pieces until the next version arrives, if it indeed ever does.
If the telemetry says that many people use these features, are Microsoft out of touch? These are features we don’t use. But other people might.
My dad rang me once said that when playing solitaire it kept playing ads. I said he can buy it so the ads go away or find another app that doesn’t have ads. He’s like “ah what ever I’ll watch the ads”. He’s happy and content. Just wants solitaire.
I guess the ads in Solitaire may be less about making money off those ads themselves but more about reinforcing the idea that "ads are everywhere and that's OK" to get the masses used to ads (so they accept the other ads everywhere else).
I wouldn't call it being content, I'd call it being stuck in a situation that sucks.
I mean, if I gave you a script that would patch up Solitaire executable to remove any and all ads and telemetry with a single click, wouldn't your dad want it if you offered?
There's almost certainly a free app for Windows that's even better than the Microsoft version. He said his dad doesn't want "some other app," for whatever reason, but he's not stuck if they are available.
Hell if push came to shove you could probably get GNOME's solitaire running which at least has the advantage of supporting something like 100 different solitaire games.
Lastly I was curious how much the Microsoft solitaire costs and OMG. They want you to pay an ongoing subscription for it. Wow.
I'm talking about the obviously stupid features like the people hub or Bing search in start menu interfering with local results the user actually wants. Telemetry should obviously show that nobody uses these features successfully right?
They are the largest company by Market Cap. They're hardly out of touch with their users' needs. I use Windows 10 as my primary development system and it works great. Maybe you're out of touch?
