Their main goal is to extract maximum revenue, not to provide good products. Also, they've grown fat on the monopoly profits they enjoyed for decades. It's very hard to pivot back to competitiveness from that and as of now, they're not really compelled to do that.
This is it. For-profit companies exist to make a profit, not a product. Any time you ask "why did they do this thing that makes the product worse?" remember that the product doesn't matter to them, only the money it makes. If a change makes more money, they'll do it.
Some might think a worse product means worse sales and less profit, but they'd be wrong. Enough people buy products regardless of their quality that it's often more profitable to simply make the product as cheap as possible while maintaining just barely enough of the most basic functionality to meet the definition of what they're trying to sell.
Linux is setting out to make an operating system. Microsoft are setting out to make a data capturing advertising billboard that sometimes runs programs.
They’re a B2B company first and foremost. What they’re selling is the Microsoft ecosystem to companies, like their Office suite. Companies don’t care if each individual products sucks - just that they integrate well with other products. In particular, companies want good integration with Active Directory (Microsoft’s permission management system). Companies love controlling who gets access to what.
Consumer operating systems is more of a side hustle for them.
Because with Linux, the software design decisions are made by engineers, not executives.
And the install decisions are made by people with options.
Because their management structure is horrendously overbloated and their internal culture is horrific.
I used to work for them. Every manager, every team lead, at every level, is viciously trying to climb to the top of the crab bucket, and pull every one else down at the same time.
Look at Asha Sharma's recent statment on reorganizing Xbox.
14 levels of management. 14. You have have a boss, who has a boss, who has a... up to fucking 14.
... the entire company is like this, not just Xbox.
Thats why everything is insane broken nonsense.
Oh, that and extreme over reliance on contractors to do most of the actual work. Contractors don't get stock options, you see.
This results in a situation where half of any project's timeline is the new contractors just trying to understand the code the previous contractors made.
That is all wasted time, compared to if you just actually had a consistent team you paid properly... and of course it massively exacerbates technical debt.
Nothing is actually properly documented, there are very, very few people who actually understand a codebase and have been maintaining and growing it for 10 years, no, its 10 years of 10 different sets of contractors, and maybe 3-6 different managers 'overseeing' this.
It is all spaghetti code.
There has never been a totally new Windows, certainly not in this century. That has never happened, and they lie internally to their own employees about that.
There has never been a total refactor of Windows. Windows 11 still has UI menus from Win 7, possibly fucking XP, if you dig deep enough.
still has UI menus from Win 7, possibly fucking XP, if you dig deep enough.
Yeah, those are the good ones.
Yeah that's the worst bit tbf
If you're not going to make better UIs and you're going to keep the old ones around anyway... Why not just... add new items to the old ones?
Instead, you have like 3 or 4 different generations of control panel and they do different things so you go to the correct one based on what you need to do...
I'm just happy to not own any Windows machines anymore, not even dual boot. I actually liked 7. Like really liked it. 10 felt like a downgrade (I suspect because the UI was uglier and it had an extra layer of control panel added in either 8 or 10 that was more dumbed down so you'd usually want to go to the old one, which gets you thinking "why exactly did we need a new Windows version"). 11 is shit even on a brand new machine, even if it looks pretty-ish. It's slow, the reduced context menu is annoying... Yeah I could change a lot of things via registry keys and whatnot, but KDE Plasma just gives me a single system settings application that configures almost everything I'd want to configure on my machine, the rest is application specific stuff for which I'm fine just editing the conf files
To be clear I'm just venting because I'm frustrated with Windows, not because I think you like it lol
This is the answer. I work in a big company which has a similar issue. The boots on the ground devs like me know how bad some cascaded orders and ideas are but when you try to bring it up it's like trying to talk to a brick wall with 13 other brick walls in the way
it's like trying to talk to a brick wall with 13 other brick walls in the way
I'm gonna have to use that saying, lol
Its so cathartic to read this after dealing with the exact same bullshit with my own employer. Management has no clue what is actually going on, but refuses to listen to us peons because they've 'made it' to middle management so obviously they know better than all of us always.
