In a long post titled “Our commitment to Windows quality,” published on Microsoft’s website and sent via email to millions of members of the Windows Insider Program, Windows boss Pavan Davuluri laid out a laundry list of changes Microsoft plans to make in Windows 11, starting this month.
What’s most remarkable about this post is what it doesn’t contain. Here’s how Davuluri kicked things off:
Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows. And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.
That paragraph belongs in the non-apology Hall of Fame, with a cross-reference to “Friday news dump” – a classic PR technique that aims to minimize media coverage of the awkward news being released.
Too little, too late.
Already left for Cachyos and it is for me without a doubt better at everything than Windows.
Good riddance.
There is no committment to quality. Marketing lies. Nothing new.
And I dont think anyone who uses windows cares deeply about it.
The revealing part isn’t what they’re changing—it’s the opening. ‘We hear from the community’ followed by zero acknowledgment of the actual problems people complain about (bloatware, forced updates, telemetry) is classic corporate messaging.
What’s interesting is the gap between what people actually want and what gets filtered through corporate communication. Companies sanitize feedback to protect the business model. That’s not just Microsoft—it’s how the system works.
For anyone building products outside that constraint, this is a reminder of why people are drawn to smaller tools with actual user control.
Item 3 is even shovelling more AI into more places. About the only thing that is real in that list is the taskbar being able to be moved, and this was something they have promised would happen since they rewrote the taskbar and crippled its functionality.
You’re hitting the real pattern here. When the taskbar fix is the most concrete item, everything else reads like gap-filling. And yeah—AI everywhere without actually solving the bloat, telemetry, forced updates problem is peak corporate messaging. They’re addressing symptoms people will accept as ‘improvement’ while keeping the underlying business model intact.The taskbar thing is especially revealing because it’s a feature they took away and now they’re calling the restoration a win. That’s the system working as intended.
Haha so true, its not what they are changing, its their opening…
This is fear. They screwed up on requiring you to purchase new hardware for Windows 11. Now everyone who held off so far will purchase those cool looking, inexpensive Apple Neons.
It’s more than just the hardware.
They screwed up by finally forcing everyone onto an objectively shitty OS. Every other time MSlop has dropped support for an OS, they’ve had at least two others to choose from, and one of them was passable.
They screwed up by letting AI vibe code updates, which were then vibe tested and vibe deployed. The last 3 “patch Tuesdays” have been absolute nightmares of system breaking bugs.
They screwed up by sloppily forcing AI in to every aspect of their OS, and then (allegedly) bragging about how the next one is just going to be an AI.
They screwed up by not recognizing that AI is not popular among the common user. There are like 3 people at my workplace who actually use it, and the main thing they use it for is to add fluff to a chat message to turn it into an email.
They screwed up by putting a “line go up” business moron in charge of the company, who then pup more “line go up” business morons in charge of the projects and departments. It’s no wonder that the new outlook sucks and is not fully featured, despite being the “default” outlook for year. It’s no wonder new teams is buggy, inconsistent, bloated, and always changing for the worse. It’s no wonder why all the perfectly functional menus and features of 10 have been hidden by slick and useless facsimiles in 11, while confusing and clunky elements of Win95 still lurk in the shadows.
If Microsoft wants to get back on top, they need new leadership. An apology changes nothing, action does. The current man in charge and his posse of yes-men flat out lack the character and understanding to make a good product that people and businesses want to use. They’ve been coasting on the momentum of being the top dog for 30 years, but that source of market force is not infinite.
Nup, we’re sticking with Linux. It was the elevation we really needed.
This is, like, 95% in response to the Neo. MS hardly gives a shit about your or my opinion but they do care about the common computer user who sees it as just another appliance.
Meanwhile, Apple made a laptop\appliance that’s capable enough to do the things these people care about in a very affordable and attractive package without really mentioning AI, the cloud, or people losing their jobs.
I’m sticking with Windows 10.
I’m sticking with Linux Mint. I don’t need ads and data mining built into the operating system, the internet is bad enough.
It’s funny, because technically they are hurting themselves in multiple ways. They are investing loads of money in AI. Then using the same technology to produce crap that no one wants. People are starting to lose trust in their OS because of all the issues.
AI is now using up all the resources, making gpus and memory skyrocket. People are not going to be able to afford PCs for gaming. Most people that want to stay on windows are gamers. While Linux is getting better, it’s still a shit show when it comes to Nvidia cards.
