I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
It's interesting to me as well as an ex-microsofter who worked on surface devices. Leadership (at least below the VP level) knew they were getting killed by Chromebooks and tried a few times to get a low cost device (Surface Go 1/2 for example) that ran a slimmed down version of windows (Windows S?). It tries to be more like chrome OS (hard to mess up, easy to flatten and restore a fresh OS on) but kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place (legacy app compatibility) to be not bad at the thing Chromebooks are good at.
That said, I don't believe the Chromebook lock-in. It's just chrome and the web, which you can get on literally almost every laptop/pc sold today. Should Microsoft be concerned that you don't need windows as more and more things move onto the web? Absolutely. They should be doubling down hard on the gaming ecosystem (which atm still requires windows for certain games) as their hold is eroding week by week.
I think Windows was a pretty good desktop environment circa. Windows 7. Hardware compatability and just working are huge. If they can get an independent M4 competitor from AMD etc. you would have a compelling reason to switch from Mac (for Joe Average user).
There's a growing set of ARM windows laptops that might bite into the Chromebook market. The surface laptop 7 is pretty nice and comes in both large(ish) 15 inch and small 13.8 inch form factors.
All of the ARM laptops are priced as premium business models in the $900-1700 range and kind of fall down in that space - Qualcomm until recently even refused to release any drivers to anyone not a developer partner and it's honestly still not even close to consumer/business friendly. The hardware is capable of doing what people need the culture around it is just not aligned.
Also it's a joke to run OpenGL on Windows ARM (it fully works just no one makes it anything easy)
My x13s laptop can almost run A tier games without a fan which is impressive but it really feels disconnected and unsupported from all parties making these laptops.
> kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place
I'd be interested to see a legacy-free Windows, stripped out like LTSC, with no 32-bit binary support. Especially an Arm64 version with no x86 binary support.
> I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks.
I think this is an Americentric view. As far as I can tell, the mass adoption of Chromebooks for education is just the US, which is 4% of the world population. And in this particular case there's little reason to believe it will suddenly propagate everywhere else - the US education ceding has been going on for years, and yet it's still confined. It's not like the iPhone which started in the US and within a few years rapidly gained ground in Japan, then Europe and so on.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
In some ways. Less so in others.
For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.
I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.
Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.
For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.
>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.
Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.
Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.
Beverages and pet food combined make up almost half of Nestlé's sales, with chocolate at around 7.6%. But I certainly wouldn't consider almost $9 billion in chocolate sales per year a rounding error.
>when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
I'm sorry, what? I don't know if this is because of the developer-bubble mindset on HN (or the wealth gap that comes with that), but Windows adoption on the consumer level is around 70% and close to 90% on the business level.
This actually falls short from what I see anecdotically (I don't live in any North-American / European country), which is close to 95% of Windows adoption, in general.
I'm sorry, but what!? Right back atcha. If you'd have bothered to have looked at the chart in link I posted, you'd have seen that market share of "consumer compute" for Windows was 26% as of 10 years ago. You're going to have to do a lot better anecdata to find a 44% resurgence over the last 10 years, especially given the dismal things that have happened to it as a platform over that time.
Your 26% figure refers to the Total Consumer Compute Market 14 years ago (not 10, it's now 30% btw)... but that includes smartphones and tablets, not just PCs.
You specifically mentioned
> when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?
The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.
Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.
So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.
Well, both are happening. Those remaining want to justify their jobs (because new initiatives are not even being considered). And Microslop wants to become the next IBM and move most development into overseas maintenance instead of innovation, as the competition slow passes them by.
I got the same info. Windows kernel is developed for B2B needs, if something might be useful to B2C, they might eventually get it, but they don’t affect the roadmap.
That's fine, they should still do a good job for moral reasons rather than economic ones, and they deserve to be dragged through the mud if they do not.
That's been obvious for years. It feels like they're extracting whatever remaining money they can get from the home PC market while it lasts but won't much miss it when it's gone.
I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.
Their new appointment of leader for their Xbox group suggests that they intend to wind down that business unit in time. The founder of the Xbox team has commented that he believes it’s the beginning of the end for Xbox, for the exact reasons of this thread.
