In summary because:

  - They're beholden to Wall Street and stock price is the only relevant metric.
  - They've been laying off staff even up to senior/principal engineering levels. 
  - Shifting towards vibe coding instead of engineering.

There's not really not much more room for Microsoft's consumer software to grow, but the next quarterly report must show black numbers, so the only way to stay profitable is to produce software in a way that is cheaper than the previous month.

Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.

Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.

Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwarts of Windows and Office, but in doing so caused disruption to users that had bet on the eternal stability of Microsoft’s product line? I don’t like the current direction of Windows any more than the next guy, and personally I’ve made other choices in recent years, but as a general principle, I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere.

IMHO, a deeper problem here is that we collectively allowed a near-monopoly culture to develop around desktop operating systems and basic business software. Instead of having a healthy degree of competition between providers and using standardisation to ensure interoperability and portability of our data, we’ve ended up in a “too big to fail” situation where many users have all their eggs in one basket and that basket has a rapidly growing hole in the bottom and looks like it’s going to fail anyway.

There are also reasonable arguments to be made about length of support for products already sold, forced obsolescence and ratcheting “upgrades”, where possibly the actions of some providers in the market are exploitative in ways we should not allow, and therefore regulating to prevent the undesirable behaviours might be in the public interest.

Ultimately, I think a combination of restricting customer-hostile practices while also encouraging a healthy degree of competition and interoperability in important markets would be best for the users and fair to the developers. Sadly, right now, we have neither of those things, and that’s how we get Windows 11, the mobile device duopoly, numerous examples of products or services being locked down against their users’ interests, online services that people increasingly rely on for fundamental aspects of their normal lives and yet that have little real obligation to those people in return, and assorted other ills of the 21st century tech landscape.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon ...

Depends what you mean by Microsoft. Azure is its biggest division. OpenAI stake is its most important. I think xbox/gaming has more revenue than Windows now. Even LinkedIn is a huge part of the company.

The Xbox name committee moved to Windows. Maybe they are shuffling the names their internal tools and documentation as well.

It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.

> Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years

Sort of matching the decline of Intel too.

All products seem to decline the moment the revenue model switches to monthly recurring. This is always contrary to the promise that they won't and that money will be invested in product improvements.

If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)

[flagged]

The bigger question is how the breakage made it through QA in the first place. Oh right, Microsoft fired all their QA a while back.

They're quite a bit late to the 'move fast and break things' party.

Search on Windows is completely pointless, it’s been broken for years at this point. I’ve installed PowerToys and use Command Palette now

The start menu is a React app!

I would enjoy hooking up Claude to KDE with voice control and audio feedback, but am 100% on board with that it should be 100% the user deciding to go for that folly.

I was doing that until Adobe decided to start using an API which is not present in 2021 LTSC. So I moved to macOS. Tahoe has its problems but it and the hardware makes a mockery of Windows 11 and PCs generally.

In theory, this was a security patch, so you're still at risk of MS pushing a problematic patch to Win10

How do you get a valid license?

They are doing fine. It affects users, not customers.

Exactly, half of a system exists as code but the other half exists as a mental model in the minds of the devs. With AI the former will, now much more quickly, outrun or deviate from the latter and then the problems of long-term reliability, maintainability and confidence in validation and delivery are just beginning.

Agreed. Combine with job rewards for "impact" over anything else and move fast break things its hardly a surprise.

Exactly right and by the time you get that theory back could you have just it all yourself?

I think there is even an internet meme showing a headline where Microsoft brags about how AI is doing more more coding and right below that headline another one where a decline in quality is mentioned.

It's mandatory.

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-internal-memo-usin...

I mean, unless Windows is a special exception, almost certainly:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

10,000%.

That sounds like there’s something else amiss because that definitely should not happen. For example, I was working on a family member’s Win 11 laptop (a budget 2018 HP laptop upgraded from Win10) that was absurdly slow. It would take 5 minutes to power on and open a web browser and even that was extremely sluggish. The specs were decent except for one thing—the local storage was a crappy 1TB 5200 RPM HDD. The drive was functionally ok, but I couldn’t find a way to get it out of 100% disk I/O. I ended up just cloning the drive to an old spare SATA SSD that was laying around and that immediately solved the issue. Windows was zippy and very usable again. I couldn’t believe they put up with this nonsense for years. Not sure if the HDD was just a lemon or something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.

If you want stable, responsive, and old, use Debian, possibly with XFCE. Then, you have patches for security issues too.

