From the Editor’s Desk: Noise, Distractions, and Something Much Worse ⭐

Two weeks ago, I wrote that it’s not enough to identify problems, one also has to solve or at least work around those problems. Since then, I’ve been reminded that there’s more to it than that. Not everyone is a problem solver or can solve any problem, and those in that group have a choice to make. They can get out of the way, they can be noise and distract you with irrelevance, or, in a worst-case scenario, they can get in the way.

This past week, I’ve seen examples of the latter two responses to problems, one innocuous and one deeply troubling. Both concern the Windows community, or perhaps I should call it the Windows enthusiast community, such as it is. These days, it seems, all I see out there are complaints.

I know what you’re thinking: I complain all the time. And fair enough, it’s almost a brand at this point. But I will draw a distinction between problems real and imagined, remind everyone that we have enough real issues that we don’t need to make anything up, and that I am very much on the problem solving end of the spectrum when it comes to Windows and enshittification. I see the problems and I have spent more time than most trying to fix all of them.

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has built quite a little YouTube empire for himself, opining mostly on technical topics and, sorry, constantly revisiting the past. I get it. But he’s not really solving problems for Windows users today, he’s weighing in on events that are happening out in our world, engaging in some incredibly good interviews, and otherwise just doing it all for the “subs and likes,” as he says. Fantastic.

But when Dave weighed in on Windows enshittification in a recent video called Windows “SUCKS”: How I’d Fix It by a Retired Microsoft Windows Engineer, he didn’t really have anything to offer. The video is short by his standards, never addresses most of the specific issues one might have with Windows today, as I did in my article, A Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist (Premium). And he absolutely doesn’t try to explain how you, as a user of Windows, can fix the problems. Instead, he gives Microsoft advice about how he would fix Windows. Which literally amounts to Microsoft putting a “power user switch” in Windows that would turn off all the stuff we don’t like. Oh, and then make us pay for it because “Windows with no monetization is going to cost you some kind of annual or monthly fee because they can’t just give away Windows [for free] forever.”

That Plummer has been celebrated for this is painful for me because I have been calling on Microsoft to offer a standalone paid subscription to de-enshittify Windows for many years (or just add that to a Microsoft 365 subscription). I specifically asked Chris Capossela this very question when he was Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, and he told me that would never happen because just having a paid way to make Windows less terrible would be Microsoft publicly admitting that Windows was terrible.

But Plummer’s idea for a single switch in Windows is even more painful, not because I thought of it first, but because it’s a stupid idea. More to the point, it will never happen. It’s a fantasy, a Red Herring, and a distraction. It is, like this entire video, just noise. There’s no “there” there. It’s just a cheap way to rile up like minded people who can then bitch and moan in the comments or in an article for The Register, where everything Microsoft does is half-baked crap. Have your fun and vent. But ultimately, you’re just spinning your wheels. As I asked my mother over 40 years ago, “Now what are you going to do about it?” Nothing. Plummer’s just in it for the subs and likes, guys. He’s not here to help you.

Which is perfectly fine. Plummer is not hurting anyone. He’s not getting in the way. But this past week, there was another event that many wrongly celebrated in our little community. And this one speaks to all kinds of problems that I’ve experienced online over 30+ years and have discussed many times. It’s about toxicity and bullying, and the misplaced certainty that we technical people have, no matter the topic. It’s really just about the difference between right and wrong, or how two wrongs don’t make a right, or whatever drivel you prefer. Labels don’t matter here. What matters here is that we can be terrible as people and, worse, terrible to each other too. You don’t have to be particularly smart to know better. You just need some basic human decency and empathy, two qualities that were not on display this past week.

As you may have seen, Microsoft president Pavan Davuluri recently had the temerity to tweet about an Ignite session called Innovation Session: Windows & Microsoft 365 Copilot: Secure AI & agent productivity that he will participate in this Wednesday. His tweet simply repeated the messaging he’s engaged in recently about evolving Windows to become an agentic OS, and there was no new information at all.

“Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere,” his tweet reads. “Join us at #MSIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Windows and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!”

Yep, that’s the whole thing. That this innocuous little bit of promotion, which was likely written by a handler, set off the knuckle-draggers in the audience shouldn’t be surprising in retrospect. That’s all Twitter/X is these days, a vortex of misinformation, hate, and aggression. But I’m freaked out by the responses Pavuluri triggered. The replies to this tweet range from completely unhinged to dangerously stupid. Worse, some tech blogs felt the need to amplify the hate with critical barbs of their own.

The responses to Davuluri’s tweet almost all fall into one of several big buckets. I’m cleaning them up and paraphrasing, but there is outright hate and several threats (often to his job) in there. These changes are, will, or did drive “people” (or the replier) to Linux or the Mac. Instead of focusing on AI, you should clean up Windows and only work on the fundamentals. You got some very specific features wrong, so there’s no reason to do other things anyway. AI is just bloat. Nobody asked for this. And my favorite, “No one wants this.”

The vitriol is so thick in there that it’s difficult to read. But this one is personal to me because this is the type of insular, simple-minded, small-minded, and change-averse nonsense that I deal with all the time. And I’m not even responsible for Windows. You can imagine this experience is quite a bit amplified for Mr. Davuluri.

