He's not angry that it changed, he's angry that the new settings interface doesn't let him fix the issue at all, and while he used to be able to easily access the old interface so he could fix it the old way, MS has now hidden that ability too. If not for some user-hostile magical incantation, printing would have been permanently broken. Who wouldn't be seriously annoyed with this situation? How many non-technical users would have chucked a perfectly good printer because of a poorly executed software change? The Windows control panel UI transition has been a serious boondoggle from the start.
The article doesn't specify what the issue was, neither you or I can say what the best way to fix the problem would be, if it required something specific of the old panel unable to be accessed via more appropriate or modern tooling.
Well I still need to access the good old control panel each time I long on to a new machine, since the new settings app thing still doesn't have all the regional settings.
Quite basic stuff, at least it's still available in the old control panel for now.
Every Windows user I know hates the new control panels. (I use plural because they've been trying to replace the actual good control panel basically every version of Windows since 7 and it's an incredible mess). Enterprise users put up with Windows because it's better to administrate than anything else, so taking away that stuff really is murdering windows.
I did enterprise administration of Windows boxes, ~400 seats.
We did not manually muck with control panels per station. I could not care less what the settings UIs for home installs of Windows are.
And that's the real truth, power users and these small fry IT install bases are not major markets. The most prominent markets are OEM installs for non-technical home users (who hate complex panels and love the push-button UIs), and large 3/4/5 digit enterprise installs that do not give a damn about this stuff because they're using MDT (or whatever) to deploy images to all their stations and not playing with this per-station configuration stuff.
I dunno man, with Steam on linux and most of the major game engines making porting easy (or at least moving in that direction) I have very few reasons to stick with Windows anymore. At this point it's basically Photoshop and Fusion 360, otherwise I'd abandon it completely. If they lose gamers, I think they'll have a real issue.
You're a power user unable to understand the needs of non-power users.
We all go through that stage, it's natural.
I once installed Linux on all my siblings' desktops because I had convinced my parents it would lead to "less viruses" (Fedora 13, I think, GNOME 2, those were the days). The nightmare of providing support for that over the rest of my high school years provided me with a powerful and important lesson.
You have few reasons to stick with Windows, you are a very, very tiny droplet in an ocean of users with different needs than you. Judging what such markets will do based on your personal needs is unwise.
Here's the thing though, the desktop now really is about power users or corporate users, because everyone else just uses cell phones or tablets. So ok, sure, your sales people and your secretaries probably aren't going to care about the control panel, but people that use computers outside of work are mostly going to be power users and they're starting to have options. (I can use all the software I need on macOS, and linux is rapidly getting there too)
And honestly, breaking Printers is a thing that everyone is going to care about, especially people in a workplace.
As explained above this is irrelevant to enterprise users, corpo installs don't play with per-station configuration like this or care about consumer-facing UIs, the needs of that market revolve around things like image management, deployment, and active directory administration.
You're right that the home market is shrinking though, the OEM install market is down billions in revenue and has been dropping by double digit percentages each fiscal year, but you're wrong in your assumption that the power user market is worth anything. Power users, represented by direct license installs, are a rounding error of Windows revenue. There's nothing worth fighting for there.
Convincing Mom that she should buy a Windows laptop instead of an Apple laptop is still worth ~$750M/Q, and Mom doesn't ever want to see the old Windows panels, she loves the "Add Printer" button. Convincing Timmy Q Hacker that he should buy a Windows license key instead of installing Arch Linux is worth squat.
I think you're overestimating the importance of the revenue generated and underestimating the importance of mindshare and people caring about their system. If the next generation of creators (IE, coders, designers, etc.) grow up on macOS and linux then Microsoft has a real problem down the line. The Windows monopoly has been VERY good to them, they would be foolish to lose it by angering their most passionate users even if in the short term they don't see an effect on their bottom line.
> I think you're overestimating the importance of the revenue generated
It is literally impossible to do this. Revenue is the only thing that matters when measuring markets. If it doesn't affect the bottom line, it does not matter.
