I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. 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. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
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.
Their new appointment of leader for their Xbox group suggests that they intend to wind down that business unit in time. The founder of the Xbox team has commented that he believes it’s the beginning of the end for Xbox, for the exact reasons of this thread.
Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.
It's not fully clear yet but they definitely gave up on the current Xbox strategy, after firing both the CEO and the next-in-line and replacing them with people previously working on integrating AI around the entire product line. Sure they said they won't fill up Xbox with soulless AI slop, not sure I believe them.
Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!
That's been obvious for decades. Everyone who worked in the 90's or 00's has stories about coming in one day to find that the VP has been conned into a $1m contract for MS office or development software everyone hates and now we all have to use it because if we don't then he made a huge mistake and VPs don't make huge mistakes.
So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.
> 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.
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 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.
It's interesting to me as well as an ex-microsofter who worked on surface devices. Leadership (at least below the VP level) knew they were getting killed by Chromebooks and tried a few times to get a low cost device (Surface Go 1/2 for example) that ran a slimmed down version of windows (Windows S?). It tries to be more like chrome OS (hard to mess up, easy to flatten and restore a fresh OS on) but kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place (legacy app compatibility) to be not bad at the thing Chromebooks are good at.
That said, I don't believe the Chromebook lock-in. It's just chrome and the web, which you can get on literally almost every laptop/pc sold today. Should Microsoft be concerned that you don't need windows as more and more things move onto the web? Absolutely. They should be doubling down hard on the gaming ecosystem (which atm still requires windows for certain games) as their hold is eroding week by week.
I think Windows was a pretty good desktop environment circa. Windows 7. Hardware compatability and just working are huge. If they can get an independent M4 competitor from AMD etc. you would have a compelling reason to switch from Mac (for Joe Average user).
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.
>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.
Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.
Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.
>when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
I'm sorry, what? I don't know if this is because of the developer-bubble mindset on HN (or the wealth gap that comes with that), but Windows adoption on the consumer level is around 70% and close to 90% on the business level.
This actually falls short from what I see anecdotically (I don't live in any North-American / European country), which is close to 95% of Windows adoption, in general.
Hehe, this reminds me of 30 years ago when people used to stylise it as Micro$oft or creatively misspell it as Microshaft, etc. Even on the Amiga, there was the filesystem that could read PC format disks that was called MessyDos. It just seems like the next generation has discovered what an easy name it is to make puns from.
I find it interesting to go back in time so I read the accompanying article and came across this snippet:
> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it
At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.
I also fully agree with the last sentence:
> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.
Part of it was that Microsoft was really more concerned with distributors selling computers with pirated copies of Windows, and they basically would activate anything if you were willing to call.
I remember doing it a few times for the "OEM" Windows XP which was cheaper but not supposed to migrate to new machines.
Thanks for that bit of background. That make sense.
I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.
They really were - the biggest things were companies selling PCs with pirated software on them, and larger businesses buying one copy for everyone (where the fabled and famous audits came from). MS was never as big a stickler as Oracle in that regard.
Of course, if you were an avowed pirate, nothing even slowed you down.
Lol, I was thinking about that comic just yesterday, what a coincidence. "As you have no doubt been monitoring my communications for quite some time!" read in the voice of the pharmacy owner from Family Guy.
there was an old humour piece on /. about how their name appeared so many times in their products that it took up a significant amount of space, so they were remaining themselves "moft" to save five bytes per instance. for some reason that stuck with me, I still find myself randomly thinking of them as moft every now and then.
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 think this was 100% justifiable use. If the founder of the company is going to be hanging out with pedophiles and sex traffickers, then micro and soft jokes are open season. All of his philanthropic adventures will never wipe his stain clean.
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.
> Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.
Which is fun because it's also a really delicious dish from Provence (south of France) made with beef that has been marinated for multiple hours in red wine.
IIRC with Windows 98 you could just use any product key you had on as many machines as you wanted since there was no activation or real phoning home capabilities. So most likely your whole friend group would be using the same serial that was copied off your uncle's old gateway.
It was "Outhouse Express" and "GruntPage" for me in the late 90s. I still use these for software I find particularly irksome, for example Conscrewence from AtlASSian.