And I can imagine that many of you are probably shaking your heads and not seeing the issue. After all, there are definitely some aspects of Windows 11 today that most would agree are objectively problematic, behaviors that I describe, accurately, as enshittification.

But keeping to the themes established up top, I will point out that lashing out at an individual on Twitter in such violent and horrible ways is more than just noise, it’s behavior so bad that it makes the problems I document in Windows pale by comparison. Getting past this terribleness is difficult. But in sifting through this dreck, it’s clear that whatever ideas and suggestions these critics have are one hundred percent pointless. These are terrible, terrible people.

They are people who can’t see past their own shallow, insular lives. They are people who don’t understand that evolving Windows along whatever lines doesn’t mean that Microsoft can’t also improve it in ways that they would appreciate. They are people who threaten those they disagree with. They are people who apparently don’t even use Windows, to take several of them at their words. They are people who bring up incredibly specific product requests because, seriously, this is the place for that. And they are people who claim to speak for others or for everyone when in fact they know less about normal people and their needs and expectations than they know about Windows or Davuluri.

These types of reactions occur again and again in our community. We saw it viscerally with Microsoft Recall, where the most vocal complainers were those who didn’t even have a Copilot+ PC to begin with and could simply choose not to use the feature regardless. We saw it recently in the rather innocuous news that Microsoft had, with Windows 11 version 25H2, removed a few of the more obvious workarounds for signing into the OS with a local account. And now this.

And what is this, exactly? What is this thing that these smart but terrible people are absolutely positive “literally no one” would ever want?

Microsoft has been talking up AI since its February 2023 Bing and Microsoft Edge announcements, but at a high level, we’ve experienced two major phases of this evolution: A generative AI phase and, more recently, an agentic AI phase. Neither is a replacement for the other, they’re both still happening. And the agentic AI stuff continues to be more promise than reality. All we really know for sure is that these AI agents will “do things on your behalf.” We hear that over and over again.

Agentic AI capabilities are being added to personal computing platforms that include web browsers, of course, and operating systems, be they desktop or mobile-based. At Build 2025 in May, Microsoft said it would add more and more agentic AI capabilities to Windows via Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, a standardized way for agents to control and/or interact with apps (locally) and online services. Since then, Davuluri was promoted to the role of president and he reorganized the Windows business to prepare it for this future. We just learned today that MCP is available now in preview in Windows 11.

Davuluri’s and his team’s vision for advancing Windows in this AI era is straightforward. There was (literally) a vision video back in August. Less than two weeks later, Davuluri said that AI would bring new interactions to Windows in the form of natural language and “voice and vision” capabilities, and that these things would be additive and not replace existing interactions like keyboard, mouse, touch, pen, and whatever else. And in October, Microsoft said it would turn all PCs into AI PCs, which is another way of saying the same thing. Windows is evolving. As it always has.

I don’t understand why any of this is controversial. And I don’t write that because I “want” any or all of it. I just don’t see the problem: I don’t like Copilot today, so I choose not to use it. I’m not going to personally attack someone about that. And I’m certainly not going to opine that “no one” will ever want to talk to their computer, find things with Recall, or see the very real benefits of signing into Windows with a Microsoft account. But I will try to solve the problem, such as it is. Which is easy: You can literally uninstall Copilot. In a similar vein, I don’t like multitouch screens on laptops and I never need or use a smart pen. But I likewise don’t call on Microsoft to remove these features. I’m just one person. Other people do like and use these interactions. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Davuluri did make one mistake, of course. Instead of simply ignoring the haters and blocking out the noise, inhe tried to engage with one of the less ranty commenters. Such a rookie.

His respectful and thoughtful response to that person is there for you to read. As are the hurtful, hateful, and terrible responses that just kept coming. Tech blogs chimed in with horrible amplifications, with one literally titled “Microsoft Windows boss posts lackluster response to ‘agentic OS’ backlash — Microsoft is working to address broad problems with the OS.”

Lackluster? Get over yourself.

What that tech writer and all those commenters get wrong is, well, everything. They confuse enshittification with personal preference, obviously. But the notion that any of these people speak for “everyone” is laughable. These people, piling on the hate on Twitter, of all places, are in a tiny, tiny bubble, a little echo chamber. They represent less than one percent of the audience, probably much less. And in being terrible, and disgraceful, and thoughtless, all they’ve made clear is that they should be ignored. It bothers me that I can’t do that right now.

Look, what Microsoft is or is not doing to evolve Windows 11 is almost beside the point. If this were as simple as people overreacting, this would be a brief discussion. We all want Windows to be reliable, stable, and perform well. Nothing is perfect, and Windows 11 is perhaps less perfect than it could be. These things are obvious.

I look forward to debating the relative merits of Microsoft’s agentic AI push in Windows and elsewhere when it’s possible to do so as an adult and with some measure of education. As I write this, I have no idea where I’ll land, because none of us know where the AI features will land. But I can state with certainty that it will be somewhere in the middle between the hate described here and the sycophantic cheerleading Apple always seems to receive from its community.

Maybe I’ll get it wrong, we’re all imperfect. But I do have a recommendation for the trolls on Twitter and elsewhere: Please, I am begging you, follow through on your threats to leave Windows so you can let the rest of us get on with our lives. We will be better off without you and your terrible, terrible ideas, better off without those who are just causing problems and not solving them. And that’s true no matter what Microsoft does to Windows.