We’re a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I’d better take a peek at how things stand with Windows. I came across a story about Yusuf Mehdi, an executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, who apparently became the face of Microsoft’s “AI” push. After 35 years, he’s leaving the company, but not after pledging to continue pushing “AI” deeper into Windows 11.
Despite this intense backlash, Mehdi is doubling down on the AI vision during his final months at the company. In his LinkedIn announcement, he stated: “I will work through the next fiscal year to help reimagine Windows for the agentic era, grow Microsoft 365 services, and bring our One Copilot vision to life.”
Microsoft has recently scaled back on some intrusive Copilot features in Notepad, Snipping Tool, and Photos, but the executive leadership team still views AI agents as the inevitable future of the Windows desktop experience.
↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest
The numbers for Microsoft and every other software company who dove head-first into “AI” are clear: it’s one of the biggest bottomless pits of all time, and they’re all throwing money down the pit hoping it’ll eventually fill up and overflow. Meanwhile, 100 metres down in the pit, a dude in a leather jacket is holding out a bucket and collecting some of the money before it disappears into the void below. For Microsoft, “AI” represents a $235 billion loss (so far!), so the company had to do something – anything – to stop the bleeding.
They tried shoving Copilot buttons in every nook and cranny of its products, but users rightfully and understandably revolted. They’re toning it down in Windows, and recently, they’ve also had to tone it down in Office as users were horrified to discover a floating Copilot button in Word, Excel, and so on. People really do not want this shit, which puts these companies in a hugely precarious position: just how badly can they abuse the geese?
We’ll see just how much Microsoft will actually roll back its force-feeding practices, and I’m not excited to be partaking in the Windows 11 experiment soon.
Thom Holwerda,
Can you clarify if you’re going to use stock windows or are you going to try and mod everything to remove it’s anti features? I kind of feel that, in the spirit of the challenge, you should stick to windows as a normal user would and as microsoft intended.
Thoughts…?
Edit: Maybe spend two weeks with defaults, and then two weeks trying to tweak things.
Fully stock, so no debloat tools. I am, however, allowed to remove stock applications since we get that ability in the EU. Office is part of this effort – I will use Outlook, too.
Thom Holwerda,
Would be an interesting experiment. I don’t use Windows 11 outside of gaming, and if I had the choice, I would stay on Windows 10 for those tasks.
Let us know how it goes
I use 11 on my gaming rig and don’t see a lot of the crap that people complain about. My guess as to why is because I’m using the Pro version instead of Home. So maybe try that version, if you can.
Ah! So all we had to do this whole time was pay them more money? What a wonderful solution.
What I find weird about AI “agents” is that, for something that’s supposed to be very valuable (and cost a lot of money to provide), it has to be shoved down people’s throats like an unskippable cutscene. If you think about it, some “agentic tools” like Copilot have negative value, in the sense that Microsoft has to find something valuable that people are willing to pay top dollar for (such as a nice LG OLED TV or a nice Windows 11 gaming laptop) and inject Copilot in it in the form of an unremovable button in the most prominent (i.e annoying) places they can.
kurkosdr,
I agree.
Agents have a much higher bar than regular LLMs, since they are not only connected to your input, or even read only data sources, they have free reign on “tool calling” like direct file system management or Internet access.
Then we hear stories like Meta security chief had to physically disconnect her machine, since her agent decided to clean up her inbox by deleting all the mail. And of course refused to cancel on user input, as AI knew better!
I don’t think the problem is going to go away either. There are qualities inherent to the idea of an “agent” that incur risk that guardrails cannot protect against. Attempts to solve this will rapidly and inevitably begin hacking away at the very utility of having an agent in the first place.
One solution I’ve heard is having multiple agents babysitting each other. But this doesn’t scale cheaply or cleanly and also suffers from a bad chickenegg problem. Another idea is human approval, but if I ultimately have to babysit the agent to prevent it from wreaking havoc… what do I need the agent for? I need a useless middle-man like I need a hole in the head.
No computing system has ever been built that is impervious to hacking. We will probably never manage it, due to the nature of computing. If an agent is taken over, the hacker now has access to everything the agent does, and the authority to act on the user’s behalf. The courts are going to have some fun sorting all this out, and it will probably get ugly.
Baylan Tano,
I agree. Agents are inherently untamable.
And the only correct solution is a “man in the middle” approving every dangerous operation.
And even that might not be enough
“I have checked 200 old reundant receipt emails, shall I delete them, it is safe?”
“Sure, delete all”
“Deleting emails”
“Wait a minute, were they from my health insurance, I needed that for tax purposes”
“I’m terribly sorry, I should have double checked. But don’t worry I saved you 15MB of Inbox space”
“Undelete”
“Purging deleted emails…”
“Wait I did not approve that”
“You just approved delete all”
Not too uncommon in near future.
Picturing this feeble exchange using my minds eye had me rolling. Abort, retry or fail? Thanks for the laugh.
kurkosdr,
I also don’t like features being forced in front of users…computing is worse for it. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s microsoft, apple, google, samsung, or whoever…even mozilla. But this is par for the course in the industry now, uses are sheep in someone else’s agenda. Everyone does it and this is what technology has become 🙁
I’m with you. There are software packages I won’t even consider trying, Gnome being a notable example, strictly for this reason. But I’m not sure ‘force’ is an accurate characterization. They certainly impose their ideas on their users, but the only leverage they have is given freely. People could stop using the software. As a person that has avoided many things in life on principle, often at some personal cost, I refuse to accept that it is impossible. Many people just don’t care enough at the end of the day, and that’s fine. The only part that bothers me is when they complain later about results that were entirely predictable. Like, shut up. You chose to ignore the warnings, so you should just shut up now.