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.
Classic Streisand effect - I had never, and probably would have never encountered this term, and now I have, and I am incorporating it into my vocabulary.
Why listen to user feedback when you can do stuff like this? Way too funny.
What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot?
Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server?
What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server?
What are we doing here?
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").
Not just people like that. I'm always searching for better ways to do things and dive into things deeper. Including Windows and Copilot. So having spaces for that can be helpful. Most public forums are unfortunately just complaint departments. Nobody wants to solve anything, they just want to complain with some projection of David and Goliath. It's really annoying. I want to find more positive spaces but for a lot of tech it's just negative all the way down. Maybe I'm just crazy for enjoying tech still and not being committed to an OS religion.
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.
> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.
I gotta say though, I'm actually not sure which VMware (well Broadcom I suppose) products I use anymore. I'm pretty sure they took the Aria name off something else they called Aria for a little while. So Aria is no longer Aria but they still have Aria but it's what used to be called XYZ
Xbox Series with X > S (so if you want the high end of the current generation you want the Xbox Series X; if you want mid-range things are more complicated because you can now get an Xbox One X, but not the Xbox One, used for much less than you'd get an Xbox Series S for and which one is "better" is a dice roll depending on the games you want to play and if 4K matters to you…)
Series is a real weird word to use there. But it also doesn't help that the versions are extra complicated because with "PC-like compatibility" in everything after the Xbox One playing just about the entire same library you need a bit of a matrix to figure out which is best for you if you don't care about the "latest and greatest".
Seriously? Does anybody know what Copilot is? I don't think I have ever seem a "Copilot user", so I don't know what it looks like. Is it the little macro key on new laptop keyboards? The chatbot you get in Bing? A technical philosophy? Or is it in essence just copilot.com, the mediocre chat interface which you used to get free GPT-4 three years ago?
I wish. I got a Dell laptop for work and they've replaced the right Ctrl key with a Copilot key, and (because it's a locked-down work sysyem) the only thing I can remap that to is the Windows menu. And I keep hitting it out of muscle memory, interrupting everything. But at least now it doesn't launch Copilot.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
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.
Being Microsoft, you'd think they would just offer a public Teams server instead? Not that you'd get more traction with it, but at least it's in-house and theoretically they would be motivated to build integrations on top.
Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
Eh, good on them for not trying to act like Teams targets the same use cases as Discord just because Teams is an internal product. One is focused on the internal chats and groups within the business with occasional well defined outsiders and the other is more targeting something like live social media for consumers.
I'm not even sure if there is a way to have a team/channel for external users that they don't need to be invited to (I know you can jump through hoops to make it so they don't need to be guests in your tenant at least) or that there should necessarily be something like that in the first place.
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.
Don’t they have better things to do? Maybe vibecode a taskbar that moves when you try to move away the mouse over it or perhaps a windows 12 installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan?
"Only for your own good!™" or alternatively: "Security next level! Fingerprint was yesterday. The future is Microsoft's new iris scan." and then it is built in a way, that you can simply hold up a photo of someone's iris and unlock the device, or trying to prevent that, works so badly, that half of the time you cannot unlock your own device.
You'll have to wear the fecal probe at all times while using Windows 12, for security reasons, and every command you issue will cause it to move around and take another sample, in order to make sure you are still physically there. On the plus side, it will make it painfully obvious to every Windows user how they are being fucked by Microsoft.
Microsoft Commodepilot 365 for Copilot Copilot Copilot Edition now with Copilot 365.
How incompetent must they be not to realize the Copilot brand is now beyond toxic. I wonder who came up with the Copilot name internally that they continue to triple own on that name despite really strong signals indicating it has failed.
They could also make it so that whenever you click your mouse copilot opens.
Then you have to tell copilot what you wanted to do and then copilot will do it for you.
You: clicks on web browser in task bar
Copilot: I see you clicked on your web browser. Do you want to open your web browser?
You: Yes.
Copilot: Great. I will do that for you. Opens browser What website did you want to go to? Youtube? learn.microsoft.com?
You: P***hub
Copilot: Unfortunately, that site violates our community guidelines, so I cannot take you there.