Scott Adams went MAGA bonkers, but the Dilbert Principle is still a valid corrolary to the Peter Principle.
... the narcissistic sociopaths that are most managers simply don't care, because they are right and you are stupid.
... which is also why the love the overly confident lying know it alls that are LLMs... they are a perfect source of many elements of narcissistic supply.
Amazingly, Windows 11 still has some settings menus directly from 1992's Windows 3.1
Easy, their objective is to make money, not develop software. Linux is made and maintained by users, for users...
Microsoft's mission isn't to improve the public good. Microsoft's mission is wealth extraction for its shareholders.
Windows is worse for you as an individual consumer. But I would argue Windows is a better product for advertisers and other interests that go beyond you. Those interests are at odds with your interests. You need to look at the bigger picture.
In a word: enshittification.
Honestly, people should have to go back to school when the turn 70 for a year to get updated. Plenty of folks still think capitalism runs on “make a good product at a good price.”
Linux was built by engineers and professors based on idealistic values like progress and collaboration. Windows was also built by talented nerds, but at the direction of suits with the goal of making money.
And now they're ripping all the shit the talented nerds made out and replacing it with AI slop and ads.
Yep! Like every other tech company.
Engineers want to make something work with the stability to last a long time.
But lasting a long time cuts into profits.
If you ever worked on any big corporation, it becomes crystal clear why things suck. Megacorps value money first, second, third, fourth and fifth. Sixth comes avoiding being caught by their crimes.
So, Microsoft doesn't have a vision for Windows as an operating system, it sees Windows as a way to maintain a stranglehold in office computers the world over. It doesn't matter that most people on lemmy will say "switch to linux", they're not companies, they're not bosses - these are the vast majority of Windows users and South America + Asia + Africa make up a fuckhuge market. Sure, Europe and USA have more money, but the rest have sheer numbers.
Another thing that matters a lot is that many decisions come from the top and are enforced. If Satya Nadella or the director of whatever bullshit says something, those below have to comply. If the order from above is "cram bullshit ads in Windows Explorer, this has the highest priority", that has to happen.
Regarding resources, having them and allocating them in a decent manner are not the same thing. The same could be argued about USA having trillions of tax dollars and having so many people living in poverty without healthcare or even basic education. Lots of that money go to keeping their armed forces. Microsoft is not too different, they have to pay people who keep their datacenters up, pay for the energy of said datacenters, maintain several other apps they have - oh, and the CEOs bonuses, because he's such a great leader who totally deserves billions every year!!!!! Of those 300bn, how much are they diverting for Windows in general? 50b? 20b? 1b? Of that, how much is going straight for security, bug tracking and quality assurance?
Microsoft has pretty much lost most of their experienced employees, they're sitting on a mountain of spaghetti code with tech debt that goes back to windows 3.1 to maintain compatibility, they've fired their QA team, and their absolutely out-of-touch leadership is trying to force the surviving employees to use AI anywhere they can for developing the OS to pump up the numbers of AI users to prop up their insanely huge AI gamble so shareholders don't lose faith.
They're acting confident because they haven't had to respond to a credible threat to their monopoly for 30 years, and that arrogance combined with everything mentioned above will most likely be their ultimate demise. The corporate system they have created and perpetuated is no longer capable of righting the ship, both technologically and organizationally.
They made a statement years ago now about how they were going to respond to the success of the steamdeck by creating a handheld mode for windows, but they never did, and Valve ate their lunch and allowed Linux to gain a foothold among gamers. They probably couldn't manage building that handheld mode (it's been so many years now, but I read a post from a Microsoft employee detailing how it could take something crazy like a week of work just to add a new menu entry to a drop-down without it introducing major breakages elsewhere).
They haven't been able to develop a killer app or feature for Windows in over a decade, and I don't think there's anything else under their sleeve. I believe we are actively witnessing the downfall of an ossified giant, just as the once great Commodore fell due to incompetence and extreme corporate greed.