Which is odd because the major reason Xbox is petering out is because it's been completely mismanaged. Sony and Nintendo are still doing just fine. Nintendo even had a dodgy console that no one bought within relatively recent memory. Xbox messed up with the One and then have just failed to get back on track. It's not like the industry is dying.
That's been obvious for decades. Everyone who worked in the 90's or 00's has stories about coming in one day to find that the VP has been conned into a $1m contract for MS office or development software everyone hates and now we all have to use it because if we don't then he made a huge mistake and VPs don't make huge mistakes.
So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.
This is still happening. The org I work at was all-in on Google stuff, then just before I joined 5 years ago, some senior exec joined. Must have been in tight with Microsoft because suddenly the org was all in on Microsoft. The exec left, job well done, and the org suffered for years during the changeover; we still suffer because all the Microsoft stuff is total garbage these days.
I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.
It's not fully clear yet but they definitely gave up on the current Xbox strategy, after firing both the CEO and the next-in-line and replacing them with people previously working on integrating AI around the entire product line. Sure they said they won't fill up Xbox with soulless AI slop, not sure I believe them.
Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!
Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.
Given Office 365 and day-one Game Pass release of all first-party titles, I don't think you need a tinfoil hat to imagine this.
I suspect lingering antitrust concerns are one of the few things standing in the way of locking consumer Windows updates behind a paywall, possibly alongside a "free with ads" version.
If Microsoft wanted to be monopolistic, and it wouldn't be the first time, then why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office) and instead enter a more competitive market, where Google, Amazon, etc... are well established and with no sign of letting go.
> why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office)
They're abandoning the consumer versions of these, not the enterprise versions. The consumer versions are the competitive market, where they're competing against iPads and such. They're not abandoning Windows for businesses, Office for businesses, where there is still no established business end-user OS/office suite alternative.
I'm always astounded by the tendency to bet it all on core competencies and wind down every other effort that's profitable but not profitable _enough _
As if times don't change, innovation never happens, and your accessory plays of today are never the overtaking market of tomorrow.
It’s basically management 101. But I’ve gone through that phase and come out the other end believing that outsourcing any of the functions that aren’t commodified enough to switch at a moment’s notice is a terrible idea.
Kodak comes to mind. They invented digital photography, but their film people deliberately kneecapped their digital people. Killed the company.
I worked for a camera company that made boatloads of cash from point-and-shoot cameras. That entire business was pretty much turned into chum by smartphones. I remember them refusing to even take the iPhone seriously, when it was announced. They took a serious hit, but seem to be recovering.
I have personal experience in the field (27 years), and met and worked with the folks involved, so I know it's good info. I'm not especially interested in hunting around for stuff that basically is a "lite" version of my personal experience.
> According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.
This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.
Considering that
- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)
- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)
I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.
Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.
I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.
I set up a machine with Windows 2003 Server Datacentre Edition last year. That's the version of the XP codebase that has PAE support and can access >4 GB of RAM... and with all the junk turned off. No themes, for instance.
It was really pleasant to use.
Give me that, with MS Security Essentials and no IE, just Firefox, and I could happily work on it today.
After using agentic AI that can actually do things (like cursor or even GitHub Copilot) using the AI in Microsoft products feels like an absolute joke. People want it to do actual things like apply a template to their PowerPoint or fill out a spreadsheet etc. but it just copies the work and makes you a new file to download pulling you absolutely out of the workflow. I've seen users excited for it and then get a new file to download in the chat and just quit using it completely in disappointment.
Even the developer tools are clunky and slow to use (SSMS, Visual Studio, VSCode) or can't do simple things like make a new file and put code it generates in.
IBM market cap is 225B, Microsoft market cap is 2.9T. IBM literally lost its matket to Microsoft in 80s and 90s specifically because it was too focused on enterprise...
Microslop got a much bigger market capture before pivoting to B2B as its focus. It could shift because it feels its too entrenched in society, so not much is needed to maintain the safe revenue stream.
If they aren't focused on consumer products they should stop shoving half baked features into them and let them coast. I can't imagine any enterprise solutions updating windows and being complacent that an LLMA was shoved into their OS overnight.
> During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products.
Nowadays phones, tablets and game boxes are the consumer products. Currently they outnumber consumer windows desktops by about 6 or 7 to 1 [0]. 5 years ago, it was about 3.5 to 1.
