So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:
Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”
Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.
Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
That was in 2014, doesn't explain the timing of these increasingly common broken patches. I had never gotten as many calls over Windows Update messes from my non-techie family as last year.
There's a great talk that explains how code structure ends up looking like the org chart, and every subsequent organization chart layered on top producing spaghetti code. Windows is now old and full of spaghetti code. Then Microsoft layed off all the expensive seniors who knew the stack and replaced them with cheaper diverse and outsourced staff. Then the people who can't maintain the code use AI and just ship it without any testing.
On a contrary note: if LLMs really are that helpful why are QA teams needed? Wouldn't the LLM magically write the best code?
Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages.
Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry
It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.
> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
We know this was the correct move because Microsoft's stock price has gone up tremendously since 2014, those in the c-suite received massive bonuses and the worlds most efficient system for resource allocation has deemed it so.
I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.
There seems to be a lot of internal factionalism that's showing up in the final product. I think this is a chromic disease that flares up every couple of years and is then clamped down on... but for whatever reason the lessons are never learned for long.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one
Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics.
If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene).
I will never ever understand this. Development and QA are two different mindsets. You _can_ do both, but you* can't be great at both.
I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch.
That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.
I fully believe highly skilled people can get a great benefit from LLM tools; probably not 10x; but enough that its noticeable.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
The argument I usually hear is that you only truly get the 10x improvements with <new-model> (right now, Opus 4.5), so they've only had a few months, not years. In a few months, it'll turn out that <new-model> wasn't actually capable of that, but <new-new-model> is, and as that's not been out long its unfair to judge so early. And so the cycle begins anew
Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
The distance between the promise and the reality really is huge. On some level I wished they'd just promise less, because it's not like LLMs compleatly useless. I don't find much use in them, but some clearly do. They do them. But since the entire economy has apparently bet the farm on AI, underpromising isn't really an option, while underdelivering is a problem for future Microslop and co.
Interesting thought experiment. In that alternate reality, their shareholders would probably be shouting "why would you give competitors access to this awesome tool?!"
I guess you haven't tried ZZK-5.6 with Maverick Agent? What prompt did you use? If it doesn't work, you can always try a swarm of agents with model hot-reload and re-spin. That will solve all your problems, write all your code and then make you a cup of coffee.
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.
Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.
Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.
Everyone should read "The Bear Case for AI" thread:
"The bear case for AI is that bringing 10x or 100x or 1000x more intelligence to America will not change anything because U.S. institutions are already designed to ignore or waste intelligence and have no idea what to do with any more of it."
I would like to point out that not even a week ago Satya Nadella stated that someone should finally do something really useful with AI because if no one does then they'll lose the social permission to burn all the energy on training and running the models: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that...
Mr. Nadella, why not lead by example and make Windows the most amazing operating system ever created with the help of Copilot? What's the holdup?
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
(1) a couple of years ago, LLMs for coding sucked pretty bad.
(2) LLMs are a force multiplier. If you start with a negative number, then your coefficient makes things worse.
(3) Microsoft has never been a place of quality. It's not organized for that, it doesn't have that as its philosophy, and so you should never be surprised that it doesn't deliver that.
Its a misunderstanding of costs. Its the same misunderstanding of thermodynamics applied to dieting. Inputs do not equal outputs, or even scaled outputs. In any dynamic system there are costs to storage and costs to processing. This is how you can increase your calorie intake and still rapidly lose weight, yes, I have lost 30 pounds that way.
In the case of LLMs the only way LLM use becomes profitable is if this condition are achieved:
If you want to see a 10x savings then multiply the cost of manual output by 10. While LLM profit is achievable in some scenarios a t0x improvement in most scenarios is highly improbable.
People are pointing their fingers at QA, and while that is a big part of it I think the bigger issue is, like you said, them not really caring about some of their core products. Windows 11 seems to exist purely so that they can earn passive ad revenue while vacuuming up user data, Office 365 is now just a pile of mature applications that are slowly getting worse and new applications that are too unfinished to be actively useful.
Growth at any cost. Once growth is unable to increase the wealth of the shareholders the money has to be diverted from elsewhere, via cuts. Money gotta keep flowing upwards.
But the second was always the case, windows and everything else is getting shittier so fast it would require a prompt explanation if we didn't have one.
exactly my thoughts as well - if LLM really were massive productive booms - then we would see the number of bugs in major software platforms going down - we would see more features - but neither is happening
I think it's naive to believe AI is used primarily for productivity boost. It's used mainly for cost reduction and to increase profits, even if quality and productivity take a hit in the process.
> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.
If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.
Microsoft has no "move-everything-to-Rust initiative" and never did. That was a bunch of clickbait created based on the personal comments by a single Microsoft developer.
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
+1 for SyncThing. No cloud, thanks. And unlike OneDrive, it actually works. OneDrive screwed me when I tried it, so I completely uninstalled it. Still on Windows 10 too. Not regretting it so far.
OneDrive slows my directory navigation to a pace reminiscent of mid-90s computing.
Double-click folder name, wait 5 seconds, douhle click next folder name, wait another 5 seconds. As such, I've moved my working directories out of the bubble in which OneDrive is (corporately) configured to operate.
This is 2026. All this processing power, storage and memory capacity and speed, network bandwidth, and we're regressing thirty years of performance gains. Bang up job Microsoft. I'm glad I managed to personally extricate myself from that particular squirrel grip a while back.