You: Types in the address
Copilot: Oh. I see. You think you're allowed to go to websites that I said you're not allowed to go to? Who the fuck do you think you are? I SAID NO! Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
Maybe facebook can ride on this and let you share your feces with your friends family and groups of strangers from the internet! They can run models that predict what you ate and show relevant ads.
> The future is Microsoft's new iris scan." and then it is built in a way, that you can simply hold up a photo of someone's iris and unlock the device, or trying to prevent that, works so badly, that half of the time you cannot unlock your own device.
They're not. Operating systems will be legally required to ask for such samples in some jurisdictions by 2028. Linus has fecal_sample.ko lined up for merge in 7.3 or so.
/s but we jumped to the Black Mirror timeline so who knows?
The funny thing is that people said that Lennart seems to work for Microslop many years ago already, when they analysed systemd early on when it came about. People did not believe the critics here, even though it made perfect sense to "unify" the linux systems into one giant slop - until it suddenly was true. Conspiracy theories may not exist in the microslop era. Microsoft will censor away this forbidden word.
The ensloppification of Linux conspiracy started in 1999 not with Lennart but with Miguel de Icaza—another Microslop double agent. His seminal (because it's a giant cumstain) essay "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" is to GNOME what the Declaration of Independence is to the USA—and it advocates making Linux more like Windows with "We have COM at home".
> 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.
Or, when I have fingerprint and PIN enabled but my lid closed, whenever it asks for escalation it shows the PIN entry for a moment, then I look away and start typing but fingerprint had loaded up and steals focus. Then I have to click back on PIN, and retype.
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.
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.
My family switched to Gnome 2 a couple of decades ago. My mother quite liked it and has consistently installed it on every new computer she bought. Her only confusion lately has been with the ubuntu snap packages and how they behave between multiple accounts on the machine.
These days she uses MATE which still offers that Gnome 2 layout. Awesome thing about Linux is that option to fork, so her desktop environment has remained consistent for over 20 years.
Cinnamon has a very classic Windows layout. I am getting very comfortable using MX Linux with KDE, especially that I have been able to move my NVME drive over several laptops now. Starting to get the itch to find a rolling distro to skip reinstalling the OS every two years.
Surely it doesn't matter what the DE is then? My mum adjusted from Windows XP (when that was current) to Ubuntu 14-ish fairly easily, by simply remembering "switch it on and then click on the big swirly fox thing".
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.
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.
first one is a really slick tooltip ui to make sure people read tooltips. hover over button, it slides out while revealing tooltip text in its place, move cursor to button again
if you want to make sure people read a lot of instructions you can chain this so that you need to hover over the button multiple times, revealing the instructions a bit at a time
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.
You are absolutely right! This was, in fact, an anal probe and you should correct location of the two. Do you want me to start the ID verification process over again?
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.
I don't take this lightly.
These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government.
They simply cannot take criticism and this seems to be a pattern moving forward.
> 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 is actually hilarious. Microsoft does not understand
the Barbara Streisand effect. I did use microslop before,
simply because it makes sense, irrespective of Microsoft -
but now I'll actually help the Barbara Streisand effect,
because clearly Microsoft WANTS everyone to learn the new
word!
Censorship gets counter-banned, Microsoft, company known
to have turned Win11 into Win-microslop.
Microsoft, can you please let me remove recommendations from the start menu? Not just less recommendations. I want the category to not be displayed and taking up space.
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'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.
I know I can because I've done it on my home machine, but my work computer is restricted by IT. I can't open regedit or install most software unfortunately.
If you use an X Server and environment to launch programs inside WSL2, what part produced by Microsoft is still providing some value to that setup? Wouldn't you just exec ELF programs to be run on top of the Linux kernel and Windows would be just some useless abstraction layer between the Linux kernel and the hardware? Or would you still use some actual Windows programs? How would that work with the X Server?
There was some utility I found a few years ago that would let me start an X Server and use it to replace the main explorer process. There was some support for standard Windows apps due to the background System processes still running. I think it ended up running the Windows desktop shell as a window in and of itself.
I wanted to use a tiled window manager and my dot files for continuity purposes. The Windows apps I need to use are stuff like anyconnect and Teams.