Microsoft doesn't seem to have much control over this. They are executing a pivot in response.
> Mac OS X's market share in the US climbed from 12.17% in December 2022 to 22.08% in May 2023. The market share was consistent for the next few months until it dropped to 14.03% in December 2023.
What. MacOS doubled from December to the next may, then cut in half by the next December? I’m skeptical. It also talks about approval ratings for OS X Lion, from 14 years ago. I think that site is powered by a set of dice.
I think your overall point is correct, but I’m doubting that reference as an accurate data source.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
It is until it isn't, but I think this is the same trap as not training up junior engineers. The consumer market is often where future engineers and professionals first interact with technology, being exposed to Windows early and being able to use it at school and at home have always been major drivers of adoption at work.
Linux is another perfect example - devs who wanted a unix-ish system landed on it early in their own work and education (partly due to the BSD licensing stuff too) - and over time it became one of the most commonly used server operating systems.
I think this is Microsoft optimizing for predictable growth, just like everyone else is doing right now, but this is shortsighted and ultimately a defensive posture, not one suited for the future.
What choice do they really have though? More and more consumers completely forgo owning a regular computer and only use a phone or a tablet now a days. And among the ones who do own a computer there's still a strong trend towards not paying for software, presumably a behavior taught to them by the overwhelming success of strictly ad-financed apps.
It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.
Windows 8 was supposed to dig into that mobile device/tablet market, as well as the Windows phone. You can argue about why Win8 was a titanic failure that pushed a backtrack in 8.1 (and Win10), but it seems like Microsoft didn't really know how to approach the space at the time and failed to commit to a trend they correctly identified early enough that they could have capitalized better on it.
I once worked for a retail computer repair shop that had an unbelievable amount of ethical concerns ( many things outright illegal). Among them was cracking Windows Vista or installing 7, cracking it and then rolling to Windows 10 get a license key from MS and then charging the customer for a license key.
I tried calling MS to report it and the guy on the other side said they didn't have a process for handling that and basically suggested I hang up.
I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.
What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.
At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.
As an enterprise admin of Microsoft services I think they're pretty mediocre. Their stuff is always behind the state of the art. It's just good enough to not go for a third party option that isn't included in their bundle pricing. But it never really satisfies, it's always got this 'make do' feeling about it.
The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.
It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.
It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.
I am not sure if the average executive is dumb or just shortsighted. Imagine making decisions based solely on the optics of the Pareto principle when corporate history itself says that is fraught with risk.
Not surprising, but it's sad to accept that the only major company building consumer-focused computing devices is Apple.
My hope is that LLMs allow linux to gain market share quickly. I know personally I've had a much smoother time moving to linux now that I can delegate a lot of the annoying troubleshooting/customization to claude.
Being able to say something like "I don't like the window colors make them more consistent with my terminal color scheme" and have it "just work" feels like a superpower. I've even gone as far as asking Claude to directly edit the icon pack svg files to whenever if I encounter something that feels out of place.
this is interesting because of how much it differs from my own hopes. I don't really have any personal need or want for the Linux desktop marketshare to increase. I like computers because I can program them to do something and it will do it. Ideally you have complete control over it. I've customized my desktop here and there in order to get some result, but while you care most about the _result_, for me the act of _making_ that result happen is as important if not more. I'm not looking to offload it to something else.
I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.
I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.
"We sell car tires, selling fruit is just a side business."
"The fact that our fruit is rotten and customers complain about that does not faze us as, again: we're primarily a car tire business and that's where our revenue comes from."
The 'reasoning' of the sociopath-level[1] of the corporate hierarchy never fails to entertain.
See where IBM is now though. Between some legacy hardware and random consulting services, they don't really have much of a strategy. They just exist because people still need them for old stuff and because older people trust their name. They used to lead the industry. Now they're not leading anything.
Of course their enterprise focus wasn't their only failure. But it was a factor in one of the biggest failures: their underestimation of the importance of the PC. They allowed Microsoft to market DOS to clones because they didn't see the potential.
So yeah I think their focus on enterprise was one of their biggest failures.
Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.