Windows 10 is still supported until 2032 if you use LTSC

I for one been enjoying Linux for years. No surprise updates or AI slop forced down my throat.

Vibe coding with Github copilot, no less

They do as the slop king Satya guides (yes).

I can't judge the severity but his basic point is absolutely correct

If you mean his conference talk by that title, what was batshit unhinged in it? I remember thinking he was spot on. (Then again, if you called me “batshit unhinged”, you wouldn’t be the first to do it, and you may well be right.)

You know better than jblow to call him crazy? I definitely don’t.

[dead]

My experience has been somewhat different. I've had a linux server for a long time so I'm not new to the OS but my main computer which I use for development and gaming and everything else has always been Windows. I recently added a dual-boot Ubuntu for some performance-heavy development where the better docker integration made sense for me to use.

I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.

The window manager crashed multiple times when I tried to unlock it.

Whenever I woke up my screen the whole system froze, apparently because of the USB hub in the monitor which registered. So far the only solution has been to disconnect the USB hub.

Fan control doesn't work properly because the chipset isn't supported.

I see rendering issues with window decorations all the time.

That's just after two weeks. I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors. Whenever I'm in the console or do IO heavy stuff I feel right at home but as a desktop OS it's still inferior to me. I don't have fewer problems on Linux, just different ones.

> I've been on Fedora now

I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.

If you are not on KDE, I strongly recommend it.

Source: daily driving Linux for 25+ years.

This is the result of letting “devs” that only use JavaScript, that think JavaScript is an good language, and now only use AI to code, to do anything at all.

Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.

I was just helping my dad with a brand new Lenovo laptop with Windows 11. It felt unbelievable slow and sluggish. Just opening file manager to create a new folder lagged so much it felt like this would have been a 15 years old computer.

There’s no way they’re using react in windows shell. Tell me they’re not.

If only people knew how much of Microsoft Windows has been secretly powered by HTML pages for 20 years…

In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.

Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.

Windows XP/2000 still had Internet Explorer as a core component. Web tech was involved every time you opened a folder.

Windows Shell using web tech is as on-brand Microsoft as it gets.

I’d also recommend people try Arch. The install process has been made waaaay easier in the latest versions. Mostly select what you want et voila you’re good to go. I installed it on a mini pc I took with me over the holidays to game on and it was great. The only thing I’d seriously suggest against is installing a bunch of packages from the installer itself.

Doing so caused me headaches because it installed Gnome (again my fault for selecting a bunch of packages) alongside KDE and I didn’t realize it. Causing me a bunch of “issues” until I selected KDE as the desktop environment on login.

I’ll probably move to Arch on my primary workstation sometime in the next few weeks (from PopOS which has treated me well for the last five years but Cosmic has been frustrating). My biggest reason is Arch has much more up to date packages than what I’ve had access to via Pop and it’s what SteamOS is based on so imagine it’ll be easier to keep up to date (along with little tweaks that Valve incorporates). Not to mention the Arch docs are great, I’ve had them help me even on PopOS for years now.

Addendum: Gnome + Wayland has more or less jumped the shark for me, with its highly opinionated design. KDE has thus far been plenty acceptable. For folks wanting to try both it’s easy enough to just install, pretty much all login managers (screens) let you choose which one you want. My only regret about KDE is losing Kinto.sh for MacOS style keybindings but I lost those with the move to Wayland anyway (still trying alternatives but they’ve been slow or quirky by comparison).

Non-technical home users in my circles are fed up with Windows 11's changes from Windows 10 without a suitable transition that eases them into the changes. They are nowhere near good candidates to migrate to any flavor of Linux, though. There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.

More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.

Please don’t blame react for this, and not because I like react. The real problem is bad development caused by processes, procedures and most likely pressures to cut corners.

Microsoft code is bad. This is not a react issue, and is probably not caused by lead developers. But the problem is now that things have regressed to 98 era technology, it’s going to take a long time for the problem to get better.

Source? This sounds like a racist take even if there would be a modicum of truth to it.

Nah, I wouldn't call it outsourcing. They have AI usage KPIs. [1]

> "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication..."

> "We need to make deliberate choices on how we diffuse this technology in the world as a solution to the challenges of people and planet," Nadella says. "For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact."

> https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-ceo-satya...

[1] https://adoption.microsoft.com/files/copilot/Unlocking-AIs-I...

The Indian outsourcing long predated Nadella. Now it's outsourcing to AI.

Microsoft was on a downward trajectory long before Satya Nadella's tenure.

Microslop producing slop by using github slopilot, now supported by claude slopus 4.5

Copilot Tuesday