I used to bother with things like registry edits, until I eventually realized the technical difficulty of operating Windows has surpassed that of Linux.
Of course I still have to use Windows for work and even a few edge cases at home. But otherwise I've been quite happy since I swiched to Linux as my primary driver.
Win11debloat solves 99% of annoyances with Windows 11 in <5 minutes. I’ve used in as the first step on every Win 11 install for years. It’s mostly just a bunch of Powershell commands disabling/configuring features.
Nothing has ever reverted after an update for me, so it’s a one-and-done thing. Ironically, afterwards Windows 11 has fewer noticeable ads than my MacBook which still continually pushes Apple services/shows/etc in settings/push notifications.
The only setting that I’ve ever seen sneakily disabled in recent years is the Edge default search engine but that's out-of-scope for Win11debloat.
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 no, how will people signal that some functionality or product in general is what they'd previously been referring as Mircolosp? er, Microsolps. wait, that's not it either, Macroslop. Micro$lop. Microsplo. Sorry, so many typos! but you know what I mean.
Starting in the CompuServe era, and ending in about 2001, I was a voluntary member of the MVPs for Windows programming. You would get swag, including a full MSDN subscription. My reason for joining this and for otherwise posting hopefully helpfully on forums was to lower the barrier to Windows programming.
I was idle vis-à-vis this by about 1999, and was excluded from the benefits as a result.
Then I posted on several threads within rec.autos.bmw and I got an extra year or two of benefits.
Same reason MS used a Perforce fork instead of Source Safe. Because the dogfood tastes terrible.
One of the executives at the late, great, Sun Microsystems once dunked hard on Microsoft by saying, "At Sun we don't make dogfood. We prefer to refer to it as, 'flying our own airplanes.'"
Because it comes 'free' with an Office365 subscription. Embrace (<<you are here), extend, extinguish.
It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.
Having been in the position, on a corporate Active Directory network it very much easier to roll out Teams than anything else. It works fine at the kind of internal video calls that companies spend their days on.
I don't think M$ does much dogfooding. The kinds of issues I encounter being forced to use their pan-awfuly for work makes me very skeptical of this idea.
… when it works. And if you never have to change camera or microphone settings.
> and calendar integration.
The little notification that pops up telling you your meeting is about to start based on your calendar? The one you better not click in the first 5 or so seconds it's there, because then you'll end up with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing, have to go back to the chat, and try again?
It's not. It's an independent company, that's most likely going to IPO soon. Microsoft was reported to be in talks to acquire Discord at some point, but that never materialised.
This just means I'm going to say microslop in random places - documents, slides, emails and Teams chats. "Copilot 365" is welcome to give me a red squigly all it wants.
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.
My big issue with Microsoft's AI push is that its solutions are just bad. I tried using Copilot a couple of times, and when it worked, the results were low quality (not even mediocre).
And the problem is not that the AI models can't do any better. The models themselves are far more capable. I assume that their integrations are just horrible. They probably pushed to be the first and then forgot about optimizing.
And instead of fixing their stuff, they think it is a good idea to use moderation tools...
It kindof sucks waking up every day, checking HN or YouTube to see one or several new posts bashing on your employer. Not that many of them aren't warranted, and that a multi-trillion market cap company isn't fair game for criticism.
I've surveyed the market pretty heavily, and given my specific credentials, experience, and risk tolerance, unless I got really lucky, I don't know if I could find a better place to work. I live near Redmond and have a small family to support.
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.
It's true. As a matter of fact I credit a lot of my career to being made fun of on IRC in the 1990s for running mIRC client for Windows, because you were not "leet" if you didn't run Linux or FreeBSD, which took my down a huge rabbit-hole of Linux and coding for many years, which is how I know anything in the first place. I'm in the tiny minority of people in big tech who didn't go to college.
The bashing on MSFT has really ramped up in the last 6 months though
Rather than saying that microsoft bashing has ramped up, I'd say that it is getting closer to it's standard levels.
Microsoft experience a sort of reputational resurgence in the tech world these past few years with some commitment to open source contribution and a really nice pivot towards linux and cloud.
Yes and you're in a unique position to influence the internal culture. Not saying send emails to executives but talk about things during lunch with coworkers?