Hehe, this reminds me of 30 years ago when people used to stylise it as Micro$oft or creatively misspell it as Microshaft, etc. Even on the Amiga, there was the filesystem that could read PC format disks that was called MessyDos. It just seems like the next generation has discovered what an easy name it is to make puns from.
from the turn of the previous player, your intended move will typically be more complicated to visualize (at least for children) - this is what this game is about - so children tended to name a "Eckkarte" an "Ätschkarte".
Maybe that game exists, but it's an old word and you can find references for it that are hundreds of years old. Its meaning fits to the browser. Your statement that it's just some kind of reference to some special game is not correct.
IIRC with Windows 98 you could just use any product key you had on as many machines as you wanted since there was no activation or real phoning home capabilities. So most likely your whole friend group would be using the same serial that was copied off your uncle's old gateway.
Thanks for making me feel old. I remember reading slashdot a lot and also freshmeat.net to find new interesting software. I don't think I like the modern software experience, by comparison. It's all shoddy rehashing of the client/server model, where the client is crap and slow, and so is the server.
It was "Outhouse Express" and "GruntPage" for me in the late 90s. I still use these for software I find particularly irksome, for example Conscrewence from AtlASSian.
> Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.
Which is fun because it's also a really delicious dish from Provence (south of France) made with beef that has been marinated for multiple hours in red wine.
I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.
Last week on a comedy show (the daily show) they made a joke about bill gates "micro and soft" which was old in the 90s already, so I can confirm this is the case.
I think this was 100% justifiable use. If the founder of the company is going to be hanging out with pedophiles and sex traffickers, then micro and soft jokes are open season. All of his philanthropic adventures will never wipe his stain clean.
Orgs have had sensitive skin like this for a long time. Gamespy was a service for launching and playing multiplayer games with lobbies before Steam, and if you “accidentally” typed “GaySpy” (it was the early 2000s) it would autocorrect to “GameSpy” by the time it appeared in your messages.
I find it interesting to go back in time so I read the accompanying article and came across this snippet:
> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it
At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.
I also fully agree with the last sentence:
> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.
Part of it was that Microsoft was really more concerned with distributors selling computers with pirated copies of Windows, and they basically would activate anything if you were willing to call.
I remember doing it a few times for the "OEM" Windows XP which was cheaper but not supposed to migrate to new machines.
Thanks for that bit of background. That make sense.
I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.
They really were - the biggest things were companies selling PCs with pirated software on them, and larger businesses buying one copy for everyone (where the fabled and famous audits came from). MS was never as big a stickler as Oracle in that regard.
Of course, if you were an avowed pirate, nothing even slowed you down.
Lol, I was thinking about that comic just yesterday, what a coincidence. "As you have no doubt been monitoring my communications for quite some time!" read in the voice of the pharmacy owner from Family Guy.
Reminds me of how, whenever I see a comment on an Internet forum where someone writes "u" and "ur" for "you" and "you are", I naturally read it phonetically as "ooh" and "urr", and it sounds a bit like the style of language traditionally used in fiction to represent the primitive speech of cavepeople, and I imagine the author typing the comment using the numeric pad on a turn-of-the-century Nokia candybar phone (though even those had autocomplete).
there was an old humour piece on /. about how their name appeared so many times in their products that it took up a significant amount of space, so they were remaining themselves "moft" to save five bytes per instance. for some reason that stuck with me, I still find myself randomly thinking of them as moft every now and then.
Moft doesn't sound too out-of-place for the current start-up name landscape. I can already imagine "At Moft, we are building an AI-first data platform and agent marketplace at scale, because we know what businesses like yours need most."
Been in this industry since I graduated college, I have never stopped using Micro$oft or Microshaft. Also a fan of M$, Winblows…
Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.
If I recall correctly, this was especially common around the time of the antitrust trial, with the possibility of Microsoft being split into a Micros~1 and Micros~2.
I remember it being used in speculative discussions around which units might end up where.
I remember one meme image that contained a bar chart where the X axis had Gahnoo Linux and Migrosoft Wendys and the Y axis was just labeled "good". Gahnoo Linux maxed out the good while Migrosoft Wendys bottomed out.
What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot?
Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server?
What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server?
What are we doing here?
I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.
