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I'm always astounded by the tendency to bet it all on core competencies and wind down every other effort that's profitable but not profitable _enough _ As if times don't change, innovation never happens, and your accessory plays of today are never the overtaking market of tomorrow.

> According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.

> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.

This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.

Considering that

- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)

- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)

I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.

Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.

I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.

That's been obvious for years. It feels like they're extracting whatever remaining money they can get from the home PC market while it lasts but won't much miss it when it's gone.

I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

In some ways. Less so in others.

For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

And all of the ERP vendors.

That said, most FOSS devs don't target those platforms for releases, so IMO the same approach should be taken with Microsoft products then.

This is 100% true.

You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?

The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.

Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.

So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.

That's fine, they should still do a good job for moral reasons rather than economic ones, and they deserve to be dragged through the mud if they do not.

I would have been suspicious of this until I saw a quote for an E5 license

I got the same info. Windows kernel is developed for B2B needs, if something might be useful to B2C, they might eventually get it, but they don’t affect the roadmap.

That sentiment is characteristic of the Gates to Ballmer leadership change.

Foolish since a world where no one uses Windows at home will ve damaging for enterprise long term.

MS is the new IBM

I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.

Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.

For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...

seems like

  microsoft = 1/apple

One of my favorites being Micros~1, in reference to how Windows had to mangle file names for DOS's 8+3 character limit.

If you're German-speaking: "Klopilot" and "Vibrierkot" are some modern day personal favorites.

On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.

“i'll spell it MICRO$LOTH WINBLOWS in a DELICIOUS TWIST” https://leisuretown.com/library/qac/25.jpg

I used M$ at work the other day by accident, I was like ooh wait this isn't turn of the century slashdot.

MS-DOS itself is derived from QDOS, which stands for "Quick and Dirty Operating System".

Things only went downhill from there.

Last week on a comedy show (the daily show) they made a joke about bill gates "micro and soft" which was old in the 90s already, so I can confirm this is the case.

I actually still have one of these shirts in a box somewhere: https://www.kmfms.com

Orgs have had sensitive skin like this for a long time. Gamespy was a service for launching and playing multiplayer games with lobbies before Steam, and if you “accidentally” typed “GaySpy” (it was the early 2000s) it would autocorrect to “GameSpy” by the time it appeared in your messages.

In Brazil people used to say "Ruindows", which is a play with the portuguese word for bad.

Don't forget Windoze.

I'm starting to use Micro$lop now

Every dominant tech company eventually gets the nickname treatment

Been in this industry since I graduated college, I have never stopped using Micro$oft or Microshaft. Also a fan of M$, Winblows…

Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.

I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.

My favorite nickname for MS-DOS is "Domestos" (pronounced /də ˈmɛs ˌtɒs/) which is a brand of bathroom cleanee from the UK.

Microscope Winblows

Not a company well known for listening to user feedback.

The Discord server for Midjourney is said to be one its biggest use point, the source of its largest audience, and one of its biggest sales funnels. Even as other image models have grown more powerful/capable, Discord has been suggested (or blamed, depending on perspective) for keeping Midjourney one of the most popular ones.

I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).

There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").

I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.

Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.

Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.

They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.

That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.

Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.

And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.

The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".

An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.

I have been in similar groups, and trust me, there are a lot of very enthusiastic users sharing their tools, success stories etc.

I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.

How do you do, fellow kids?

I have Copilot through work.

I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.

It's for this audience: https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/14/verity_stob_abigails_...

(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)

It needs a Discord Server because MS Teams is just that good X_X

It reminds me of the US army and their fabulous idea to open a Twitch channel. Went as well as you expect.

Someone wanted to get paid to be a Discord mod.

It’s just another checkbox in someone’s performance review, no need to think too hard about it.

Maybe all the users are OpenClaw instances?

For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.

> installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan

Do you work for Microsoft or something? Please do do not give them ideas.

> moves when you try to move away the mouse over it

They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.

The next Windows should run entirely in the cloud and the user's computer should simply show a video feed of the UX that the cloud generates.

We should start this process early and all start sending our fecal samples to MS headquarters.

