Trust But Verify ⭐️

I want to believe, I really do. And I like what I see from Pavan Davuluri quite a bit: This is a thoughtful, smart person who seems like a good choice to lead Windows development. But the problem with trust is that it's so easily lost and so difficult to regain. And that's what Mr. Davuluri and his team face after years of Microsoft abusing its customers.

I am referring, of course, to Microsoft’s pledge this past week to improve the quality of Windows throughout 2026. This is a topic I’ve written about in the past, negatively in A Lying Liar Who Lies ⭐️ and more positively in Something Happened ⭐️. Both of those discussions bear on where I’m still at today: There is both good and bad to all things, of course, but especially Windows. It’s OK, maybe even healthy, to have hope for the future. But we need to be clear-headed about what’s really happening here and not project beyond what Microsoft has told us.

And that communication, a 2000-word blog post authored by Davuluri, is a curious combination of specific and vague. It's interesting to me that this post was directed at those in the Windows Insider Program and not more generally at Microsoft's customers. And it's curious that there's no real apology here for the abuses we've all suffered, though to be fair, those abuses all came from Davuluri's predecessors and, let's not forget, their superiors.

OK. Let's dive in.
Checking the checklist
When I think about what's wrong with Windows today, I think about my Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist and how the ongoing abuses escalated to the point where it became my overall focus; I literally just published a book called De-Enshittify Windows 11. In the checklist and book, I identify several specific areas of enshittification in Windows 11. And it is reasonable to see whether Microsoft addresses them.
Forced telemetry
The first issue I listed is forced telemetry: Starting in Windows 10, Microsoft made forced telemetry mandatory, with no way in the user interface to disable it. The word telemetry does not appear in Davuluri's blog post, and I can't find a single sentence that references this topic even vaguely. I will point out, however, that there is a lot of talk about reliability here, and one can easily imagine that this telemetry is a key way Microsoft can help make Windows more reliable. This isn't changing, I bet.
Bundled crapware
The second issue in my checklist is bundled crapware: Let's not forget that Microsoft used to have a Signature PC program so that customers could buy a third-party PC without any of the crapware that PC makers still foist on us and that, since Windows 10, it has completely reversed course by bundling crapware directly in Windows and suggesting crapware by default.

I didn't expect Davuluri to use the term crapware anywhere in his post, and he doesn't. But he does address recommendations and suggestions, noting that Microsoft will provide "a more relevant Recommended section in Start [that] will...