Passion does not sell OEM installs or license keys. Creators and hackers didn't buy MS products in appreciable numbers to begin with (compared to consumer and enterprise markets), so to the degree MS can be said to be losing them, MS does not care. If moms and humanities majors stopped buying laptops entirely and that $750M/Q dropped to the ~$1M/Q the power users drive, MS would probably pull out of the OEM license market.
This is a very different mindset about how businesses operate than you seem to share, which is fine, I'm explaining it not trying to convert you to it.
You are certainly right about revenue. You say you are in enterprise IT, I used to be there. I actually built and was responsible for the IT of one of the few larger "Linux only" enterprises in the mid-2010s in Germany (like you said, Fedora and Gnome2. Ubuntu and Gnome2 for us). When I left we were talking about a 1000 seats. Needless to say, it worked mostly flawless. Yet we always had the same "battle" with new joiners, unfamiliar work environments. We had to move accounting (20 seats) to MS Windows so that accountants would come to work for us. No matter that the 20 seats caused three times the support compared to the Linux seats, no accounting is still worse ;)
Anyhow, that's what Microsoft is abandoning. Familiarity. If young people do not learn MS Windows and MS Office during school or at home, the grip on the enterprise will vanish. We already see it in tech-oriented departments, where Macbooks reign supreme. I for one wouldn't like to use a Macbook, but I sincerely hope that MS grip on enterprises is broken sooner rather than later.
How was the old school control panel not better for non power users? Everything in one compact and intuitive display with understandable icons and a description of the icon in the English language. I'm confused when I try to change or navigate settings in Windows 10 or in modern apps in general where there's an array of icons with no description. I can memorize what the hamburger means but beyond that is too much!
You haven't worked in IT with "truly" non-technical people if you're asking this question (yes, No True Scotsman fallacy, I know).
They never opened such panels, they don't read error messages, they just say "the printer doesn't work". If the "Add Printer" button doesn't work it's all over for them. The only thing you can do is make the "Add Printer" button as good as possible.
The least common denominator is so much lower than you think it is. It's why Jobs and Timmy Apple worked so hard to eliminate the concept of the "file system" and make everything built around the concept of the "app". These abstractions that seem intuitive to power users and technical people are nonsense to the much larger market of push-button users, and that's where all the money is outside B2B enterprise.
TBF I don't think there's any control panels people are in love with.
Apart from the issue of needing control panels mostly to solve problems, they're just not great.
Windows legendarily keeps multiple versions of them, while for ios/macos it's a game of finding which image is actually a clickable button or understanding that wi-fi hotspot is under sharing and not networks. The FA was about command line incantation to fix printers and of course at every new macos version there will be a set of new defaults to get back behaviors. I think that's just the way of life at this point.
Sure, but here's the thing, all they really have to do is... nothing. Just leave the old control panel alone and stop making new ones. Make small evolutions, not redesigns. It might not have been brilliant, but once people learned where things were there's very little upside to changing it and all sorts of downside.
I think we're underestimating the amount of stuff going on in Windows and the amount of settings that are globaly needed after decades of trial and error.
Right now, we have machines that basically do what macs do (traditional "computing", a mouse, a keyboard a screen, office or image related work).
Then you have tablets (the whole Surface Pro line + 2 in 1 convertibles) and their touch options, including the impact on existing settings (you now have two or more sets of keyboards that might be in different mappings with different interlocked behaviors. Same for screens. and so much more)
Then thin clients, mirroring and remoting. For mac it's remote desktop or screen mirroring at most. Windoes gets a flurry of inbetweens.
Then all the hardware that only works on Windows and need some way to be managed relative to the system.
All in all, mac made the choice to only cater to the proverbial 20 of the 20/80 power law. Windows fundamentally can't just pile on the existing chaos, even if it means bringing new layers of chaos.
I don't even think a full rewrite in a new layer would be humanly possible at this point.
I disagree with this notion. Enterprise GNU/Linux environments with a configuration management system like Salt are easily on par (if not superior) to Enterprise MS Windows environments in all regards. Add a 389 or Samba4 domain controller on top and off you go. The difference is obviously that you need people who can administer such systems. 389 is just as part-time admin friendly as AD, but Salt actually requires you to understand a little bit about the computers you are administering.