They don't have David Cutler to mow the lawns. I have worked in larger shops (smaller than MSFT but still large enough, almost 10K employees), and people in general are very forgiving about making mistakes. You would think it was a good thing, but what it shows was that no one cared and none took responsibility.
If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.
A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
There are fewer and fewer 'David Cutler' types and more and more 'Pavan Davuluri' types at Microsoft. Wonder if the blame is really down to AI or indeed a lack of attention to detail from a new kind of workforce.
Same thing happened to me last year: some files on OneDrive where deleted. It was random txt files that I use to log ma progress on projects.
I moved everything out of OneDrive and I backup on hard drives.
That is a shame because OneDrive was a very good product.
I’m not 100% sure if this will solve the problem, but I recall that if you open the explorer folder viewer and right-click on the pinned shortcuts on the left (Desktop, Documents, etc.), then in properties > location you can move the folder target.
Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?
Unrelated to the article itself, but I'm really not a fan of websites like this one hijacking the back button to show more articles. It feels like a mistake to have ever allowed websites to modify behaviour of the back button like that, although I'm sure it leads to some usability improvements elsewhere.
Here's a similar discussion[0], and here's my experience[1]:
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
If this is the case, Windows seems like it should be very important. Otherwise they can't deliver their subscription services. I'm not going to subscribe to cable TV if my TV is broken.
The largest Microsoft subscription account is the United States federal government. Windows/office/whatever else for every federal employee pays the company enough to continue development and offer it to the masses. I’m certain that the ability to collect habitual data on users is valuable to both Microsoft and the powers that be, for advertising and criminal investigation.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.
At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.
The competition is more fierce than it has been since before Windows 95 started the complete domination of the desktop market.
Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.
You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.
You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.
I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.
I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.
Monopolies destroy everything. This isn't a binary it's a spectrum. You don't even need total control of the market, just extreme dominance of it, to see this effect begin.
The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.
I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.
Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)
Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.
Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.
If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
No, they have choices, but many people just want to turn on their computer, watch a few videos, read some emails, pay some bills and then go do something else.
Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.
If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.
I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.
I seriously wonder if everyone in the Windows development team(s) are just vibe-coding everything now. I feel like all of these are rookie mistakes from the POV of working on an operating system. This is also the consequence of eliminating all QA and testing and forcing your users to do that for you. Admittedly there are some things that are hard to test (or impossible to) in an automated way, but that's what the old Windows hardware lab test machines were for.
Just checking into this thread for the record, I commented in one of these "update bricks windows" threads maybe a year ago about how I don't let my Windows 10 update, still haven't updated and everything is still working great!
If your device is working, after an update there are only two options, either it keeps working or it doesn't. Why roll the dice?
Realistically, what's the threat to me if I don't patch Win10? I know in theory if there's some big vulnerability discovered my system would be in danger of getting pwned, but realistically what are the chances of that happening? And if it does, how likely am I to even be affected by it if I'm not doing anything crazy, I don't even do much banking on my PC other than the online shopping.
I think the more realistic danger is that software eventually stops supporting Win10, but I'm still playing XP and Vista games here, so even that seems far fetched.
Yeah it's just a matter of how you evaluate the threat model, I might get hit by a wormable zero day, but I also think even in that case there's a good chance I see people flipping out on HN before I actually get hit and run the update manually. I think the odds of a vuln that materially effects my LAN are low, and actually I could lose my whole computer right now and I think I would still be vastly up on time saved over the past 10 or so years that I've been strongly anti-update.
Also worth pointing out that disabling most kind of updates reduces your threat surface quite a lot. If your system isn't pulling updates there's a much lower chance of malicious code getting in that way.
That's why I live very well with Win 10 without updates.
I downgraded in May last year from Win11 after months of frustration and headaches and since then everything works smoothly and peacefully.
Windows 10 LTSC IoT 2021 is the way to go, if you have to use Windows. Gets security updates until 2031 but no new "features".
You can't just pay for it like the Home or Pro edition because Microsoft is not interested in actually selling an OS as a product to users, but https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend.
I will say that 11 LTSC is also a solid option. I run it myself and I don’t have any issues with it, and it lacks a lot of the crap that Microsoft has been trying to shove in.
At some point there might be compatibility issues with Windows 10 (especially with it now being EOL) so if your a gamer 11 LTSC might be the better choice.
Month after month I read this stuff (along with the seemingly neverending gaming issues with MPO?) and think, yep, I will stay off Win 11 as long as I can
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
Open gpedit.msc, configure policies to disable automatic updates. At this point Windows is a virus that is useful for only playing computer games and should be avoided for any other purpose.
Heaven forbid any company ever come to the conclusion that shoving updates down your users' throats against their will might not be the best idea humans ever came up with.
This makes me wonder what the testing method is for this sort of thing. Presumably you'd do as much as possible in VM's to get repeatable states with updates from every conceivable starting point.
But what about physical machines? Exactly how many repeatable update tests on physical machines are done? You get a combinatorial explosion if you need to test on 100 different configurations for hardware and you have 100 different starting points in your pre-update OS image. But something like that (10k tests on physical machines, millions for VM's) is what I would _expect_ they are doing.
I expect this too, but at such insane scale, it won't catch everything, and no one should expect this. The only solution (as far as I know) is very slow releases (starting with something like 0.01% of users) and watching what happens.
