>Microsoft makes more money when the broader community wants to use their products. Users are stakeholders.
>But if the broad community hates what they’re doing, they will stop doing it. They must, if they want to remain in business.
This mostly isn't true. MS customers are going to use Windows no matter what, unless MS somehow makes it so completely unusable they're forced to abandon it. So they can make whatever annoying changes they want, and their customers aren't going anywhere.
However, this isn't true of everything MS makes, so you have to be careful not to conflate Windows with anything else. If people hate Teams enough, they might be convinced to switch to Zoom or whatever. This just isn't the case with Windows. They're free to piss people off as much as they want here.
>But as I’m a paying customer, my opinion still matters - or at least, the opinion of their customers in aggregate.
No, it really doesn't. You aren't paying for a Windows subscription, you paid for a Windows license. You probably paid it when you bought your PC. Or if you're a big company, you probably have some sort of site license, because you made the decision to use MS products across your organization. And if you're BigCo, you probably don't have Solitaire installed on employee computers anyway. So MS making the solitaire game slow and shitty isn't going to change the amount of money they get from you: they already got your money when you bought your PC. Even worse, you probably didn't have much choice: there aren't a lot of no-OS computers unless you assembled yours from parts, and those that exist (or come with Linux pre-installed) usually cost more, because MS isn't making money from you so much, but from kickbacks from all the crapware that's pre-installed.
>...a forum like HN where microsoft engineers sometimes visit.
>it seems mighty strange of you to try and convince me that my opinions don’t matter and I should… what exactly?
What makes you think MS engineers have any sway at all over the user experience? That stuff is decided by upper management, product managers, etc. And they don't care about you; they only care about the company's profitability. Adding more crapware and ads into Windows makes it more profitable, so that's what makes sense for them to do. Making a bloat-free, high-performance OS without any annoying ads or other crap doesn't make them more money, because you and everyone else are going to keep using Windows (and buying new computers with it pre-installed) no matter what.
>it seems mighty strange of you to try and convince me that my opinions don’t matter and I should… what exactly? Be quiet and take it instead?
Basically yes: you're wasting your keystrokes complaining about Windows enshittification, because your opinion really doesn't matter. It's not like MacOS, where someone has to actively want to use a Mac to go buy one, or Linux where you not only have to actively be willing to buck the trend, but also choose which of dozens of distros you want to use. With Windows, it's just the default choice for 90% of users, and they're not going to switch to something else, which MS has found out over the course of decades now.
>Provide no feedback and quietly migrate to another equally imperfect ecosystem?
Other ecosystems are far more likely to take your complaints seriously and to worry about your user experience.
I hear what you're saying; I just think your worldview is too cynical. The world isn't full of middle managers micromanaging engineers and laughing all the way to their overflowing bank accounts. People want money - sure. But people also want to do good work. If the world was really as dismal as you think it is, microsoft would destaff the entire windows team and just let the ecosystem rot while reaping in their locked in revenue.
Thats not what happens.
Windows is worked on constantly. And most of the changes are clearly done with the intent of making the product better. Things like IO completion ports. C# and the .NET ecosystem. Support for big/little (P/E) cores in the kernel. Edge replacing IE. ARM support. And so on. Of course like any big company, they make plenty of bad choices - like telemetry, the "watch everything you do" AI assistant, and so on. But its too simple to paint any large company with the "evil megacorp" paintbrush. Microsoft has 200 000 employees. I'm sure some of them are exactly who you think they are. But some - I suspect most - of them really want to do a good job and make products their customers want to use.
Just like any big company.
> Other ecosystems are far more likely to take your complaints seriously and to worry about your user experience.
Are they though?
Parts of Apple are great. And other parts are obviously horrible, extractive and greedy. Did you know companies can't use the NFC chip in Apple phones - in my phone, which I've already paid for - without being paid millions of dollars for the privilege? I'd love it if I could pay for public transit in my city using my phone, which I own, but my government doesn't want to pay the extortionate price apple is charging to bless them with that capability. Horrible.
Companies aren't good guys or bad guys. They're just big groups of people. And people are complex, and they have a wide variety of incentives and drives. Calling companies out for bad behaviour and sloppy work is important - even though it often has no effect. "Killed by google" is infamous inside google. Microsoft rolled back their AI assistant thing after the bad press.
If you're looking for great products made by companies who are ethically spotless, well, there aren't a lot options. Linux on the desktop is pretty decent these days. But I still use windows for gaming. And I'm typing this on a mac.
>The world isn't full of middle managers micromanaging engineers and laughing all the way to their overflowing bank accounts.
