A Lying Liar Who Lies ⭐️

We never seem to learn the lessons of the past.

In 2017, Microsoft engaged in what I called “privacy theater” when it responded to the complaints about its privacy overreaches in Windows 10 by changing absolutely nothing important and fooling just about everyone.

In 2024, Microsoft did it again with Recall, a Windows 11 feature unique to Copilot+ PCs. This time, privacy and (supposed) security experts complained, Microsoft made a show of listening to the feedback but made no material technical changes to the feature, fooling just about everyone.

In both cases, Microsoft fooled the critics into silence, correctly betting that they would simply move on to the next controversy instead of actually paying attention to what it did. But I pay attention, and I know many of you do as well. And what Microsoft says is often different from what it does.

Well, it’s 2026, and Microsoft is at it again. This time, with two new controveries: The way it’s jamming Copilot and other AI features down the collective throats of Windows 11 users, and its evolution of Xbox as a brand to focus more on game publishing and not on dedicated console hardware.

And based on what I see out there in the world, two things are clear. Microsoft will never change its ways. And we are as gullible as ever, falling for the same trick again and again. Babies playing peek-a-boo exhibit more capacity for nuance and logic than we sometimes do.

Our ability–and desire–to believe this pathological liar is depressing and shocking. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s just human nature. But we need to think–and think clearly–when it comes to this company. If it helps frame the problem for you, think about it this way. Any company that enshittifies its products is, by definition, lying to you. That doesn’t mean that everything that company says is a lie. But if the claim is about a product that is thoroughly enshittified–and we’ve demonstrated that Windows 11 and Xbox both meet that standard–then we need more than words and our desire to believe those words.

As a former president once said so eloquently, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me … you can’t get fooled again”. OK, maybe that’s not the right example. But you get the idea. This is just common sense.

With Windows 11, we have two complementary thoughts, one that is real and one that is largely invented. On the one hand, Microsoft did publicly state that it would focus on pain points–things like system performance, reliability, and the overall experience–this year with Windows 11. And we have seen some positive improvements in the product. There is something happening, something positive.

The problem is that when some enthusiasts hear the term pain points, they think only of their own pet peeve, Copilot and any other AI they don’t want in Windows. Some of that work is terrible, and some even rises to the threshold of enshittification. But Microsoft never said anything about backing off from its AI-centric strategies in Windows or anywhere else in the company.

But we want to believe. And by “we,” I often mean the well meaning but unsophisticated enthusiasts who write the words we would like to hear in blogs we should have stopped reading years ago, being adults and critical thinkers. We’re told that Microsoft is reviewing whether some Copilot and AI features in Windows “make sense” and whether the Copilot brand is now so toxic that it should be removed from features and not used as much going forward.

The desire to believe the unbelievable is so strong that we start to lean into conspiracy theater. Just this week, for example, we were told that because Microsoft didn’t ship a single Copilot-based feature it announced in 2024, this was obvious evidence of backtracking. But a far more obvious reason for this is that the feature just never worked well regardless of its Copilot/AI-ness. And regardless of the fact that promising even bigger new features in Windows and then never delivering them is historically common. Anyone remember Longhorn? Or were we still in diapers back then?

This is a false equivalency and wishful thinking.

More to the point, Microsoft can improve the quality of Windows 11 and still deliver AI features that make sense for many customers, whether you, as an AI denier, believe that or not. The trick isn’t whether Microsoft puts something in Windows we don’t like, it’s whether we can uninstall, fix, or workaround those things we don’t like. And say what you will, but that’s worked out pretty well so far. I literally just wrote a book about it.

So what about Xbox?

As everyone knows, Xbox is a failure as a business. Xbox has failed so badly that the hardware side has never been profitable, not once, not ever. And its one shining moment of success was the Xbox 360, a console that performed so well, it came in third place in its generation out of a field of three players. That’s Xbox.

To its credit, Microsoft tried everything to turn this business around. It played the console exclusive game, modeled the first console on Windows to ease game migrations, innovated here and there, escalated capabilities with new models within a single generation, and then shipped two different consoles at the same time. It pivoted to digital media and general entertainment and then back. And then it started gobbling up game publishers, first with Mojang and Bethesda and later, far more dramatically, with Activision Blizzard. Nothing worked.

Only one thing will work: If Microsoft could simply give up its money-losing hardware business, Xbox–or Microsoft Games, whatever you call this thing–would be profitable and fantastically successful. And so it’s moved to make that happen. It put cross-platform capabilities into the system so that Microsoft could meet gamers wherever they were and we could simply play games–Xbox games, we’ll call them–on whatever device we want.

This is an excellent idea, a winning idea. But Xbox fans hate it. They’re stuck in the past and simply want to see a new console generation once every six to eight years like it was the 1990s all over again. They want Microsoft to keep trying and failing, as if there is anything it could do now that would suddenly overturn 25 years of defeats. What is it we call doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results again?

Crazy.

When Phil Spencer suddenly left Microsoft last month, it seemed like the culmination of two years of bad news. Spencer was literally the best thing that ever happened to Xbox, but here’s a bone for the haters: You can take some solace in the notion that he and Sarah Bond were just two of many people who lost their gaming jobs in recent years. I know. Hilarious.

Given who he is, anyone who replaced Spencer was always going to be a step down. But his replacement, Asha Sharma, was a slap to the face of long-time Xbox fans. She is not a gamer and doesn’t seem qualified for the job, triggering very unfair criticisms. And then she started talking. And amazingly, Xbox fans heard in her words exactly what they had wanted to hear. And though those words were, like those with Windows early, misconstrued, the narrative remains.

Sharma said that there would be a “return to Xbox,” which fans cluelessly thought to mean an end to the cross-platform game publishing plans and a return to focusing on consoles. But when pressed, she clarified that it meant “the spirit of building something nobody else was willing to try — I’ve heard ‘renegade,’ ‘rebellion,’ and ‘fun’ used,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote that.”

She meant, in other words, exactly what Xbox was doing already under Spencer and Bond. Microsoft would combine its Xbox and Windows-based platforms into a single platform that could play games from both sides, a unique advantage that only Microsoft, as the maker of Windows, can provide. And the reason we know that this is what she meant is that she then went on to reveal that the next Xbox console, which Spencer and Bond had previously discussed, would play Windows games. Which we already knew.

And yet, the crowd went nuts. Enthusiasts heard what they wanted to hear and they ignored the rest. Like how Windows would soon get a new Xbox Mode that would bring the Full Screen Experience from the Xbox Ally gaming handhelds to all PCs. And how Xbox is indeed working to bring Xbox console games to PCs, making the Backward Compatibility work that makes Xbox so special as a platform even more special.

So when the “This is an Xbox” ad campaign disappeared from the Xbox website because enthusiasts hated it so much, they cheered and slapped each other on the back to celebrate what they perceived as a victory. But an ad is just an ad and a slogan is just a slogan. Reality is unaffected by our hopes and dreams. And the reality is that Xbox can only succeed as a cross-platform game publisher. The hardware business will continue as a loss leader.

Sorry. But it’s time to wake up, think critically, and pay attention not just to what Microsoft says but to what it does. These things don’t always line up. And you can save yourself a lot of heartbreak simply by paying attention. If you really care about these platforms, there is good news to be had. Let’s celebrate that.