[timlatim]

I have to use Windows at work, and one thing that hugely improves the experience is the "Everything" search tool [1]. It searches across all files you have in something like a second or two, and when you type it narrows down suggestions as you'd expect instead of randomly bringing up something completely unrelated. I even use it to launch programs I don't have pinned to the taskbar (it will find both .exes and .lnk shortcuts with readable names).

Compared to that, search in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS.

[1] https://www.voidtools.com/

[jerf]

Windows search is so bad that you can type "NOTE" and it'll be seconds, on a freaking supercomputer, before "Notepad" appears. This is insane. The list of applications on my computer is in the very low hundreds total, and the number of users with literally hundreds of thousands or millions of apps is very, very low. It can and should be in the search bar's RAM at all times and a linear search should be orders of magnitude below my human perception speed to say nothing of better algorithms.

So, OK, sure, the alpha version couldn't do that, and the beta version couldn't do that, and by golly, launching apps quickly didn't make the release list... sure. But why hasn't this obvious optimization ever risen to the top of the feature list in the last several years?

The obvious answer is that nobody in Microsoft is empowered to care about the experience as a whole anymore, and it shows.

The slightly less obvious answer is that I bet Microsoft management has simply written off Windows now. It's not Cloud enough and too hard to make services- and subscription-based even if they put their best efforts in. I think they're going to discover that it was more foundational to their business than they realized.