Developers, Developers, Developers! ⭐

Like its predecessors, Build 2026 unleashed a tsunami of news, most tied to Microsoft's strategy of the era. For many years--well over a decade, I'm trying to block this out--that strategy was all about Azure and cloud computing. And that's a topic so thoroughly uninteresting to Windows fans and other technology enthusiasts that Build became a tedious slog of trying to find a proverbial needle in a haystack each year. But then things change, as they do.
From cloud to AI to AI agents
Microsoft moved us all decidedly into a new era, the AI era, when it announced a set of services that it would later rename as Copilot in February 2023. AI is interesting for all kinds of reasons. For Microsoft, it was a chance to reassert its influence on the industry and take advantage of the cloud infrastructure it built out for Azure in expansive new ways. But where Windows was largely ignored during Microsoft's cloud era, and thus wasn't a hot topic at Build during that time, AI marks a comeback for our favorite operating system. Windows, suddenly, is important again.

This is good and bad.

As I've said so many times, Microsoft didn't just ignore Windows for many years, it often undermined the platform be engaging in what we now call enshittification, a process by which Windows 11, in this case, was made worse for users through a series of bad, user hostile behaviors like forced telemetry, tracking usage and selling that information to advertisers, bundled crapware, forced Microsoft account (MSA) sign-ins, forced Microsoft Edge usage, and a lot more. The problem got so bad that I ultimately wrote a book, De-Enshittify Windows 11 to collect all the ways in which we, as human beings and customers, can make this thing work the way we want.

But Microsoft's newfound need to drive AI to the client in ways it can at least partially own and control triggered a rethinking about how Windows 11 fits into the grander scheme of things. At first, Microsoft's need to jam AI down its customers' collective throats was nothing more than further enshittification, seen more obviously in a painful episode in late 2023 when it delivered the first version of Copilot for Windows 11 alongside dozens of other new features in a normal monthly cumulative update ahead of a major (version 23H2) OS upgrade that would have typically delivered those changes. Microsoft did that specifically to prevent its corporate customers from skipping the 23H2 release and delaying the rollout of Copilot for another year. And it has since changed how it releases new features into Windows 11 to ensure that slow-moving companies can no longer purposefully stick with older OS versions to avoid getting those new features.

Many have theories about the changes we're seeing this year. My bet is on corporate customers, Microsoft's most important customers, finally pushing back on the enshittification, most especially the low quality of the chaotic feature updates that Microsoft was forcing on them...