this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Nowadays Windows is filled with adware and is fairly slow, but it wasn't always like this. Was there a particular time where a change occurred?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

When was Windows 1 released?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago

I think there are two eras that have some overlap:

  1. Microsoft developed new versions of Windows to be more compelling by adding features, capabilities, new hardware compatibility, etc. I think this was the main era they were in from the inception of Windows to somewehere in the XP-Vista-7 era, and fully ended a couple years into Win 10.

  2. Microsoft developed new versions of Windows mainly as spyware to extract data from and about users to exploit themselves or sell to other parties. I believe this started late in the Win 7 era and really took off mid-Win 10 and is continuing to escalate.

Note: I don't think they ever really cared about their users needs or wants, because their main business strategy has always been elimination of competition as much as the law would allow. No one asked for the caramel pepperoni milkshake that was Win 8's half desktop half tablet UI, they incorrectly thought they could horn in on the iPad market if they half assed it just enough. Most of Win 10's history has been "Microsoft is going all in on [trendy bullshit]!" 6 months later "Microsoft is ripping out all support for [trendy bullshit]." Their inferior voice assistant, 3D, AR, AI, all this stupid crap no one wants. Microsoft's attempts at anticipating what users want in a computer platform began and ended with Microsoft Bob.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

Windows 7. Some may say 8.1 if they were willing to tolerate it, but most will agree that Win7 was the last “true” OS that wasn’t riddled with adware and telemetry collection.

Microsoft lost a lot of money on Win8 (and by extension, 8.1). That made them rethink their business model, and they shifted away from selling the OS. Instead, they gave the OS away and made money on the data collection. Because Win8 made them realize that the world didn’t want or need a new OS every other year.

It’s the same reason people don’t upgrade their cell phones every year anymore. At first, the hardware changes were meaningful, and you actually got large upgrades with every new iteration. You were noticeably behind if you had a phone that was two or three years old. But now that modern hardware design has slowed down, (and hardware changes are more akin to updates on existing hardware), people don’t feel like they’re behind if they put off upgrading for two or three years.

And this reluctance to upgrade hardware meant people and businesses weren’t constantly buying a new OS every year. So Microsoft lost a lot of money when Win8 launched and everyone collectively went “actually, I’m good with my current computer.”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

One another factor is hardware manufacturers started to screech at them to make Windows even cheaper for them, because Android is technically free (save for the driver licenses) in exchange for user data collection, so they started to kneel.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I'd go as far as Windows 2000. This new XP crap is too shiny, and why did they hide the controls?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

The same is happening with Windows 11 as well. People don't want to upgrade to it. With its pervasive adware and information gathering. The only reason the company I work for is buying Windows 11, is that you can't buy Windows 10 anymore.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Phones can have exponential growth in hardware capabilities, but the bigger thing is they don't need to get more powerful.

All the app makers want their apps to work on any device, so a 10yo budget phone with 1/60th the horsepower of a modern flagship will work just fine with most apps, and New phones are just way overpowered for what they actually do.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'd say Windows 8.1 was the last "good" one (as in B tier good), and Windows 7 was the last great one. Everything went downhill from here.

And yes, I'm considering Vista as part of the good ones.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Truth be told, Vista wasn't bad, it needed a bit of polish here and there but most importantly, you needed a good PC to run it smoothly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And it was riddled with issues due to lack of 64bit driver support. You could have released 7 instead of vista and ended up with some of the same issues.

I've long thought it was fine and subjected to misplaced ridicule.

Windows ME, however....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Win98 was so bad they released Win98SE.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It had the annoying habit of asking "Are you sure you want to run this?" too often; and early cheaper consumer-grade PCs that were really just moderately nice XP machines that could on paper even boot and run Vista that in reality were slow and had poor driver support. I had a Vista machine that was fairly powerful for the day and had decent driver support, like Gateway put some give a shit into it, and it was pretty okay.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

And I was one of the very few who were lucky enough to have one.

And it lasted me like, 11 years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

just after windows 7.

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