Updated Windows 11 on Parallels: Has been stable since 2021.
Boot loop: Can't system restore. Can't roll back updates. Can't reset PC. Can't even enter safe mode.
All options ran into unexpected errors and cancelled out. Only option left was to shut down or "restart".
Had to clean install and attach the old virtual drive to a new installation to copy files across then copy the new installation's disk back to the old system as a replacement to ensure it was able to activate.
Seriously considering if I even need Windows anymore.
I haven't _needed_ windows in over 5 years, and I game pretty hard (though not much in the realm of anti-cheat compatibility drama). Bazzite is my daily driver now for development and pleasure.
I'm still on Windows 10, and the only issue I have is the huge nag-screen promoting Windows 11 that appears sometimes when I boot up.
No option to say "don't show again". If anyone knows how to permanently disable this intrusive Windows 11 propaganda screen, please share. I tried searching for a solution but the one I found - a registry change, didn't work.
I managed to turn it off. But forgot the details. Maybe it was the “RUXIM” binary? I think I unchecked the executable flag for that .exe, or I removed it from the task scheduler.
Switch to Windows 10 LTSC. It's easy to strip out all the garbage like the app store, it won't ever nag you, and is supported for longer than the regular version.
That's terrifying, as I currently have no boot stick. Does someone know a reliable free system backup tool for windows, in simplicity comparable to Timeshift on Linux Mint, which I can start from an USB Medium to restore a broken system? (I need to able to exclude some folders, like Steam games)
LLMS are a farce of productivity, one of the largest companies in the planet with Azure (cost reduction) AND their own inhouse chips and LLMS still can't get anything meaningful out of it, trillions of dollars spent, Lol.
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
I tried Win11 out for maybe a week before upgrading (I refuse to call it a downgrade) back to Win10. Explorer of all things being slow as molasses on my very beefy system was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, but also idiotic decisions like not letting my move the damn taskbar without hacky 3rd party software certainly didn't help me feeling frustrated with every minute of use.
I dunno what the fuck they're smoking at M$ HQ, it's truly baffling.
So happy being on supported, stable version. Every other Windows release is a nightmare and when I saw W11 empty task manager (yes, the bug still persists, of course no response from M$ and some private contact saying to "just reinstall it"), bootloop after defender signatures update and other funny stuff - waiting for Windows 12.
One is an operating system maintained and run by a diffuse community of people, (albeit a flavor of linux with the explicit backing of at least one large company), whose primary goal is to create and maintain a functional operating system that can be used by many people for many different purposes. The other is a product whose primary goal is to convince investors that the company is on a growth trajectory that will continue into the next quarter by extracting value from that product's customers. We've now seen decades of data that suggest disparate results stemming from these priorities in a lot of contexts. I think viewed through that lens, the reason is obvious and was inevitable over time no matter what your threshold of "sucks" is, so long as it has something to do with the thing's function as an operating system
It turns out that most of this stuff is not difficult if you're just trying to make a good computer rather than make billions of dollars for your investors.
no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
The only system where I had this happen was a Google Pixel 6a, where a system update irrecoverably corrupted all (encrypted) data which made it not boot on top.
It's particularly great Monday morning on your phone if you require 2FA to sign in to work.
Interesting. I bought a brand new Windows Arm machine the other day that was DOA: It booted with the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME message. I brought it back to Microcenter and exchanged it and the replacement works fine. I wonder if that machine was just updated at the factory before it shipped...
I'm a longtime Microsoft fanboy, but even I wait a couple of weeks before updating anything, unless there's an actual problem I need the fix for.
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
Vibe coding to the max. Forcing employees to use it and that’s the large scale result. Cause it’s garbage. Hands down on large scale it just doesn’t work. Especially on something the scale of an operating system.
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
The most impressive thing is that if they stopped putting out new features, and solely delivered security and optimization patches for Windows, it would unironically be the best no-frills platform. You could just keep milking steady upgrade fees.
But no, they have to go out of their way to accelerate the enshittification of Windows.
Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.
In case it gets edited, the last sentence currently reads:
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
Genuinely curious—what parts of Windows 11 do you like? I can’t find a single redeeming quality compared to W10, but admittedly I daily drive arch + macOS and only occasionally use my windows machine.
The multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, it's a huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.
There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.
Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).
The Start menu now allows me to do what I have been doing since, like, XP, using shellinks and folders in the taskbar: Sort the Program icons in categories (like "Coding", "Sys", "Tweak", "Web"), to find them easier. This is not totally buggy any more (On Windows 10 the start menu became unusable at some point).
In the taskbar I only have the most used icons. And the opened program instances are separated from the icons. That was doable on Win 10 and I think Win 7 too, using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, which is now dysfunct. But the same author has created Windhawk, which does the same plus some other cool things.
The Explorer is useless as ever. I am still using Total Commander with its filter-as-you-type, rename tool and button bars.
What I still miss is a tool like Timeshift on Linux Mint.
I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.
With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.
Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.
So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.
The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.
It seems like partially moving an app from one monitor to another is improved. Previously, this operation was quite laggy as Win10 must have been doing some involved calculations balancing the DPI between different resolutions.
Interesting - my annoyance with W11 is nothing to do with AI or CoPilot (or "Privacy", "Phoning home", the usual crap MS haters talk about), it's due to stuff like Windows Explorer getting seriously worse.