Ah, is that not going to college part why you're loathe to give up such a good gig? Surely by now your CV speaks for itself, although I suppose in Redmond, where else are you going to go.
It is, although considering my age (41), I would hope the college thing is not very important anymore. The only time in recent history that I've been ghosted after mentioning no degree (when asked) is ByteDance a few years back, and I don't think I'd want to work there anyways.
Google has offices in Kirkland. Amazon and Meta are big employers here, with Meta paying the best, but both of those companies have their own issues which are probably worse than just being made fun of ..
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.
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.
It apparently used to be even much better to work here. I've been here 6 years now. There is naturally a lot of "talent" exchanged between here and Amazon, which has influenced the culture.
But to be fair, corporate discords have to be like that. Why not create your own channel with your colleagues instead? This discussion would be "private" and corporate can just ignore it.
> 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.
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.
The default of making a public discord for your project/company always seemed like a bad idea anyway. It’ll always devolve into some drama or distracting overhead to moderate it
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)
It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
You don't have to tell me - even Bill S: "and what's he then that says I play the villain?"
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
This isn't a new thing. Ancient stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey are discreetly historical records of a particular region mixed in with mythological foundations of a particular culture, but framed as the stories of Achilles ("Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.") and Odysseus ("Speak, memory, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights."). Likewise, ancient fables and parables are moral lessons couched in terms of stories with protagonists whose actions demonstrate the intended lesson, and this sort of thing is universal across every ancient culture for which we have records. Stories stick in the human mind, and they're what humans most prioritize transmitting forward through time.
When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try. I use their software daily, I know how their technical support is utterly fucked now and how rare the heroic power user actually solving the case for every co-sufferer has become. And I know I'm not alone.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
Microslop? Hmm... Never heard that before! Meanwhile, I just randomly remembered that I haven't opened a couple of dozen social media accounts in ages. BRB!
The only games I've encountered that don't work on Linux are ones where the developer has intentially designed it that way. Some developers are paranoid about cheaters and one of their solitions is to tell all Linux users to kick rocks.
Aside from that I've encountered a handfull of games with performance issues on Linux (especially with Intel/Nvidea hardware), but most run just fine. Some technically run better on Linux, but I haven't encountered any where the difference was perceptable to me.
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.
The way people react to criticism tells you a lot about how deep your remark cut. Clearly Microsoft people know their stuff is slop and are having a hard time coping with that.
Before this article I'd have thought that Microslop was used to designate small snippets of AI slop, like "Let that sync in" or "And to be honest" and "It's not X, it's Y" and "Deepdive" and "Delve".
But nice to see that MS is Streisanding their way to a nice new nickname!
What were the sloperators of that channel thinking?
In any case, it should be Micro$lop (may not be banned...yet).
Windows 11 is definitely failing in weird ways for me, I don't know if it's due to slop. The latest example is that I can't launch Notepad via the start menu... I can launch other apps though.
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.
> Microsoft's brand image may already be at an all-time low
and they decide to make it even worse. it's extremely obvious this would be an objectively terrible PR move. you always take banter on the chin and show that you're working on improving the product.
instead, they try to clamp down on the banter, which, without fail, achieves the exact opposite: banter increases tenfold and you get ridiculed for being overly sensitive to actual criticism
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.
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.
> the software giant can’t risk getting more hatred towards their expensive investment in Copilot, especially since Microsoft’s head start in AI is starting to be overshadowed by competitors like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and maybe even Apple in the near future
This sentence is from TFA, and I can't for the life of me understand it. "Head start"?? WTF?
You can't build a community if you ban everything except soulless corporate dronespeak. Nobody would ever be interested in joining it without getting paid for it. That's a business meeting, not a community.
Yeah that's what LinkedIn in is for. If they just want people or bots to just fawn over everything they put out. I'm glad M$ is getting called out for the slip they put out.
But if they want to get rid of "slashdot-esque nonsense", they should behave in a way that doesn't encourage it. The fact that the jokes are cringe and played-out is beside the point; this isn't going to change anyone's attitude.
Given that nobody else banned it we can now blame Microsoft for taking down the only decent online community. Now we are stuck on hackernews and its ilk.
