Now What? (Premium)

While pumping gas the other day, I was bothered by the suddenly high price—thanks, Russia!—but there was something else that irritated me more. While I was standing there, nozzle in hand, I was assaulted by the screechy blare of video advertisements playing on a tiny screen on the pump. I hate this kind of intrusion, but what I really hate is that I can’t turn it off.

Naturally, this made me think of Windows, and of Microsoft’s incessant, slow boil moves to forever ruin its user experience with crapware bundling, forced telemetry tracking, and, yes, advertising. These are the times that try one’s soul, as Thomas Paine once opined of an admitted more serious historical crisis. But I feel the pain all the same. And as time goes on, and Windows 8 becomes Windows 10 becomes Windows 11, it just gets worse.

The entry points for Microsoft’s advertising have only grown over time, as I predicted back in 2012 when I first decried the addition of advertising in the in-box apps as “a slippery slope.” And I don’t really need to rehash them here, do I? There are overt ads in Start, in File Explorer, and in pop-up windows. And there are sly and deceptive pushes to use Microsoft’s online services when you search the web from Start—which uses Bing, like it or not—or the new Widgets UI, which uses Bing and MSN, again, whether you like it or not. Microsoft pushes you away from rival browsers as it loads its own browser down with superfluous features, and it makes it hard—really hard—to switch the default browser in Windows 11. And has even acted against those who tried to work around that stupidity. While enforcing bogus hardware requirements that it pulled out of thin air. Oh, there’s a watermark on your desktop now to remind you how horrible it is, too.

So, yeah. It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating when these changes and escalations are accompanied by the functional regressions also found in Windows 11, which takes earlier simplification efforts like Starter Edition and S mode and just foists them on the entire user base, because Microsoft knows best. Even its staunchest defenders can do little more than shrug and hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll fix some of those problems in the next version. Hope springs eternal.

For developers, Windows used to be a wasteland, a place to ignore while they focused on the green fields of mobile and web. Microsoft’s response was humorous in retrospect. Rather than create a viable developer platform that would let interested parties target Windows, the web, and mobile devices simultaneously, it simply gave up and embraced … well, everything. (Even .NET MAUI won’t do this, and it’s not even out yet.) There is no such thing as a single, obvious Microsoft framework or set of technologies to choose if you want to create modern apps for Windows. You can instead drown in a sea of incompatible choices, each with its merits and problems. And hope for the best. Or you can just give up, which is what developers have done. And go back to targeting mobile and the web. It’s where the users are anyway.

The heady platform wars of the early 2000s, when you were either a PC or a Mac, were a lot like the conventional wars of the past, say, World War II, where armies would line up against each other and do battle, with some winner emerging. Today, the situation is more akin to the modern age of terrorism and electronic espionage, where we can’t see the enemy and we’re not even sure who we’re fighting, let alone why. Windows exists today largely out of inertia, which is not much comfort for those of us who still give a crap about it.

What’s worse, after explicitly ignoring Windows during Satya Nadella’s tenure as Microsoft CEO, the software giant suddenly woke up to the obvious when the pandemic showed them that—get this—people actually rely on Windows and PCs to get work done. Like, every single day. This should not have been an epiphany to Microsoft’s senior leadership.

But it was.

“I should have been talking about Windows,” Microsoft chief financial officer Amy Hood said recently when asked about her suddenly “more positive tone” when describing the legacy cash cow. “The utility of that device and my inability to accurately explain it may in fact be the issue, people are just now realizing, ‘Wow, she just figured it out, Windows matters.’ No. I just figured out how to talk about it. And so the reality is, a large screen device over the past couple of years, we’ve all been reminded of the role it plays. There are more PCs per household and more time being spent on PCs. We’re continuing to see that even with hybrid. And so there are jobs to be done. And it plays a great role in many jobs to be done.”

If that doesn’t infuriate you, please read it again. She knows exactly how many revenues this product generates every quarter. And she needed to learn how to … talk about it? Oh, F#$% that.

So what’s a poor Windows user to do while Microsoft continues to make Windows worse?

I guess you could switch platforms. Apple is there for you with a Mac—or even an iPad if you’re that special kind of person—but, come on. Apple is an even worse company than Microsoft, and its lock-in strategy makes Microsoft look like an amateur. You could go with a Chromebook, if you like computing with one hand tied behind your back. Or you could go Linux, assuming you could find that magic combination of the right hardware and the right distribution for you.

I’ve tried all three, and I have to say, I’m trending towards the latter choice. I’ve been experimenting with various distributions, most recently Zorin OS, and while I’ve had some incompatibilities on certain PCs, I’ve had some very good experiences too.

What I really want, of course, is for Microsoft to put actions to its meaningless words and make Windows better. Heck, just make it suck less. Panos Panay has said of Windows that “details matter,” but he then released the least detailed-oriented version of Windows ever, in Windows 11. But there’s time. There’s time to fix it. Time to make it better. Time to make Windows truly special again.

But that time, too, is running out. And you have to be especially delusional to believe that the incompetence that gave us Windows 11 will ever really get it right.

Pray.