> It appears this moment of pushback has resonated with internal teams: According to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, the company is now reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans changes to streamline or even remove certain AI features where they don’t make sense.
Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features made sense in the ways that they were being added. There should not be any necessary work to "rollback" features that do not make sense, because they should have not built them in the first place.
Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. Taste comes from knowing what not to build.
Right now Windows is an unstable mess, filled with things that shouldn't have been built. The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
> The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.
The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
> because they should have not built them in the first place
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work.
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong.
I think Windows 11 is the Trump moment. Even if they right the ship, Linux is good enough or good enough is on the near horizon for most use cases so people are jumping ship. There's also bleed from people being tired of Apple's lack of software innovation.
Too late, idiots.
Just as Windows 10 was being retired, you ran the craziest anti-marketing campaign I've ever seen and successfully coaxed me into switching my daily driver to Linux. Until this year, I've been using windows my ENTIRE life.
Literally installing Arch right now as I read this. Same deal, been using windows as my daily driver all my life but have been running Linux servers since late 90s (and did daily drive RedHat back in the day).
My work env was just VS Code + WSL and I realized the most pain points came from using Explorer and trying to admin the machine with the fractured landscape of sys admin tools. For me it became very obvious that windows is only going to get more bloated and less “my” machine going forward, why stay on this platform if I’m already spending most of my day in a Linux environment (that I’m already familiar with).
I have a feeling it's too little, too late, even if it's completely true and sincere, which I doubt at this point.
I can't help but wonder if they're in the process of losing an entire generation of tech enthusiasts to Linux and maybe MacOS. And the rest of the world tends to slowly follow the tech enthusiasts.
Windows 10 is my last Microsoft Windows operating system. Between the fact that I had to turn of TPM in the bios so that I wouldn't wake up one day turn on my computer and see Windows 11. The massive bugs that prevent things like power off. The insane push for AI in everything (notepad? really?).
I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
The real issue was never AI in Windows
It was AI with no clear user benefit. A Copilot button in Notepad doesn't solve a problem anyone has
Good to see them pulling back, but the test will be whether the features they keep actually earn their place in the workflow instead of just being there because someone had a KPI to hit
As someone that uses Linux distros since 1995, I have had lots of joy getting it to work on various kinds of hardware, during weekends and long nights.
Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)?
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
That seems likely. Someone got a directive to "increase Copilot adoption" so they rebranded Office to Copilot and now they can show their boss a graph for Copilot adoption that goes to the right and up and get a promotion for it and everyone's happy.
Yeah, this is a public relations effort. Corporations, especially ones that have spent an obscene amount of money on AI companies aren't going to change their direction. They have to justify that spending to their shareholders.
Microsoft had gained my goodwill as a linux user when they didn't immediately destroy github and embraced open source
I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again.
I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that I actually have faith in the people actually developing Windows. I'm not at all aurprised that they are rebelling against stupid non-features. But that rebelling doesn't amount to anything, since managers and decrees from the top funnel all effort into the most user-hostile results possible.
If MS rehires their QA teams and listen to the people on the ground, I'd imagine the very same devs who put AI in Notepad would be very happy to give us features we actually want.
As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/server).
Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games.
Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
Thing is, at the time it felt like these experiences (e.g. demos) were rare and a treat; nowadays you can open up Steam or the App Store and get full versions of full games with hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay right there and then.
Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.
I love the care and polish that went into the Microsoft Windows XP Welcome/Tour app that played after install. That was the peak of the summit—quality wise.
Great. Let us hope that support for hardware without TPM is next. Creating several mountains worth of electronic waste was a terrible decision. And in the middle of the AI-induced memory shortage!
Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.
This reminds me of a useful tool I encountered recently..
Winslop is an open source tool that removes Windows 11 bloatware, disables AI features like Copilot, and restores useful settings:
https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop
AI feels like the ultimate “a solution in search of a problem.”
Forms of it are very powerful and have a lot of uses for sure. But there seems to be an enormous amount of top-down “figure out how to fit AI into our product/processes” for both producers and consumers.
For people who work in very classified/secure environments (designing weapons systems, rev eng UFO's, etc...) does M$ offer some version of windows without all of the AI crap and bloat?
Trying to bake AI into the OS was so dumb. Make the OS super agent friendly, surface as much data as possible in agent accessible way, and perhaps create a journalling config management system so agent actions can be rolled back. Then sit back and let people build cool shit on your base and let people market your product for you.
After relentless pressure from Microsoft finally switched to Linux. I won't say it is smooth sail - but it respects your time and PC resources. Which Windows does not. Windows has had abhorrently slow Explorer, File Search and almost any end user interaction for couple of years now. And is so full of crap that can't be disabled or even don't know what it is doing.