But how did it happen? How did we move from “the customer is always right” to the “we know best and you can take it or leave it” shitshow we have today? I think this is actually a very tough discussion to have because the answers are complicated, and also inconvenient with respect to other beliefs and positions that many people hold. I dont want to fall down a rabbit hole, so I’ll just say that many of the people I’ve heard complain about this situation entirely support this attitude in other areas of life. Many of them are working hard to build a world where people are only free to pick from among the “good choices” that experts and authorities have anointed. They have fostered this attitude and given social predators the confidence to employ them. Yet they have the nerve to complain about the result that could not exist without their participation and support. They are the monsters at the end of the book, yet actually consider themselves to be the good guys and gals on almost every question. It is vexing.
Just to be clear, because the internet does a great job of masking intent… none of this is directed at you. Your comment just set the table for me, that is all.
It is mostly cognitive inertia. Humans like to use mental shortcuts. Really thinking is energetically expensive, so shorthand is preferred. Once a thing is deemed the best choice, it is very difficult to have the human reconsider their previous classification. Even if the “best choice” has stopped being the best choice a very long time ago.
Take Windows. In the 90’s it was the best choice for consumers (even if not the best technological solution), because the alternatives were either very expensive Unix systems, pretty much DOA OS/2 or very immature FOSS systems. Network effects and inertia did the rest and therefore Windows is still the default. The question that really needs to be asked is if it still is the best choice. The number of people complaining about Windows has skyrocketed. The number of people defending the enshittification with, “You can turn all of that off.”, has risen to the same extent. As a Linux user, I am just wondering when (if ever) the continually increasing hoop jumping will outweigh the diminishing benefits of using Windows.
Maybe MS will never have to worry. New users are instantly used to the shenanigans of the Windows version they grow up with. A never ending treadmill of things getting worse.
r_a_trip,
That’s an insightful post. I think the ideas here apply to A LOT of topics, politics, religion, and I hate to say it but even intellectual topics like math, physics, CS, etc can undergo “shortcut thinking”. Ideally evidence could settle any and all technical debates, but topics become so darn dogmatic. I guess it says a lot about human evolution, we may use “mental momentum” to help cement concepts as ground truths and build up higher abstractions.. but then exposure to contradictory evidence can result in cognitive dissonance that doesn’t get reconciled.
I think these are keen observations. With regard to Microsoft specifically, I would point out that assessing scaled entities in situ can produce an “objects in mirror may be larger than they appear” effect, only in reverse. Mightier empires than Microsoft have fallen, with some being forgotten by history or reduced to a footnote.
Microsoft in particular appears to be at a strange crossroads. For all their success, one cannot escape the stench of desperation that pervades every move they have made for the last several years. They are acting like a group of people that know the jig is up and are working to try and stave off their inevitable demise.
And one thing I will say for people is that even the worst cases of inertia can be cured through shock treatment. If Microsoft rapidly makes things bad enough, even the laziest moron among us will muster up the motivation to start making changes. It seems like they may be in the process of doing this… time will tell.
The operating system should be stupid, dumb program launcher + device manager + barebones text editor and perhaps a bunch of links in a minimum web client to get a web browser. Anything else should be extra.
Windows should be Windows. If you want Paint, new Notepad, Copilot, whatever, then Microsoft should sell a Plus package or whatever.
macos should be just the Finder and textedit. If you want anything else, a plus package, or install your own apps. If you want the mega deep integration with the Apple ecosystem, get an icloud package.
Amazon should do one thing. It should not also do shipping, warehousing, etc..
The film studio should not own the theatres, the streaming services and the ISPs…
SpaceX should fly rockets. Starlink should have been a separate company, xAI???? Bite me.
Americans got rid of Standard Oil after much effort and 100+ years later everything is a stupid Standard Oil and we all suffer for it.
Shiunbird,
That turned into a rant about everything 🙂
Having a minimal install, though not necessarily for everyone, would be good to at least offer. Some linux distros do offer minimal installs – no forced bloat, small base system and then install what you want on top. This is my preference as well.
People who need the Plus version would know they need it. Let the market speak.
Just as another commenter said above: if AI is so valuable, people would cause a Windows 95 style launch stampede to get it. Did Microsoft have to shove Windows 95 down everyone’s throats? No. It was clearly better than the version before (and they marketed it well).
I would buy Windows (pure edition), my grandpa would buy Windows Plus, all good.
There is symmetry in what you suggest, and perhaps many things would be better organized in that way. But it is unnatural, that is, not aligned with human tendencies. I’ve written some software, and almost every time have felt the tug towards adding “integrations” and expansions. I forget the saying, but it was something like every program will eventually turn into an email reader. When I’m programming, I find the urge to do more than the original mission very hard to resist.
Perhaps the new AI programmers will do better… :p
There’s the pipe. There’s dbus. There’s OLE (lol). We can consume and integrate with the outside world without “mission creep”.
I find unacceptable that Outlook now takes longer to load than it did under Windows 95, 8MB of RAM and a Pentium 75. It’s truly pathetic.
The problem is that every publisher wants to keep everyone under their umbrella and charge it all the time so they make it hard for the data to be portable and they punish you for every interaction you do outside their environment. We end up with vendors that are hostile towards their users.
Copilot is classic Microsoft: make it so hard to not use it (or to use something else), that people will end up using it. It’s like making Internet Explorer or Edge the default help reader. It was so hard to get rid of Edge ffs.