Comment by notepad0x90
8 hours ago
notepad is supposed to be like the 'nano' for windows. it's already bloated.
But this is just following a pattern, the enshittified even calc.exe and mspaint. Previewing pictures in windows is shamefully slow because the previewer is also a bloat.
My diagnosis is that Microsoft doesn't have good technical leadership. It has spread the risk of bad decisions by individual leaders by spreading it amongst too many decision makers, and those people aren't always technically apt, or they have aptitude within their specific domain of expertise. Why is the start menu in react native for example.
they also have a crippling illness in the form of sunken-cost fallacy. Even when no one is especially depending on it, they go all-or-nothing on tech stacks and design patterns. Marketing and branding ultimately, I think is their biggest problem. You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding. This is fundamentally the mindset of salespeople. they could be spinning a new app, or making a vscode-lite ship with windows, but brand familiarity is why they're messing with notepad.
It is truly dumbfounding, they're being run like HP and IBM but because of how much the world relies on them, and because of Azure they're making so much profit.
Why are the shareholders no enraged even more? To have such a vast marketshare and failing to capitalize on it is terrible. They could be doing better than Apple. Even apple sees the writing on the wall and adapts their strategy fundamentally by starting to make their own silicon. It's like having a barn full of chicken that lay golden eggs, but the farmer is slaughtering them for their meat, and the farmer's employer doesn't care because chicken meat is still making good enough profits.
The core product teams are on like generation 5 of the ship of theseus and every generation has been cheaper and more technically inept than the last.
> You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding.
It's funny because they are actively destroying existing branding these days. Like how they renamed Office after their failed AI assistant, rather than the other way around.
Everything is copilot, so much so that I don't even know what copilot is.
From the security side, everything is Microsoft Defender. When talking to people I have to say things like "defender but the AV thing that's on by default, not the paid cloud thingy, and by that I don't mean the cloud protection one but the thing that protects endpoints using cloud stuff". They can't come up with good names and they confuse the crap out of their users. I hate to say it's just MBAs, since I don't really know but that'd be my guess. Someone at an Ivy league school somewhere is perpetuating this perhaps?