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 ...