They already use Linux for their server division (azure). Eventually, if Linux is able dominate on the desktop in the next decade, they may shift to selling their own Linux distro with a 100% windows compatible container/VM instead, an inversion of their current model of selling Windows with their optional WSL (windows subsystem for Linux).
Linux has devs in charge instead of managers.
Different design priorities - MS devs aim to make the OS a marketing tool for other products, which are continuously obsoleted to encourage repeated re-buying. Linux devs aim to make stuff work.
Apart from what everyone here is saying, which is probably mostly true, I want to add that the Windows division in microsoft isn't the biggest either in terms of revenue or funding; it's not even second. The office team is much bigger for instance - so Windows has not been Microslops priority for a good 15 years i'd say. My 2 cents
Also the number of developers and amount of money put into something doesn't make it is necessarily better. I almost want to think that fewer developers and less money on Windows is a good thing considering Microslop only ever wants to increase operating costs in order to make more revenue.
Windows isn't trying to do what Linux does.
On the server end, Linux beat every competitor out there, including Windows Server, because it was free and development occurred along the lines of educated users making improvements. So, at first Linux was worse to use, but it was cheaper. Then, Linux was about as easy/stable as paid for versions, but it was cheaper. When it became easier to use to educated users and more stable and cheaper, all paid server OS's died.
That said, I bring up educated users because Linux is only a kernel and Windows by itself does more than Linux does by itself. On the consumer end, no one has been able to threaten Windows without a DRM'd app store. Consumers won't do bug fixes at the scale that enterprise users will. Consumers generally need more developed on the UI side to make the OS functional while you can run Linux in terminal mode. Most of Windows' development went into this, making Windows easy/desirable for consumers. In contrast, most Linux development time went to making Linux more easy/desirable for enterprise users/servers.
This is really the first year that Linux for consumers is viable and a lot of that work packaging Linux for consumers came from Valve putting the various pieces of open source software together and sanding down the rough edges. In contrast, Microsoft has been doing that for a generation.
When it became easier to use to educated users and more stable and cheaper, all paid server OS’s died.
10b in UNIX revenue in 2012 https://www.tahawultech.com/news/the-last-days-of-unix/
https://cioafrica.co/the-long-slow-death-of-commercial-unix/ one vendor drops from 1.6b to .6b revenue in four years
https://www.matrix42.com/en/blog/2016/10/17/the-cost-punch-of-core-based-licensing-for-microsoft-windows-server Microsoft moves from per processor licensing to per core licensing, to prop up revenue on server OS products. Revenue reported bundles all cloud and software services in with licensing, so any increases in this revenue bundle are most likely attributed to cloud and infrastructure revenues, considering the reported CapEx of Asure infrastructure.
I think even Microsoft is in trouble for OS sales. I have seen an increase in Linux based applications in my industry, at the expense of Windows. SOC appliances are more visibly Linux based as well.
Their business isn't to make an operating system better than linux.
Wait.. why is this a question..? I guess it's the same as when people ask my why Adobe is so terrible, why HP is terrible or why Apple is so terrible.
Companies eventually get so big and powerful they only care about companies.
Stop paying for Microsoft, pirate is Stop using Microsoft office, Get libre office Stop using HP, get Lenovo or Dell instead Everyone everywhere should stop using apple.
As much as I hate Apple/OoS and I do truly hate Apple.. Adobe is the worst company on earth.
Easiest way to explain it is that Apple and Microsoft exist just to steal all your money Adobe not only wants to steal all your money but they wanted take it all then make you pay so they can lazily explain why they took your money. HP is in the corner breaking all your furniture so they can charge you a fee to fix it and put Microsoft, apple and Adobe trash on it.
It's subjective. I'm not trying to be dismissive or something, but it's that simple. Windows is more successful than Linux for what Microsoft wants it to be more successful at.
I'm not saying Windows is better. I like Linux more. I use it. I'm just saying that for the personal computing market share that Microsoft wants, Windows is more successful than Linux.
