[bigmattystyles]

Powertoys feels like one arm of Microsoft to fix windows’ shortcomings due to the other arm via an independent app rather than fixing the actual component because doing so is too fraught with politics and incentives.

[mcv]

So Microsoft does know how to fix the problems with Windows, but simply chooses not to because of internal politics? Because I keep wondering how such a big, well-established company full of smart people can create such a piece of crap as their flagship product.

[Jochim]

The impression I got from reading through some of the Windows Terminal[0] issues/release notes, is that

It's understandable that it's much slower and more challenging to make changes to functionality that's become part of Windows core.

If something in PowerToys turns out to be a bad idea, it can be removed. It's much harder to justify that when it's been baked into the OS.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

[askiiart]

> If something in PowerToys turns out to be a bad idea, it can be removed. It's much harder to justify that when it's been baked into the OS.

Yet Microsoft seems to have no concerns about changing out functional, fast, easy to use components for worse replacements.

[Jochim]

I wasn't speaking to the quality of their decision making. A lot of their new UI fails to satisfy anything but the simplest of use cases but I'm sure it took a very long time and lots of meetings for it to get approved and deployed.

The Frankenstein period of old/new settings UI coexisting is further evidence of how painful ripping out OS functionality can be. I doubt anyone wanted to keep those dialogs around.

[askiiart]

Ah, I see your point. Thank you for the clarification :)

[bigmattystyles]

If you look at it from their incentives (serving you adds, getting you to use their products over competitor's, etc...) then it makes sense. Uniformity and Usability appears to be a secondary concern.

[vxNsr]

this[0] might be some insight in how microsoft works, this is from the inventor of powershell

[0]https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/1653541834751180803?s=20

[easton]

Microsoft's org chart makes this pattern evident: https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2011.06.27_o...

(that's not the original source for that image, I can't remember where it came from originally)

[akaij]

https://goomics.net/62/

[geraldhh]

well put!

aand it's doing so for some time now (20y?)