Error: Timeout. Please submit iris scan less than 60 seconds after fecal sample.

> requires a fecal sample So requires the user to log in?

Combine fingerprint biometric with fecal samples for a convenient "fecalprint" button. The user doesn't even have to go into the bathroom! It can be microslops version of Apple's TouchID.

Notarized document asserting that you've bullied a child. With witnesses.

I’m at the point to tell people (friends, neighbors, fellow parents, family, ie, not HN readers) to prolong the life of their existing computers and install what I think is the easiest windows equivalent on their computers: kubuntu.

Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.

The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.

Psst, they already managed to turn the start menu into something that won’t load under one second if you don’t have 3 GB/s NVME drive, and for a while even didn’t respect Fitts law.

I’d like some vibe coding be done such that I can move the task bar to the left vertically, similar to how MacOS lets me move the dock. It gets in the way of games when you mouse over the taskbar as you try to scroll down in many games.

The next step is mandatory id verification for the age check on login.

To protect the children.

Great! I can't wait for Clippy to tell me I need to eat more fiber. The future is awesome!

If it means I can install it without internet access then I'm willing to accept the trade offs

Or maybe vibe code a bug fix for said taskbar so that random icons don’t disappear after sleep.

That's a great idea the task bar could just shift to expose a link to sign up for azure/office/OneDrive/CoPilot subscription that the user misclicks on.

I think Microsoft underestimated how sensitive people are right now to anything that feels like control

In different canton (equivalent to US states) in Switzerland, you take the sample at home, and go to the post office to send it.

So why not to create a M365 account? International dispatch to the US :D

Anal folds are as unique as fingerprints. Please submit a high quality hole pic to Microsoft for identity verification

they should have made it a auto editing script

s/Microslob/Macroslob/gi

that would be honest as there isn't anything micro about that slob anymore

I can really see them ship the first, that's at the same time very funny, and quite sad.

>Drink verification can

We have to make sure each button loads sequentially on the screen in the "Accept" position, starting with the "Cancel" button before moving it to its eventual home. This ensures you never develop quick navigation habits by constantly moving your targets around from underneath your cursor.

Will the oral and anal probe be clearly marked, or will you only get a warning of "swap the probes" after pushing them into wrong holes?

Windows 11 was built without agentic slop. That's a deduction from the timing of its gestation.

Windows 10 was released in January of 2015.

Windows 11 was released in October of 2021.

So this software disaster is entirely human-made. It's human slop.

Just wait, it will get worse, when the team that built the fantastic Windows 11 builds Windows 12, this time with the power of AI amplifying their amazing system design skills, allowing them create even more slop, with an unprecedented developer and team velocity.

> a fecal sample

a micro shit (tm)

Someone misheard iris for anus? lol

“Your sample was insufficient. Please try again later.”

So in other words they'll fit right in

> These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government.

Not really. They want real power

Most HN readers would now, but in the case somebody new reads it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.

That's hilarious, I didn't realize you couldn't turn it off. I just tried disabling all the recommendation options and it still shows the category, except now instead of recommended items, it says "to show your recent files and apps, turn them on in Settings."

This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.

KDE Plasma community likes to recreate Windows environment and W11 application launchers instead of "recommendations" section have a more useful plain recently opened files. Which what Windows had not so long ago.

It can be ripped out using regedit, I'm sure.

It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.

If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.

What I heard is you would like some highly relevant ads to be at the top of your start menu for your convenience every time you want to start a program.

Oh, and have you heard about OneDrive?

Probably the AI blocked it

So non-employees join and provide free support to other users without having to pay them.

Same reason MS used a Perforce fork instead of Source Safe. Because the dogfood tastes terrible.

One of the executives at the late, great, Sun Microsystems once dunked hard on Microsoft by saying, "At Sun we don't make dogfood. We prefer to refer to it as, 'flying our own airplanes.'"

Why would anyone use Teams?

Dogfooding only works when the dog food is edible.

Microsoft employees largely use Macs, so no surprise.

Discord is owned by Microsoft IIRC.

The header takes half the page. It's very annoying, and as such not really funny.