To be honest, if Microsoft wanted to affect other stuff with Linux, they'd probably just contribute the changes they want into it. It wouldn't surprise me if they already did. They contributed many features to git for things they wanted to use in git.
Linux benefits enormously from community review.
It's a lot easier to find bugs when literally the whole world can review the source code.
Because they are prioritizing data collection over performance.
Windows is no longer about giving customers a good operating system. It’s now a vehicle for Microsoft to collect data from you for them to use and sell to other parties at a profit. It’s why Microsoft hasn’t cared much about pirated versions of Windows much anymore. They’ll do small things to annoy you, but overall, you can still use it and they still get to collect your data.
Microsoft is only starting to be more concerned as Windows loses market share and Linux gains some. The Steam hardware survey has only gone up a few points of percentages but this accounts for thousands of losses and this only shows gamers who use Steam, not all the other use cases.
So Microsoft is finally starting to make some promises to improve performance now that they have some real competition. And they’re only doing that because they want to continue collecting your data.
That is what Windows has become, unfortunately. Your performance while using it is very secondary, if not at all a priority of theirs.
Commercial closed source loses because of the profit motive to cut corners and make anti-features. Plus little to no independent peer review. Also legacy stuff can't just be recompiled or ported by anyone, so ABI has to be stable for a long time. Even new stuff, can't be all compiled to the same one version of every lib, so basically ever program has it's own version each lib it uses.
Plus they have a big user base locked in, so they have to take whatever they are given. So motivation to be good is low.
Just so many reasons!
I think Microsoft has grown too large to deliver a coherent product, and has probably forgotten how to do so. Beyond a certain point, knowledge just completely breaks down, without near perfect knowledge management, senior developers leaving just leaves an understanding gap too big to ever fill. Windows has been around so long that people have had entire careers working on it and have retired and it's all falling apart.
Individual teams still deliver decent stuff, dotnet, WSL all stuff pushing in the right direction... But no unified approach. The core windows teams seem paralyzed to implement real change. By all reports the code is now a spaghetti mess and no real endeavours to fix anything can get budget approval. Any budget that might exist to fix it is being redirected towards copilot projects
A lot of reasons. First of all, it's not really their goal to make a good OS for users. They know that 95% will use windows no matter what, especially businesses, because they still more or less have a monopoly, especially in the desktop market.
In other words, any ressources spent on improving the desktop OS experience past the bare minimum is excess because they don't really get anything concrete in return.
Yes, windows is less efficient than other os, but until recently, this wasn't a problem for microsoft since you can just throw more/better hardware at the issue, which is a win win. They have to spend less ressources at optimizing code for better performance and, I imagine, they get a better cut since their hardware partners sell more devices because hardware gets obsoete every couple of years.
And in the server environment, they want it to be increasingly expensive because windows server is mostly used in cases where there is no alternative, and they want it all in their cloud.
Also, a lot of what is annoying about windows is per design. Ads, sponsorship ads, forced accounts, etc.
Windows is only like 10% of Microslops business.
Corporate culture. Microsoft may be one company to us outsiders, but internally they are a ton of different divisions divided into teams. All those teams have their own agendas, priorities, and competing visions.
If you just look at the Windows kernel project, it’s really good.
Is this a real question ?.One is about maximising profit extraction, one is not.
By design.
I can only conclude that they change stuff just to make it seem like they're keeping busy, and they're vibe coding it without any QA so it doesn't perform as intended either. For instance, I have to use Teams at work, and I have certain projects prioritized over others. These have alerts and notifications set up, or at least they did until last week, when Teams inexplicably turned them off because they're trying to get people to tag ID's more.
Stupid. Just stupid.
Three things: Bloat, Greed, Capitalization.
Passion vs corporate.
Corporate suits just sell surface promises and support contracts for corporate environments. It's a totally different mindset than Linux engineers have. Theirs is that of passion for excellent software and that's all they care about.
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