With Apple releasing a budget computer, this opens the door for everyone else. These devices are also fast enough and last way longer on battery life. They can also be more powerful in other ways as well.
Enterprise is another big user of Windows, but we can already see Europe and other places moving away from Microsoft products due to privacy concerns.
You can easily manage apple devices at an enterprise level. You can also do the same with Linux, albeit it’s a little harder. The only other thing people are missing in enterprise are the collab tools. But tbh, Google stack is actually good enough for that. Then people use slack for chat, which is way better than teams, even if it’s now owned by Salesforce. Then zoom for video calls. Even on this stack, it’s typically around the same price, if not cheaper than Microsoft anyway.
Because of all these things, Microsoft is literally choking themselves out.
Personally, I already use a MacBook for work. It’s a good balance between Linux and Windows and makes my life easier. I use Windows right now because of gaming and using an Nvidia card. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be using Windows right now. As soon as AMD releases their next gen gpus, I’m gone.
Microsoft dug their own grave and are slowly lowering themselves into it.
Most people that want to stay on windows are gamers.
You reaaaaly need to reflect on the bubble you live in because this isn’t even remotely close to reality.
They mean because games mainly work on windows first, not so much that gamers specifically want windows.
While Linux is getting better, it’s still a shit show when it comes to Nvidia cards.
Is it? Ive had exactly zero issues with my Nvidia card since converting to Mint 2 years ago.
Apologies are an admission of liability in the corporate world, therefore extremely rare. Corporate-speak non-apologies (with sweeping changes to reverse the damage) are just about the best you can hope for. If you’re looking for someone to blame for the non-apologies, blame lawyers. Otherwise blame Microsoft for everything they’ve done to screw up Windows (which is far worse than a silly non-apology).
Change, just to change. Apologize, just to say that you apologized.
Microsoft: I’m sorry you think you deserve an apology.
When I read that paragraph, I was gobsmacked. They “spent months analyzing feedback”? Seriously? They needed charts and graphs to figure out that people just want Windows to work?
Should they have not analyzed feedback? Out of everything you could complain about Microsoft, complaining about them taking their time to get it right this time wouldn’t be one of them. I mean, they aren’t going to get it right this time, but that seems like a different complaint.
This is marketing speak for “We realized that we could lose market share if we further don’t listen to our users”.
I suppose my question is why did they need to spend months analysing the feedback? Couldn’t they just point copilot at the data and have it instantly analyse it for them?
The editor’s name is Ed Bott?! As in Editorial Robot?! You can’t make this shit up.(well, i kinda did)
Did Copilot write this whole thing?
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Didn’t they already announce such a change for gaming when the steam deck comparisons came out?
Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it
More than hopeful this makes me concerned that change leads to more issues and worsening. That’s the expectation they established.
I followed several of the authors zdnet links. Crazy. Good articles, callouts and documentation.
The announcement is pretty broad and unconcrete. Some things are listed, and the slow context menu open is one I certainly care about (even when it’s not my primary context menu because Double Commander opens the classic one), but everything else is wishy washy and nonesense corporate speak and doesn’t include my main smaller issues.
/edit: oh, and I found the “we heard feedback” (ommission of negative or concern) particularly tone-deaf when they’re attemting to tackle criticism. Insane.
It’s fun to make Copilot admit that Microsoft products suck, only to watch it self censor itself seconds later.
I have a feeling this can’t be fixed unless they fork from a pre-slop point, which is highly unlikely.
The core problem with AI is not being incapable of generating working code, but the ability to maintain by AI or human.
AI has a larger memory (context size) than human. It can generate codes that are difficult for human to understand, and the complexity can build up fast, especially doing vibe coding without clear instructions (especially architectural).
On reaching a critical level, AI starts to make significantly more errors. At this point, no one can maintain, the codes are spaghetti. I think this is where Windows is at.
They’d have to fork from early Windows 10. There’s so much garbage introduced by humans at that point, nevermindLLMs.
But on the other hand, Windows is a dead and broken product to me. So I don’t care.
I wonder if there will come a point where everything is just too messed up to even salvage
I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback
Remember when a couple of critical CVEs went unnoticed and unpatched after disclosure because no one from Microsoft actually reads the insider hub lol.
Maybe they can have Bill Gates talk about it too.