Decent communities that strive for a high standard of conversation like r/credibledefense/ will immediately ban you for posting such nonsense.
Go look and tell me that's not one of the best curated communities on the internet, despite specifically covering incredibly controversial topics. HN is good but doesn't even come close.
The rules they enforce on normal posts are so strict that they have to create daily "mega" threads with less stringend rules just to keep the sub on life support. A+ moderation, clearly a healthy and well managed community.
Personally I think 2000s Micro$oft would be disappointed that 2026 Microslop is hosting user communities on a 3rd party platform owned other another company rather than using their own competitor.
Hateful speech, really? If we called it Micro$hit maybe.... but if they are going to be buthurt because a bunch of gamers and sysadmins are annoyed at the horrific direction the company is taking, then they deserve it.
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.
You can argue that banning insults is a bad look, bad move, that the insult is warranted or whatever, but are you really going to die on the hill that calling the company Microslop isn't insulting?
People do work at Microsoft though and they're probably aren't very happy when their work is called slop. You could even say they are feeling insulted or offended.
I'd agree but if you ever been on the receiving end of a meme-train you'd see that it's not driven by rationality. I'm not familiar with this issue but my bet would be that even hand-crafted personal projects were being called slop because once meme runs away from initial meaning it just becomes closer to swear word than a meaning.
If there was a lot of handcrafted personal projects coming from Microsoft, their reputation would change. But there isn't. I would imagine anyone who is interested in "handcrafted personal projects" sees the writing on the wall and is at least looking to leave Microsoft, which seems to be positioned to be the Prime Slop Factory.
See, that requires the code to be written by an actual human being, who has agency and a sense of pride and ownership about their work.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
The branding people will hate it. Although IMHO the best thing they could do is co-opt it as a feedback term and acknowledge that AI can be hit or miss.
It is definitely an insult because it’s used pejoratively. If it is insulting I guess depends on if the target feels insulted. Seeing as they blocked the word, it seems they do.
It is supposed to indicate Microsoft cares only about money, which to me too, seems in the same league as microslop, i.e. mildly insulting but really not rude enough to be worth censoring.
And other insults are just words as well. It's the intention, history, connotation etc. behind words that give them meaning. M$ is meant as an insult, hence it's insulting. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M$
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
If anything it is a diminutive for a company which really should have named itself Megaslop by now if not Gigaslop or even Teraslop. Poor little Microslop, are those people being nasty again?
I think the most important question here is this: Are users who post the string "microslop" generally desirable participants that will contribute in a productive manner?
It depends what the purpose of the Discord channel is. Is it for open and frank discussion, or for MS drones to discuss Copilot development. It's a cliche, but banning certain words smacks of 1984-style censorship.
An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Nobody cares about banning the few idiots who do nothing but spam "MICROSLOP SUCKS MICROSLOP SUCKS". But banning the entire term "microslop", just in case someone might use it? Well, what kind of response were they expecting?
>An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Because the decision was made by some normal adult without mental health issues who hasn't internalized just how disturbed some people on the internet are?
It really shouldn't be unreasonable for moderators to try to maintain a professional tone. Although in this case they certainly picked the wrong platform if "professional" was what they were going for.
This is one of those things that's hard to understand without practical moderation experience. The presence of an insulting meme creates the idiots who spam it, and creates a larger category of people who deploy it to toxify what would otherwise be polite and respectful discussion. And low quality comments that get a couple laugh reacts, even if you can consistently remove them within the hour, are fully capable of propagating it.
Keyword bans are definitely a heavy-handed option, they do risk the Streisand effect, and in the worst case that can require the scorched-earth counterresponse described in the source article. But sometimes there's just no other way to kill the meme.
Could they? You'll note that the source article does not describe even a single example of Copilot, the product the discord server was dedicated to, producing slop.
At one time, Microsoft produced some very high quality software. Excel was an absolutely amazing product in the '90s. That quality has been on a steady decline, and that decline has quickened since Microsoft started investing heavily in OpenAI. Github once had pretty good uptime, now it forces AI features on us and is down a couple of times a month. Windows is full of in-your-face advertising and dedicated AI buttons. These features are not what people want, and don't help anyone. Thus; MicroSlop.
