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by timetopay 845 days ago
It's wild how annoying Windows UX can be when it's something that microsoft wants you to use, to help improve their services revenue.

TBH, I'm on board with some of the negatives you listed, but I feel like the entire enthusiast community has been screaming about edge, telemetry, and start menu search for years. Microsoft seems determined not to listen, it's astonishing.
2 comments
hakfoo 845 days ago
They may not consciously confirm it, but I suspect someone figured out "learned helplessness is good for business."

New users can be steered through every dark-pattern install process, and upsold into every service since they don't have existing preferences.

They can't directly revert power users to that state, but by keeping the UI in a state of constant flux, they might get some accidental traction from them.

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timetopay 845 days ago
The absolutely insane pattern of making people click "back" after seeing an email/password login screen to create an account without logging in...
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shiroiushi 844 days ago
Why should they listen? Will doing these things improve their profitability? I don't think so. Having this annoying stuff (telemetry, forcing Edge, etc.) is good for Microsoft's profitability, and that's all that's important. If users don't like it, they can pound sand. It's not like they're going to switch to Linux; if they were really going to do that, they would have done it already in the last 20 years. Microsoft has gotten smart, and realized that all those people swearing "if they do this, I'm finally switching to Linux!" weren't really serious, because they've been saying exactly that for a couple of decades now, and still haven't, so almost nothing they do at this point will actually get them to leave Windows as long as it actually lets them do their work, however poorly and annoyingly.
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timetopay 842 days ago
The problem with this logic is that users _are_ pounding sand: to macos and ipados, which has been steadily ticking up.
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shiroiushi 842 days ago
Those defections don't matter. The only thing that matters is MS's profits and stock price, and those are doing great. They can stand to lose a few malcontents and increase profits by squeezing the rest of the users.
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