Ever since it's not their biggest source of revenue anymore
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Past times will always be better.
Its been a gradual decline over many years. I'd say the tipping point was Microsoft Edge or Windows 10 itself - that's around the time the explicit attempts to "monetise" users started.
When Windows went "free" the focus became how to extract as much money per user all the time, so the advertising and edge based spying / data harvesting stepped up a gear.
Its not a surprise looking back - the drive for all these companies with stock holders is "growth". That really means growth in the share price which means growth in revenue or profits amongst other tricks. Everytime a new generation of managers comes through they scrape the barrel for ideas and things get worse and worse.
I only use windows at work now; I've migrated all my devices to Linux (desktpp, laptop, media PC)
I dunno, but it might have something to do with external factors. Like, once upon a time Microsoft was sued by the US government under anti-trust laws for bundling a web browser in their operating system. Now MS force their users to experience unavoidable advertising when they try to use their own computers, and there's not a peep from regulators.
Yeah cause showing people ads is not anti-competitive
They hated him because he told them the truth.
The interface is garbage. I moved from windows 7 to linux with KDE desktop years ago, and my attempt to navigate Windows 11 lately was a disaster.
How do you fuck it up so hard?
When it became more profitable for them to develop it to be shit
Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0) was the last great version of windows. It was fucking fantastic.
I’ve also heard great things about Windows server 2008, but I had departed from the entire Microsoft sphere years before that.
*nix4Lyf!
There's not much competition, they can't make more money to increase shareholder value by improving the product because they pretty much have all the marketshare they need.
The only way to make more money is by monetizing your data and selling you more and more ads. Which they will do more and more year after year since they need to increase profits year after year for shareholders.
probably 8 or 10
I’m going to say Win8 & 8.1.
Say what you will about the UI, they did great work on the underlying kernel, file system and APIs. If they’d continued to refine it, it’d be damn near perfect.
They really started to lose the plot with 10; it kept a lot of what made 8 good (and steals a lot of goodwill from 8) but you can see the adware and telemetry start to creep in.
The next best I’d have to give to Vista, which also did some much needed revitalization, only to see 7 get the glory because Microsoft flubbed the hardware requirements and vendors were sloppy with drivers.
My favourite is NT3.5: full microkernel, no GDI in kernel space, no printer drivers in the kernel, less registry issues. We’d have skipped a lot of pain from the 90s and 2000s had Microsoft not went backwards with 9x and NT4.
vendors were sloppy with drivers
Didn't they arbitrary remade the way drivers are packed and installed so old hardware would be rendered obsolete? I feel like many producers owe MS money for that one trick. Especially since office peripherals come to chipped tanks and subscription services after that, while old and reliable tech became unusable unless you mess with drivers for a while.
Windows Me, Windows Vista, Windows 8, and Windows 11. These are all bad iterations of Windows.
I used ME a lot and never had trouble. I think I had just the right hardware cuz I know that many people had a hard time.
Not really slower, just more shit going on under the hood than ever before. Considering all of the novel ways to attack the operating system, the ubiquity and level of integration of computing in everything, the OS is a much higher value target than it used to be back in the days of Xp-7. However, MS has introduced numerous security features and significantly improved the built in AV. 10/11 is a hell of a lot more secure, but there is a performance cost to that. That and the software we run on top of it has only gotten more resource hungry and complex as well. There are also things that you might hate but are worlds better than they used to be. Updates are a lot faster, support automatic rollback and are practically flawless compared to the broken mess they used to be. We now have things that were never possible before, like first party tools to convert a MBR/BIOS-boot system to UEFI boot.
I'll concede the point about service advertisements, however depending on the edition that is suppressable. MS is not alone in its sinful capitalism however, MacOS is full of stuff like that too, they're just sneakier/more subtle about it. MS will have you griping about their promoted services or apps; Apple will have you licking their boots and not realizing it because you've deluded yourself. The only operating systems that are really free are the ones no company fully owns. I work with multiple different operating systems in an IT job, and the notion that it is acceptable to run old versions of Windows in this day and age or that they were objectively better is just nostalgic horseshit. It was always a corporate product, you're just chafing against that now.
windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I'm not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.
of course, while the base OS wasn't necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy
Best home screen ever
Windows 2000 was the peak - rock solid with no visual fluff. XP was 2000 with a childish skin on it and it's all downhill from there.
I’ve always believed that 2k was the best software they ever produced.
Oh man that was one of the few windows distros I never felt too compelled to reinstall. Perf just never degraded that much with a reasonably defragged drive (jesus I am dating myself with that statement)
To be honest I'd go as far back as XP and say that was fine, 7 was also but I've never liked the start menu etc since and the forced updates really just wind me up.
Microsoft has always made windows good... ... ... For them.
They must've stopped with Windows 11 because I'm still on Windows 10 Pro and don't see even a fraction of the BS I keep hearing about Windows having.
I think they tried on 8 to make something and it was a flop then they flipped their whole business model upside down when they released 10
From the very beginning, it always had particular features which were designed to make things worse for the users for some business reason for Microsoft. After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done - it wasn’t slow or lacking important features or unstable (relatively speaking, at least), and so the only changes being made to it from then on were adding crappiness to it for some reason related to business priorities or just simple stupidity. And so, it entered its slide.
After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done
There were a lot of big things happening in computer hardware: migration to 64-bit instruction sets and memory addressing, multicore processors, the rise of the GPU. The security paradigm also shifted to less trust between programs, with a lot of implementation details on encryption and permissions.
So I'd argue that Windows has some pretty different things going on under the hood from what it was 20 years ago.
Windows 7 exists, and there's no need to improve upon perfection. But there's no money in releasing nothing, so they release ad-filled "upgrades" to bring in more money from the doofuses who buy it.
How bad is security if you still have Windows 7 installed today?
Looks like 3% of windows users worldwide could help answer that question. Well, up to 3%… guessing not too many of them are too savvy.
I would have been happy to pay for continued improvements to DirectX and Vulcan and increasing security and minor useful incremental changes over time keeping the same Windows 7 playbook running. I wish I lived in the timeline where our greatest complaint with Windows is that it hasn't changed very much in the last 15 years.
Yeah, every UI change since 7 has been for the worse, increasing the number of steps required to get work done.
I heard someone refer to what happened from XP to 10 as "onioneering" because they just added layers.
To be fair, 10's Settings screen makes dealing with wifi and bluetooth much easier than 7
Yeah but they had to do that because bluetooth became much more commonplace between 7 and 10.
Although I'm not sure if it was like that out of the box or it was improved with an update.
This is something Apple got right. OS X 10.0 was good and they’ve made lots of incremental changes but didn’t just arbitrarily change the whole “centered application dock at the bottom and menu bar at the top” situation. When new form factors emerged, they just made a new interface and didn’t try to hot glue a mouse/touchpad OS and touchscreen OS together for the fuck of it.
Depending on who you ask, Vista or 8.
+1 for 8
That’s where they started to suck
NT 3.5 was the last version I’d consider “good” without reservation.