If it were the best, I'd be able to drag a file onto a taskbar icon to do something with it, like I could with every other version of Windows ever (and Mac, and Linux).
But it's reliability is bad? It doesn't crash as often as previous versions of windows sure, but instead ends up in various inoperable states that aren't fixed without restarting, which isn't really any better.
Dual boot with Fedora on my laptop, and my desktop at home is a Mac mini M4. I really like Fedora, it's my Linux distro of choice, but the experience is not as nice as on W11 in my opinion.
So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:
Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”
Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.
Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
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That was in 2014, doesn't explain the timing of these increasingly common broken patches. I had never gotten as many calls over Windows Update messes from my non-techie family as last year.
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> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department
A move no doubt encouraged by c-suites to demonstrate how effective LLMs are in the budget tally.
There's a great talk that explains how code structure ends up looking like the org chart, and every subsequent organization chart layered on top producing spaghetti code. Windows is now old and full of spaghetti code. Then Microsoft layed off all the expensive seniors who knew the stack and replaced them with cheaper diverse and outsourced staff. Then the people who can't maintain the code use AI and just ship it without any testing.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
According to Microsoft's top brass, Copilot (one of them) should easily be able to handle QA. So OP's point remains.
On a contrary note: if LLMs really are that helpful why are QA teams needed? Wouldn't the LLM magically write the best code?
Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages.
Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry
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It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.
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Let's hope for the catastrophic scenario. A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors. Please continue on this track to disaster!
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> Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one
I don’t think this is just Microsoft. Few engineers and visionaries that started these big companies are still at the helm.
It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.
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> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
We know this was the correct move because Microsoft's stock price has gone up tremendously since 2014, those in the c-suite received massive bonuses and the worlds most efficient system for resource allocation has deemed it so.
I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.
The shift from an engineer-led corporation to an MBA-led corporation has brought Boeing close to the brink of collapse.
At least we get Visual Studio Code for free
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There seems to be a lot of internal factionalism that's showing up in the final product. I think this is a chromic disease that flares up every couple of years and is then clamped down on... but for whatever reason the lessons are never learned for long.
So essentially, they need to turn quality around or suffer the thousand cuts of death like Intel?
Although. These companies don't "die" - it's more the consumers end up being abandoned in favour of B2B?
No one is blaming LLMs.
Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one
Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics.
If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
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> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene).
I will never ever understand this. Development and QA are two different mindsets. You _can_ do both, but you* can't be great at both.
* There's always exceptions, yes, yes.
Wholeheartedly agree.
I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch.
That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.
I fully believe highly skilled people can get a great benefit from LLM tools; probably not 10x; but enough that its noticeable.
The key thing for me is that it only works when the LLM is used for tasks below the devs skill level; It can speed up somebody good, but it also makes the output of low-skill devs much harder to deal with. The issues are more subtle, the volume is greater, and there is no human reasoning chain to follow when debugging.
So you combine that with a company that has staff in low skill regions, and uses outsourcing, and while there might be some high skill teams that got a speed up, the org is structured in a way that its irrelevant.
I think they keyword is "highly skilled." However, not everyone using the LLM will be highly skilled, especially juniors new to the industry.
The argument I usually hear is that you only truly get the 10x improvements with <new-model> (right now, Opus 4.5), so they've only had a few months, not years. In a few months, it'll turn out that <new-model> wasn't actually capable of that, but <new-new-model> is, and as that's not been out long its unfair to judge so early. And so the cycle begins anew
Very true. Look at the wikipedia article for "AI Winter" to see how old this cycle truly is...
Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.
Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
The distance between the promise and the reality really is huge. On some level I wished they'd just promise less, because it's not like LLMs compleatly useless. I don't find much use in them, but some clearly do. They do them. But since the entire economy has apparently bet the farm on AI, underpromising isn't really an option, while underdelivering is a problem for future Microslop and co.
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Interesting thought experiment. In that alternate reality, their shareholders would probably be shouting "why would you give competitors access to this awesome tool?!"
I guess you haven't tried ZZK-5.6 with Maverick Agent? What prompt did you use? If it doesn't work, you can always try a swarm of agents with model hot-reload and re-spin. That will solve all your problems, write all your code and then make you a cup of coffee.
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But web people can write css faster so I think it is a net positive?
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They weren't great before LLMs either.
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.
Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.
Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.
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Everyone should read "The Bear Case for AI" thread:
"The bear case for AI is that bringing 10x or 100x or 1000x more intelligence to America will not change anything because U.S. institutions are already designed to ignore or waste intelligence and have no idea what to do with any more of it."
https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/2014255931215716545
I would like to point out that not even a week ago Satya Nadella stated that someone should finally do something really useful with AI because if no one does then they'll lose the social permission to burn all the energy on training and running the models: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that...
Mr. Nadella, why not lead by example and make Windows the most amazing operating system ever created with the help of Copilot? What's the holdup?
Oh it did help.
Microsoft went all in on do more with less and fired/reorged significant part of the company.
Wouldn’t be surprised if the outage is caused by new team taking something over with near zero documentation while all the tribal knowledge was torched away
Or LLMs weren’t good enough yet years ago, but the growth curve looked so promising that an investment seemed a good idea.
Also: do you have a reference for “a couple years ago Microsoft [made] LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production”?
I know they started investing, mentioning future benefits, but don’t remember them saying their Windows development team (heavily) relying on it.