[+] [-] Shank|1 month ago|reply
Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features made sense in the ways that they were being added. There should not be any necessary work to "rollback" features that do not make sense, because they should have not built them in the first place.
Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. Taste comes from knowing what not to build.
Right now Windows is an unstable mess, filled with things that shouldn't have been built. The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
[+] [-] pixelpoet|1 month ago|reply
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
[+] [-] _heimdall|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] QuadmasterXLII|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|1 month ago|reply
Jobs was correct when he said that Microsoft has no taste.
[+] [-] funkyfiddler369|1 month ago|reply
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
[+] [-] hibikir|1 month ago|reply
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
[+] [-] hulitu|1 month ago|reply
We never, ever, learn from "lessons learned". They are there, just as a generic way, to tell other teams, that there might be some issues.
I deleted "Microsoft" from the quote because this, unfortunately, applies to a lot of companies.
[+] [-] observationist|1 month ago|reply
They're not even trying anymore.
[+] [-] dartharva|1 month ago|reply
As an OS, Windows died with 10.
[+] [-] eviks|1 month ago|reply
It does, imagine how much faster it's going to be in the next model version!
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] vachina|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|1 month ago|reply
How so? The forced feeding of AI is what Satya called for.
[+] [-] batrat|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] onetokeoverthe|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] protoster|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ActionHank|1 month ago|reply
I am seriously thinking of looking for another role because it is such a HOG.
[+] [-] Mabusto|1 month ago|reply
My work env was just VS Code + WSL and I realized the most pain points came from using Explorer and trying to admin the machine with the fractured landscape of sys admin tools. For me it became very obvious that windows is only going to get more bloated and less “my” machine going forward, why stay on this platform if I’m already spending most of my day in a Linux environment (that I’m already familiar with).
[+] [-] ufmace|1 month ago|reply
I can't help but wonder if they're in the process of losing an entire generation of tech enthusiasts to Linux and maybe MacOS. And the rest of the world tends to slowly follow the tech enthusiasts.
[+] [-] mrdevlar|1 month ago|reply
I know a scam when I see one, and Windows 11 is a scam.
[+] [-] a_f|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] stainablesteel|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] OsamaJaber|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] madhacker|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|1 month ago|reply
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
[+] [-] packetlost|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] MrMember|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] zthrowaway|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] nubinetwork|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] mrdevlar|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] verdverm|1 month ago|reply
I have since been reminded why this was always misplaced hope. I will never update to Windows 11 or purchase any of their software again.
I'm similarly not updating Mac to their first ai-hype'd OS version. I've only heard poor reviews, zero interest in their glass and hyper-rounded corners
[+] [-] g947o|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Telaneo|1 month ago|reply
If MS rehires their QA teams and listen to the people on the ground, I'd imagine the very same devs who put AI in Notepad would be very happy to give us features we actually want.
[+] [-] lloydatkinson|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] markus_zhang|1 month ago|reply
Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta and other Home products that never took off. The only problem is frequent BSOD, which was solved by the NT kernel, so I guess XP was the pinnacle of personal computing OS, although it does fail some DOS and earlier Windows games.
Do we still have a compatible OS nowadays? Linux is mostly for server and business, and while it has gained some popularity as a desktop OS, it definitely still have a long way to reach the intimacy that early Windows offered, and I doubt it will ever regress back to a "Home computer OS". But maybe we can build on top of that. I mean we can build software on top of Linux that provides the friendly vibe.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|1 month ago|reply
Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.
[+] [-] theYipster|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|1 month ago|reply
However, they regularly run win 3.11 under “dosbox staging”, which is a greatly improved, but poorly named fork of dosbox.
[+] [-] jpmattia|1 month ago|reply
Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.
[+] [-] vee-kay|1 month ago|reply
Winslop is an open source tool that removes Windows 11 bloatware, disables AI features like Copilot, and restores useful settings: https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop
[+] [-] antisthenes|1 month ago|reply
What's concerning is that they lack judgment and proper insight into why pushing it in the first place was a bad idea.
If your OS truly is a product, users should not be beta-testers. This isn't an indie kickstarter game.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|1 month ago|reply
Forms of it are very powerful and have a lot of uses for sure. But there seems to be an enormous amount of top-down “figure out how to fit AI into our product/processes” for both producers and consumers.
[+] [-] t1234s|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|1 month ago|reply
It’s not an AI problem but rather a ram stuff down users throat even when they clearly don’t want it problem.
See broken start menu that does a web search instead showing your apps. See forced online install. See one drive everywhere.
Toning down the AI a bit won’t be enough
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] nxobject|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ReptileMan|1 month ago|reply