@benfell @Taco_lad @osnews I thought their work o the Metro interface and the (failed) attempt to clean up the massive amount of technical debt they accumulated in special one-off wizards and interfaces by Win7 (which they accumulated by ignoring the UX and maintenance of all the different tools which underly everything, which were stuck in Win31 in some cases, and just adding more code in a teetering pile on top), shipping a new conhost, new Terminal with OpenSSH and WSLg were steps bringing their OS up to par with MacOS and Linux for IT professionals, shipping twice a year feature updates on Win10 bringing the development process in line with the cadence Ubuntu and Fedora established rather than the 2-5y between updates of the past. Oh and throwing away Internet Explorer and develing Edge from scratch with a new renderer, bringing another major player into the web ecosystem. a Phone UI that people seemed to actually like that tried new things like how the used horizontal scrolling in a novel way. All of these things showed that _someone_ cared and was willing to greenlight projects to fix things.

They built up some goodwill and have pissed it away by being absolutely trash, with ads shoved into the OS and browser, lack of attention to detail, new features that work less well than what they replace, shoving LLMs into places where they don't belong, pointless, thoughtless UI changes just to juice some developers KPI, just the overall hostility where the OS is trying to squeeze revenue from you more than help you (like a bicycle), like pushing people into OneDrive for data redundancy instead of the local backups from Win7 (which doesn't generate MRR).

I'm sure there are a few people who care, you might run into thm on the Fediverse, but they are being drowned by executives and staff who are just trying to make money any way possible

@benfell Windows for Workgroups was quite reasonable for its time. And Windows 95 was a good move forward given that they were starting from there. And some of the other stuff they did around that time was at least well meaning if a bit misguided: NT, Access, etc. After that, nope.

@Taco_lad @osnews

@fr0zi @david_chisnall @osnews I don’t believe recent versions eagerly *download* at all; they show virtual files on your system (metadata), but you have to be online for the actual transfer to take placed.

I take some of Thom’s points — including: Windows should handle storage issues more gracefully — but some of this story doesn’t pass the smell test.