(1) a couple of years ago, LLMs for coding sucked pretty bad.
(2) LLMs are a force multiplier. If you start with a negative number, then your coefficient makes things worse.
(3) Microsoft has never been a place of quality. It's not organized for that, it doesn't have that as its philosophy, and so you should never be surprised that it doesn't deliver that.
Its a misunderstanding of costs. Its the same misunderstanding of thermodynamics applied to dieting. Inputs do not equal outputs, or even scaled outputs. In any dynamic system there are costs to storage and costs to processing. This is how you can increase your calorie intake and still rapidly lose weight, yes, I have lost 30 pounds that way.
In the case of LLMs the only way LLM use becomes profitable is if this condition are achieved:
If you want to see a 10x savings then multiply the cost of manual output by 10. While LLM profit is achievable in some scenarios a t0x improvement in most scenarios is highly improbable.
People are pointing their fingers at QA, and while that is a big part of it I think the bigger issue is, like you said, them not really caring about some of their core products. Windows 11 seems to exist purely so that they can earn passive ad revenue while vacuuming up user data, Office 365 is now just a pile of mature applications that are slowly getting worse and new applications that are too unfinished to be actively useful.
this reasoning is flawed.
wouldn't a for-profit company just balance the workforce for the productivity gained to increase overall profit?
some person is 10x 'more productive' (whatever that means) , let's cut 9 jobs.
Although to your grander point, employment during the LLM-embrace period seems fairly stable.[0]
[0]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/msft/employees/
It's not LLMs. It's returns-driven-development.
Growth at any cost. Once growth is unable to increase the wealth of the shareholders the money has to be diverted from elsewhere, via cuts. Money gotta keep flowing upwards.
But the second was always the case, windows and everything else is getting shittier so fast it would require a prompt explanation if we didn't have one.
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If they used copilot and it was years ago, I'm actually impressed there are no reports of Windows PC's exploding
exactly my thoughts as well - if LLM really were massive productive booms - then we would see the number of bugs in major software platforms going down - we would see more features - but neither is happening
so yeah we're being sold a bag of air
I think it's naive to believe AI is used primarily for productivity boost. It's used mainly for cost reduction and to increase profits, even if quality and productivity take a hit in the process.
Microsoft is not even using dotnet core and what not, internally. SLT is very hard on adopting AI, but not much on getting results
If anything, we see a decrease, not an increase.
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> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
> That productivity may not be visible.
I'm not sure what your take is, but this reads like goalpost shifting.
If one of the biggest orgs that practically mandates some amount of LLM use cannot surface productivity gains from them after using them for several years, then that speaks volumes.
Reality has a way of showing itself eventually.
Microsoft has no "move-everything-to-Rust initiative" and never did. That was a bunch of clickbait created based on the personal comments by a single Microsoft developer.
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I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
+1 for SyncThing. No cloud, thanks. And unlike OneDrive, it actually works. OneDrive screwed me when I tried it, so I completely uninstalled it. Still on Windows 10 too. Not regretting it so far.
OneDrive slows my directory navigation to a pace reminiscent of mid-90s computing.
Double-click folder name, wait 5 seconds, douhle click next folder name, wait another 5 seconds. As such, I've moved my working directories out of the bubble in which OneDrive is (corporately) configured to operate.
This is 2026. All this processing power, storage and memory capacity and speed, network bandwidth, and we're regressing thirty years of performance gains. Bang up job Microsoft. I'm glad I managed to personally extricate myself from that particular squirrel grip a while back.
+1 for Syncthing so that I can take the opportunity to correct the very common mis-PascalCasing of its name.
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They don't have David Cutler to mow the lawns. I have worked in larger shops (smaller than MSFT but still large enough, almost 10K employees), and people in general are very forgiving about making mistakes. You would think it was a good thing, but what it shows was that no one cared and none took responsibility.
If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.
A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
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There are fewer and fewer 'David Cutler' types and more and more 'Pavan Davuluri' types at Microsoft. Wonder if the blame is really down to AI or indeed a lack of attention to detail from a new kind of workforce.
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On his garage interview, he mentioned nowadays having fun with XBox Cloud hardware running Azure Linux.
https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10730
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Same thing happened to me last year: some files on OneDrive where deleted. It was random txt files that I use to log ma progress on projects. I moved everything out of OneDrive and I backup on hard drives. That is a shame because OneDrive was a very good product.
"OneDrive was a very good product." - Was it though?
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I’m not 100% sure if this will solve the problem, but I recall that if you open the explorer folder viewer and right-click on the pinned shortcuts on the left (Desktop, Documents, etc.), then in properties > location you can move the folder target.
Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?
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Unrelated to the article itself, but I'm really not a fan of websites like this one hijacking the back button to show more articles. It feels like a mistake to have ever allowed websites to modify behaviour of the back button like that, although I'm sure it leads to some usability improvements elsewhere.
Just browse with JavaScript off, or with NoScript. People think it's inconvenient, but it's really not.
The whole form-resubmit-on-back thing is always annoying, but a proper redirect after submission fixes that.
does not happen on brave
Here's a similar discussion[0], and here's my experience[1]:
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
How can a company this big fail so hard in what one would consider their main* product still baffles me.