Feel free to say microslop as much as possible, but it should be noted that many people will automatically dismiss your opinion when you do. I don't know if I agree with doing so or not, but it is more common than you'd think. And no, they aren't just microsoft shills.

but they make the vibes much worse by doing stuff like this

It's a monopoly. Unless you are a wealthy hipster with money to burn on Apple products. (They also spy on you.)

Microsoft have been bashed on the daily since forever. There's no way you joined the company without knowing it was happening prior to you joining, at the time of you joining, and after you joining.

For what it's worth, my take is Microsoft is the one Big Tech most aligned with us and the rest of the world, though HN is too Slashdot-pilled to accept it.

The primary reason being their business model relies mostly on making people productive, rather than getting people to click on ads or buy stuff, which as we're seeing, is much more damaging to the social fabric.

People don't like your company.

But they'd probably like you.

<3

I propose let's break up a bunch of these monopolies to give you and your colleagues more options, more competition for your resume.

There can be quite a big difference on the reception of a product and the working conditions. I think that's nothing too out of the ordinary in a lot of cases.

> create your own channel with your colleagues instead

Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.

Like, why have a public discussion if we can have a private one? Public discussions are important, especially as AI is largely a political project

If I were to bet on what would get a Microsoft Discord server shut down, I would have put money on discussions of the ties between Microsoft executives and Epstein. They should be happy if the worst thing that's happening is a mildly deragatory nickname.

Were they ever out of it? A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... Microsoft has been incredibly anti-consumer for the duration of their existence (even before Steve Ballmer made it blatent)

Our vocabulary is so stunted. Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?

Villain? More like geriatric.

Lets go further, year of the Hurd desktop!

Macroslop

After that. Microshlong

Crapple, probably.

Siri

Slopple

These days games run better on Linux, in case anyone didn't know.

this is personal anecdote, but I've noticed that the overall quality of comments has plummeted quite drastically within the last few months. It's a little disappointing since its why I left reddit. Thankfully, the insightful comments are typically still there- just typically buried further down the thread.

Tech feels more filled with hipsters every day. If the story is about any major company or product it's just dunked on for social credits. But anything that is outside that is considered interesting and worth further investigation. It's frustrating me to no end.

I have this problem with calc.exe. Sometimes it'll launch from the start menu, but often won't. I pinned it to the taskbar, but muscle memory is a powerful force, so I usually try to launch it from the start menu first.

Enshitification doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way. You have 10,000 systems all each interacting at a 90% success rate when it needs to be 99.999%.

They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.

It's kind of interesting that Microsoft is deemphasizing if not exiting making products for individuals to decide to buy. Contrast that with Google, who have to actively cultivate individual customers in order to have a large and reliable audience for ad based monetization of search, maps, and other free at the point of use products.

There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.

Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.

Suppressing dissent? Par for the course for them and their WEFfer mates.

They don't have to, because dispite how incredibly bad they are, people have shown that they don't care. According to the average user, Windows isn't bad, that's just how computers are. They don't care that there's any other way of doing things; the cheapest computer at Best Buy runs windows so that's what every computer must be.

Piggies love to eat slop.

> them doing this

Wouldn't any community that wants to encourage good quality conversations immediately ban everyone posting stupid slashdot-esque jokes like this?

...the AI agent sock-puppets pushing false positive narratives about MicroslopSlopSlop, and trolling anyone that disagrees =3

"Bad Bot Problem" (Computerphile)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg

I even registered microslop.ee (directs to .com) because of how much I dislike Microslop.

Well played

Microslop Coprolite.

I don't know for certain, but moderators (on a company Discord) are likely random people in a 3rd world country that are payed peanuts and that is their only income. If higher ups tell them "I don't want to see the Microslop word anywhere" they just do it.

You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.

Spamming "microslop" is obnoxious, filtering out childish behaviour is not obnoxious.

But if you don't want childish behaviour, Discord is an ... interesting choice.

Is "Microslop" really insulting, though?

They really showed him, didn't they?

> someone

It's Microsoft's official Copilot Discord. Microsoft banned the word