Will the 10 person SME run such an setup? Unlikely. Can a 100 person SME that employs four MSCE run such a setup? Yes, but you only need two RHCE or LPIC-2 admins now (for vacation and somesuch). Those are rare, I know, but they will scale to 1000 persons, no problem.
Yep. My first reaction was printer issue? Riiight, that's definitely going to be the large market issue driving ppl away. People like the blackbox OS that doesn't do anything. It's not good for IT, but neither is Mac OS!
Forty-four years ago another guy felt the same anger towards a
closed-source printer driver, and he started a movement that actually
did end Microsoft's stranglehold.
On Tuesday, I had a printer issue at a client site and I was going to pull up the “Devices and Printers” panel to manage the drives and printing default settings. In the most recent 22H2 Windows 11 update, they hid it!
Using old Control Panel (Start->Run->control)
Clicking on this will redirect you to the new settings printer that gives NO options to do any advanced troubleshooting and removes the ability to FIX the issue!
A long time ago there was a video (or was it audio) of a really angry dude ranting about this and that and in the end he exclaims: I can’t print. And that is the punch line, his life was miserable and the root of the problem was printing.
Printers have been this evil hellhole of driver support for a decade or more, compared to other devices.
These days, I print so little I either stop at my local library, where printing is free, or I pay a pittance to print at a shop. It would take me a decade or more to pay off a printer when pages cost $.10.
Accurate as every other week's predicting of Microsoft's
impeding doom from users who don't like Windows in the past 30 years.
- 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft.
- 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft.
....
- 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft.
Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.
I don't think it's the same. I have been a Windows user all my life. Bloat and bad UX changes is one thing, but this is the first time I feel like I am having to actively fight the OS against showing me ads and dark practices like changing user preferences unbeknownst to me.
What problem? In 2013 Microsoft only had 2-3 big products, Windows, Office and X-Box. Now it's significantly more divested and the company's growth no longer depends on Windows' success or failure, and the stock pricing reflects that.
So, you're saying that losing 21% of their OS market share by actively pissing off their customers shouldn't be seen as a problem? OS stagnation would be an improvement compared to what they're currently doing.
Why is having even bigger market share so important? Android has bigger market share than iOS too yet iOS is the more profitable one. Microsoft cares about profit first, not unprofitable market share.
Not saying they're right or wrong, just saying it seems to be working for their bottom line as Windows is less relevante towards that as the PC market has been in a continuous decline anyway in the last decade.
Fighting to capture more % of a declining market seems like a fool's errand, when they have bigger fish to fry now.
why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue?
Because of revenue? a large seller of windows is genuinely just it’s market cap, it doesn’t really have a lot of killer utility compared to contemporaries. If it loses market cap then it’s a precipitous issue for them as there’s no point choosing the OS for other reasons, it simply lacks the value.
It’s market cap comes from people thinking it has a huge audience and so tailoring software for that audience and putting significant resources into that. Without that third-party effort: windows is toast.
>why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue?
Because unless you're from the 90's, the market for desktop operating systems is not one that generates a lot of revenue anymore. That's like laughing at Netflix for loosing DVD rental market share to Blockbuster.
>Because of revenue?
See my comment above. Microsoft makes a fuck tonne of revenue from services no matter if your company doesn't buy Windows PCs. If they buy Macs, they'll still pay Microsoft subscription fees for Office 365, Outlook, OneDrive, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. and soon Copilot AI stuff. All these are platform agnostic and way more profitable for them than selling more Windows licenses.
office365 will die without windows, it’s genuinely terrible on every non-windows platform and onedrive is objectively worse than alternatives too.
Office365 subscriptions are propping up azure numbers, without them their cloud business looks shit, and azure itself is often only used because “we are a microsoft shop”, it’s all inertia.
You're kind of missing the point, which is that they obviously are putting a lot of effort in (we're talking about changes they're making, not stagnation), and actively making things worse. And in doing so they're objectively losing customers. This isn't like the situation where they just stopped updating IE6. They're clearly investing in Windows and doing an AWFUL job. If I were an investor I would be calling for change in the Windows division.
- There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux.
- Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned.
But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though.
Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system.