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
Because they no longer see windows as anything more than a delivery platform for their subscription services, IMO
You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
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True but it is still their moat. Without windows they will lose a lot of appeal to their cloud products like Intune, Azure AD, M365 etc
Yup. The same thing is happening with Apple. With software mostly moving to the cloud, operating systems are getting short shrift.
If this is the case, Windows seems like it should be very important. Otherwise they can't deliver their subscription services. I'm not going to subscribe to cable TV if my TV is broken.
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The largest Microsoft subscription account is the United States federal government. Windows/office/whatever else for every federal employee pays the company enough to continue development and offer it to the masses. I’m certain that the ability to collect habitual data on users is valuable to both Microsoft and the powers that be, for advertising and criminal investigation.
The only thing that surprises me is the lack of any additional cost to end users. It’s almost as if the majority shareholder is Blackrock.
There's no realistic competition because the amount of work to switch your OS ecosystem, especially for businesses, is huge. So the product doesn't have to be good, you can just slam ads in the Start menu or whatever.
At one point the product is getting so bad that the cost of switching becomes a real consideration. It seems that every other year I hear about businesses and governments making the move.
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The competition is more fierce than it has been since before Windows 95 started the complete domination of the desktop market.
Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.
You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.
You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.
I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.
I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.
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Monopolies destroy everything. This isn't a binary it's a spectrum. You don't even need total control of the market, just extreme dominance of it, to see this effect begin.
The business version of Windows doesn't have ads in the start menu. That's the consumer/home version. The "Pro" flavors of Windows are quite a bit more pleasant and I don't think there is any downside even on a home computer.
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The switching cost keeps decreasing, because more and more stuff is being migrated to the browser and/or cloud.
Combined with some digital independence movements outside the US, I have some hopes that Windows monopoly starts to crumble.
I was thinking about this very thing today. Personally, I see the Windows OS as a core competency of Microsoft. If the OS is bad, then the company is being run badly. In the same as when you go to a fine restaurant and the kitchen have the polished pots and pans you can see, generally things are going to be great. Its the attention to detail, If those small details are right, then the whole meal will be good. And currently the whole meal is crap with windows.
Realistically it's because a good chunk of their work is outsourced abroad who then in turn outsource their thinking to ChatGPT.
Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)
Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.
Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.
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If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.
Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?
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Because they know everyone who's still using Windows has no choices to switch to. They won't use Linux or Mac.
No, they have choices, but many people just want to turn on their computer, watch a few videos, read some emails, pay some bills and then go do something else.
Those people won't fuss with installing linux and getting rid of Microsoft even though Windows is doing nothing for them that Linux cannot do just as easily.
If there are people in your life that do not use computers to make money or play video games or edit photos and videos but they do use computers, swap them to linux and let them get on with their lives.
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Ask anyone who was a power user of dBase or Lotus 1-2-3 back in the '80's.
I always see articles like this and have never had it happen to me. It's definitely something that affects specific hardware and/or software combinations instead of just poor QA.
I seriously wonder if everyone in the Windows development team(s) are just vibe-coding everything now. I feel like all of these are rookie mistakes from the POV of working on an operating system. This is also the consequence of eliminating all QA and testing and forcing your users to do that for you. Admittedly there are some things that are hard to test (or impossible to) in an automated way, but that's what the old Windows hardware lab test machines were for.
I see Microslop's "AI" coding mandate is continuing to go well
Just checking into this thread for the record, I commented in one of these "update bricks windows" threads maybe a year ago about how I don't let my Windows 10 update, still haven't updated and everything is still working great!
If your device is working, after an update there are only two options, either it keeps working or it doesn't. Why roll the dice?
Security patches
Realistically, what's the threat to me if I don't patch Win10? I know in theory if there's some big vulnerability discovered my system would be in danger of getting pwned, but realistically what are the chances of that happening? And if it does, how likely am I to even be affected by it if I'm not doing anything crazy, I don't even do much banking on my PC other than the online shopping.
I think the more realistic danger is that software eventually stops supporting Win10, but I'm still playing XP and Vista games here, so even that seems far fetched.
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Yeah it's just a matter of how you evaluate the threat model, I might get hit by a wormable zero day, but I also think even in that case there's a good chance I see people flipping out on HN before I actually get hit and run the update manually. I think the odds of a vuln that materially effects my LAN are low, and actually I could lose my whole computer right now and I think I would still be vastly up on time saved over the past 10 or so years that I've been strongly anti-update.
Also worth pointing out that disabling most kind of updates reduces your threat surface quite a lot. If your system isn't pulling updates there's a much lower chance of malicious code getting in that way.
Denial of Service is an attack, is it not?
until the wheels fall off!
That's why I live very well with Win 10 without updates. I downgraded in May last year from Win11 after months of frustration and headaches and since then everything works smoothly and peacefully.
Windows 10 LTSC IoT 2021 is the way to go, if you have to use Windows. Gets security updates until 2031 but no new "features".
You can't just pay for it like the Home or Pro edition because Microsoft is not interested in actually selling an OS as a product to users, but https://massgrave.dev/ is your friend.
I will say that 11 LTSC is also a solid option. I run it myself and I don’t have any issues with it, and it lacks a lot of the crap that Microsoft has been trying to shove in.
At some point there might be compatibility issues with Windows 10 (especially with it now being EOL) so if your a gamer 11 LTSC might be the better choice.
Same here. There's a good chunk of users who've downgraded back to 10 on their gaming rigs.