Now this isn't what I think either. It's the top executives mainly that drive this stuff, since they set the direction for the company. Middle managers are just pawns, except for the ones who are empire-builders trying to work their way up. Also, I'm not claiming that all companies are this bad, but I think MS is a unique company, and Windows a unique product, because of its monopoly status. Other companies really can't afford to piss off their customers too much because they'll just jump ship. MS doesn't have this problem with Windows. Remember how paranoid they were about Linux back in the early 00s? Now they don't seem to care at all, and I think it's because they figured out they had nothing to be worried about after all: almost no one was going to stop buying or using Windows (or even if they did stop using it, they still bought a license with their PC anyway; the addition of pre-loaded crapware also changed the economics here so they weren't worried about actual license fees from individuals).
>If the world was really as dismal as you think it is, microsoft would destaff the entire windows team and just let the ecosystem rot while reaping in their locked in revenue.
Of course, they can't just go to this extreme. They'd keep taking in money, but things would go down eventually, and they wouldn't grow revenues either, and remember, Wall Street wants never-ending growth. And as you point out, the ecosystem is important (as Apple has shown); they make a lot of money from all that other stuff too. Windows itself might not even be that much of a money-maker these days.
>Of course like any big company, they make plenty of bad choices - like telemetry, the "watch everything you do" AI assistant, and so on.
MS can afford to do a lot more bad stuff like this, because Windows users aren't going anywhere. It's why they can bake ads into the OS.
>I'm sure some of them are exactly who you think they are. But some - I suspect most - of them really want to do a good job and make products their customers want to use.
I'm sure there's some of them too, but they're not pulling the strings. They do get to work on cool stuff now and then of course, like the interesting kernel features you listed, but those are in support of their long-term goals (like being prepared for a post-x86 world).
>Did you know companies can't use the NFC chip in Apple phones - in my phone, which I've already paid for - without being paid millions of dollars for the privilege? I'd love it if I could pay for public transit in my city using my phone, which I own, but my government doesn't want to pay the extortionate price apple is charging
No, I didn't know that. It doesn't surprise me though; Apple was like this with Firewire too, and it's why Firewire is dead now. But that's weird too, because here in Japan Apple users routinely use their phones for the public transit, and I kinda doubt the IC card companies paid that much, though I guess it's possible. (Android users use their phones too, but only if their phones are Japanese models. iPhones however all have the Felica NFC chip needed for Japanese transit systems.)
>Microsoft makes more money when the broader community wants to use their products. Users are stakeholders.
>But if the broad community hates what they’re doing, they will stop doing it. They must, if they want to remain in business.
This mostly isn't true. MS customers are going to use Windows no matter what, unless MS somehow makes it so completely unusable they're forced to abandon it. So they can make whatever annoying changes they want, and their customers aren't going anywhere.
However, this isn't true of everything MS makes, so you have to be careful not to conflate Windows with anything else. If people hate Teams enough, they might be convinced to switch to Zoom or whatever. This just isn't the case with Windows. They're free to piss people off as much as they want here.
>But as I’m a paying customer, my opinion still matters - or at least, the opinion of their customers in aggregate.
No, it really doesn't. You aren't paying for a Windows subscription, you paid for a Windows license. You probably paid it when you bought your PC. Or if you're a big company, you probably have some sort of site license, because you made the decision to use MS products across your organization. And if you're BigCo, you probably don't have Solitaire installed on employee computers anyway. So MS making the solitaire game slow and shitty isn't going to change the amount of money they get from you: they already got your money when you bought your PC. Even worse, you probably didn't have much choice: there aren't a lot of no-OS computers unless you assembled yours from parts, and those that exist (or come with Linux pre-installed) usually cost more, because MS isn't making money from you so much, but from kickbacks from all the crapware that's pre-installed.
>...a forum like HN where microsoft engineers sometimes visit. >it seems mighty strange of you to try and convince me that my opinions don’t matter and I should… what exactly?
What makes you think MS engineers have any sway at all over the user experience? That stuff is decided by upper management, product managers, etc. And they don't care about you; they only care about the company's profitability. Adding more crapware and ads into Windows makes it more profitable, so that's what makes sense for them to do. Making a bloat-free, high-performance OS without any annoying ads or other crap doesn't make them more money, because you and everyone else are going to keep using Windows (and buying new computers with it pre-installed) no matter what.
>it seems mighty strange of you to try and convince me that my opinions don’t matter and I should… what exactly? Be quiet and take it instead?
Basically yes: you're wasting your keystrokes complaining about Windows enshittification, because your opinion really doesn't matter. It's not like MacOS, where someone has to actively want to use a Mac to go buy one, or Linux where you not only have to actively be willing to buck the trend, but also choose which of dozens of distros you want to use. With Windows, it's just the default choice for 90% of users, and they're not going to switch to something else, which MS has found out over the course of decades now.
>Provide no feedback and quietly migrate to another equally imperfect ecosystem?
Other ecosystems are far more likely to take your complaints seriously and to worry about your user experience.