| > But can you explain why this feature is/was so important? 1) It's a line in the sand between decades of customization versus "my way or the highway [third party tools, some of which get banned for 'hacking' to implement their features, all of which are generally banned in things like corporate environments]". 2) It's a customization feature that has existed since Windows 95. Removing that feature broke decades of user habits. 3) At least one of the third-party tools has been briefly banned by Microsoft Defender for "hacking"/"reverse engineering" Windows. Most of them can be accused of that. The existence of third party tools today does not imply the continued existence of third party tools. 4) It's often compared to how Apple prefers a lack of configuration for "strong opinions". It's an especially funny comparison because Apple has almost always allowed you to move the macOS Dock to different screen edges. 5) It's a great waste of space on Widescreen monitors, and especially Ultrawide monitors. I've been using a right-hand side taskbar since square CRTs, because I felt even in 4:3 that horizontal real estate is at a much higher premium than vertical space. As a user of widescreens, including ultrawide, I especially feel like horizontal real estate is much useful to me as additional app space than vertical space. 6) Microsoft knows how much real estate is spent on a bottom taskbar. They know that's a valuable band of real estate. They've been selling selling ads on it, and assuming things like Copilot can go directly on it without user opt-in because they seem to feel they've got all the space they want and "own" that space. It's not the user's to own anymore. It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases (myself included), and taking it away is a message that Windows belongs less to the users and User Customization is less important in today's Windows than yesterday's. It's emblematic of so many other problems in Windows 11. As a modest feature, it feels so much like a synecdoche, a part that resembles the whole, a part (of the problem) that represents the whole (problem). |
Not only that, but the users who did move the taskbar are more likely to be the "power users" who will help to evangelize Windows in an organization. Those are users who Microsoft should want to keep happy. When you lose them, you lose any sort of grassroots support in an org.
It's a small change in terms of code and number of users affected. It's a big change to the affected users and in user perceptions.