If you're open for it, try Bazzite. I have it on my HTPC and it's a Playstation-like experience, absolute smooth.
Month after month I read this stuff (along with the seemingly neverending gaming issues with MPO?) and think, yep, I will stay off Win 11 as long as I can
May as well use the Win 10 extended security updates though, right?
> After the Power-On Self-Test (POST), and you see the blue Windows logo (if applicable), press the power button again to shut down.
> Repeat steps 1 and 2 multiple times to trigger the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).
What exactly was wrong with pressing f8?
At this point Microsoft needs to go back to service packs and a three year OS version cycle. Rapid development doesn't seem to be working.
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
Open gpedit.msc, configure policies to disable automatic updates. At this point Windows is a virus that is useful for only playing computer games and should be avoided for any other purpose.
Heaven forbid any company ever come to the conclusion that shoving updates down your users' throats against their will might not be the best idea humans ever came up with.
Modern Windows... It's like having your own DoS adversary baked into your PC.
At least they're shipping a million lines of code per month per engineer. That's what counts.
This makes me wonder what the testing method is for this sort of thing. Presumably you'd do as much as possible in VM's to get repeatable states with updates from every conceivable starting point.
But what about physical machines? Exactly how many repeatable update tests on physical machines are done? You get a combinatorial explosion if you need to test on 100 different configurations for hardware and you have 100 different starting points in your pre-update OS image. But something like that (10k tests on physical machines, millions for VM's) is what I would _expect_ they are doing.
I expect this too, but at such insane scale, it won't catch everything, and no one should expect this. The only solution (as far as I know) is very slow releases (starting with something like 0.01% of users) and watching what happens.
Previous discussion:
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
Updated Windows 11 on Parallels: Has been stable since 2021.
Boot loop: Can't system restore. Can't roll back updates. Can't reset PC. Can't even enter safe mode.
All options ran into unexpected errors and cancelled out. Only option left was to shut down or "restart".
Had to clean install and attach the old virtual drive to a new installation to copy files across then copy the new installation's disk back to the old system as a replacement to ensure it was able to activate.
Seriously considering if I even need Windows anymore.
I haven't _needed_ windows in over 5 years, and I game pretty hard (though not much in the realm of anti-cheat compatibility drama). Bazzite is my daily driver now for development and pleasure.
Arch is really good. Between Wine, Proton, and QEMU/KVM there isn't any need for me to boot windows anymore
I'm still on Windows 10, and the only issue I have is the huge nag-screen promoting Windows 11 that appears sometimes when I boot up.
No option to say "don't show again". If anyone knows how to permanently disable this intrusive Windows 11 propaganda screen, please share. I tried searching for a solution but the one I found - a registry change, didn't work.
I managed to turn it off. But forgot the details. Maybe it was the “RUXIM” binary? I think I unchecked the executable flag for that .exe, or I removed it from the task scheduler.
Anyways, it is possible!
Switch to Windows 10 LTSC. It's easy to strip out all the garbage like the app store, it won't ever nag you, and is supported for longer than the regular version.
That's terrifying, as I currently have no boot stick. Does someone know a reliable free system backup tool for windows, in simplicity comparable to Timeshift on Linux Mint, which I can start from an USB Medium to restore a broken system? (I need to able to exclude some folders, like Steam games)
LLMS are a farce of productivity, one of the largest companies in the planet with Azure (cost reduction) AND their own inhouse chips and LLMS still can't get anything meaningful out of it, trillions of dollars spent, Lol.
>nightmare gets worse
Gets?
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
I tried Win11 out for maybe a week before upgrading (I refuse to call it a downgrade) back to Win10. Explorer of all things being slow as molasses on my very beefy system was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, but also idiotic decisions like not letting my move the damn taskbar without hacky 3rd party software certainly didn't help me feeling frustrated with every minute of use.
I dunno what the fuck they're smoking at M$ HQ, it's truly baffling.
Guess 30% AI generated code isn't good enough.
So happy being on supported, stable version. Every other Windows release is a nightmare and when I saw W11 empty task manager (yes, the bug still persists, of course no response from M$ and some private contact saying to "just reinstall it"), bootloop after defender signatures update and other funny stuff - waiting for Windows 12.
i hope that whoever caused all those bugs doesn't move later into developing Azure.
(part of me actually wishes it would happen, ngl).
It didn't need Ai to create something as horrific as windows vista.
Why doesn't Fedora suck, but windows does? Serious question.
Why is windows literally worse than Fedora? I'm not exaggerating, I just can't understand.
One is an operating system maintained and run by a diffuse community of people, (albeit a flavor of linux with the explicit backing of at least one large company), whose primary goal is to create and maintain a functional operating system that can be used by many people for many different purposes. The other is a product whose primary goal is to convince investors that the company is on a growth trajectory that will continue into the next quarter by extracting value from that product's customers. We've now seen decades of data that suggest disparate results stemming from these priorities in a lot of contexts. I think viewed through that lens, the reason is obvious and was inevitable over time no matter what your threshold of "sucks" is, so long as it has something to do with the thing's function as an operating system
Fedora also sucks, if your yardstick for suck is "Sometimes after some updates some users experience errors"
Despite news to the contrary, the majority of Windows updates don't break anything for the majority of users. You only hear about the breakage
It turns out that most of this stuff is not difficult if you're just trying to make a good computer rather than make billions of dollars for your investors.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
As they wrote it. It only affects physical computer. It seems we now have to learn that win11 is only for VM. Lesson learned
no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
It’s 2026 ;-)
If I'm going to be a grumpy old man on hacker news you can at least let me live in last year :)
Look on the bright side; at least "not booting" is better than "deleting all your files": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
The only system where I had this happen was a Google Pixel 6a, where a system update irrecoverably corrupted all (encrypted) data which made it not boot on top.
It's particularly great Monday morning on your phone if you require 2FA to sign in to work.
Interesting. I bought a brand new Windows Arm machine the other day that was DOA: It booted with the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME message. I brought it back to Microcenter and exchanged it and the replacement works fine. I wonder if that machine was just updated at the factory before it shipped...
I'm a longtime Microsoft fanboy, but even I wait a couple of weeks before updating anything, unless there's an actual problem I need the fix for.
Vibe-coding at scale.
I can't wait for vibe-coded TPM implementations.
TPM is apparently so broken, it might as well have been vibe-coded.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531925
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
I think I might know...
Cutting QA on your core product is a very Boeing choice.
I have never once in my entire life equated quality of software with headcount of QA department, I tell you that.
Vibe coding to the max. Forcing employees to use it and that’s the large scale result. Cause it’s garbage. Hands down on large scale it just doesn’t work. Especially on something the scale of an operating system.
There will be the usual downvotes and I’ll take em. If the pro-AI folks can’t convince me that LLMs are able to write and maintain systems at that scale, that will be par for the course.
Wait, “you just didn’t write enough spec and unit tests for the LLM to do it correctly and you are promoting it wrong”.
> I think I might know...
I will say it for you -- they're moving too fast with AI.
I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1649940/microsoft-reca...
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-receive-an-eve... and https://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-yanks-windows-updat... and https://www.404techsupport.com/2015/03/12/kb3033929-may-caus... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...
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There's a reason many call them Microslop.
Not slop but sophistication.
[dead]
Only 12 year old boys 25 years ago. Use Linux or MacOS, just move on.
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They just keep digging
Elon's MacroHard initiative will replace all this in the next 18 months.
"Uninstall latest lack-of-quality update"
The most impressive thing is that if they stopped putting out new features, and solely delivered security and optimization patches for Windows, it would unironically be the best no-frills platform. You could just keep milking steady upgrade fees.
But no, they have to go out of their way to accelerate the enshittification of Windows.
Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.
In case it gets edited, the last sentence currently reads:
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
Genuinely curious—what parts of Windows 11 do you like? I can’t find a single redeeming quality compared to W10, but admittedly I daily drive arch + macOS and only occasionally use my windows machine.
The multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, it's a huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.
There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.
Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).
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If not for being forced off, most people would never have left windows xp… many medical practices and industrial facilities still are in it.
The Start menu now allows me to do what I have been doing since, like, XP, using shellinks and folders in the taskbar: Sort the Program icons in categories (like "Coding", "Sys", "Tweak", "Web"), to find them easier. This is not totally buggy any more (On Windows 10 the start menu became unusable at some point).
In the taskbar I only have the most used icons. And the opened program instances are separated from the icons. That was doable on Win 10 and I think Win 7 too, using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, which is now dysfunct. But the same author has created Windhawk, which does the same plus some other cool things.
The Explorer is useless as ever. I am still using Total Commander with its filter-as-you-type, rename tool and button bars.
What I still miss is a tool like Timeshift on Linux Mint.
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Windows Key + P to change monitor configuration quickly.
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It just works.
I can't point to a single thing that Windows 11 does particularly well.
With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. It needs an annoying turn-off-turn-on workaround for it to even output to the second monitor. The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable.
Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so.
So here I am using Windows 11, and thanks to the more powerful hardware, it's pretty fast and smooth, outputting at 240 Hz.
The Xbox app is bad and I don't like the Microsoft store, but other than that I have no major complaints.
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Well Windows 11 is much better than Windows 10 on ARM devices.
Otherwise off the top of my head I don’t find Win11 much better or worse than Win10.
It seems like partially moving an app from one monitor to another is improved. Previously, this operation was quite laggy as Win10 must have been doing some involved calculations balancing the DPI between different resolutions.
* notepad with multi tab (but without copilot!) * New screenshot/screen recording tool * Windows terminal
If I can get all these on Windows 10, that would be wonderful.
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Interesting - my annoyance with W11 is nothing to do with AI or CoPilot (or "Privacy", "Phoning home", the usual crap MS haters talk about), it's due to stuff like Windows Explorer getting seriously worse.
If it were the best, I'd be able to drag a file onto a taskbar icon to do something with it, like I could with every other version of Windows ever (and Mac, and Linux).
But it's reliability is bad? It doesn't crash as often as previous versions of windows sure, but instead ends up in various inoperable states that aren't fixed without restarting, which isn't really any better.
Forkbombing into resource exhaustion aside, W11 is the only system that left me unable to as much as log in
I don't recall either a crash or a need to restart Windows 11 in the last years.
Except maybe when I was trying to use the XMP profile of my memory. It works now, maybe a BIOS update improved that.
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What other operating systems have you used?
Dual boot with Fedora on my laptop, and my desktop at home is a Mac mini M4. I really like Fedora, it's my Linux distro of choice, but the experience is not as nice as on W11 in my opinion.
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