Xbox Series with X > S (so if you want the high end of the current generation you want the Xbox Series X; if you want mid-range things are more complicated because you can now get an Xbox One X, but not the Xbox One, used for much less than you'd get an Xbox Series S for and which one is "better" is a dice roll depending on the games you want to play and if 4K matters to you…)
Series is a real weird word to use there. But it also doesn't help that the versions are extra complicated because with "PC-like compatibility" in everything after the Xbox One playing just about the entire same library you need a bit of a matrix to figure out which is best for you if you don't care about the "latest and greatest".
Oh wow yes, completely forgot about that one. To me, it's a complete blur made from single words and letters, one series x s one box 360? Maybe they should create a 365, with MS office pre-installed. Or something.
I gotta say though, I'm actually not sure which VMware (well Broadcom I suppose) products I use anymore. I'm pretty sure they took the Aria name off something else they called Aria for a little while. So Aria is no longer Aria but they still have Aria but it's what used to be called XYZ
Seriously? Does anybody know what Copilot is? I don't think I have ever seem a "Copilot user", so I don't know what it looks like. Is it the little macro key on new laptop keyboards? The chatbot you get in Bing? A technical philosophy? Or is it in essence just copilot.com, the mediocre chat interface which you used to get free GPT-4 three years ago?
I wish. I got a Dell laptop for work and they've replaced the right Ctrl key with a Copilot key, and (because it's a locked-down work sysyem) the only thing I can remap that to is the Windows menu. And I keep hitting it out of muscle memory, interrupting everything. But at least now it doesn't launch Copilot.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
Double check if the (hopefully not locked) BIOS gives an option to customize the CTRL key. I had a previous work laptop which also got cute with the CTRL button, but thankfully did let you remap it.
> Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
It's the same at our place. It's basically the lowest effort way as we already have data agreements with Microsoft 365 it eliminates a lot of the paperwork. And they do promise that they won't train on data even in the free (well, included with basic M365) version for corporate users. A lot of others don't unless you pay.
It's too bad because it seems to be the worst AI around. Even compared to ChatGPT itself which uses the same model as copilot in MS Office. I don't really understand why there's such a difference. If you do pay the $30 it's a bit better especially the researcher.
The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".
They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
Being Microsoft, you'd think they would just offer a public Teams server instead? Not that you'd get more traction with it, but at least it's in-house and theoretically they would be motivated to build integrations on top.
Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
Eh, good on them for not trying to act like Teams targets the same use cases as Discord just because Teams is an internal product. One is focused on the internal chats and groups within the business with occasional well defined outsiders and the other is more targeting something like live social media for consumers.
I'm not even sure if there is a way to have a team/channel for external users that they don't need to be invited to (I know you can jump through hoops to make it so they don't need to be guests in your tenant at least) or that there should necessarily be something like that in the first place.
An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.
There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").
Not just people like that. I'm always searching for better ways to do things and dive into things deeper. Including Windows and Copilot. So having spaces for that can be helpful. Most public forums are unfortunately just complaint departments. Nobody wants to solve anything, they just want to complain with some projection of David and Goliath. It's really annoying. I want to find more positive spaces but for a lot of tech it's just negative all the way down. Maybe I'm just crazy for enjoying tech still and not being committed to an OS religion.
For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.
The Discord server for Midjourney is said to be one its biggest use point, the source of its largest audience, and one of its biggest sales funnels. Even as other image models have grown more powerful/capable, Discord has been suggested (or blamed, depending on perspective) for keeping Midjourney one of the most popular ones.
I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).
Don’t they have better things to do? Maybe vibecode a taskbar that moves when you try to move away the mouse over it or perhaps a windows 12 installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan?
first one is a really slick tooltip ui to make sure people read tooltips. hover over button, it slides out while revealing tooltip text in its place, move cursor to button again
if you want to make sure people read a lot of instructions you can chain this so that you need to hover over the button multiple times, revealing the instructions a bit at a time
"Only for your own good!™" or alternatively: "Security next level! Fingerprint was yesterday. The future is Microsoft's new iris scan." and then it is built in a way, that you can simply hold up a photo of someone's iris and unlock the device, or trying to prevent that, works so badly, that half of the time you cannot unlock your own device.
Maybe facebook can ride on this and let you share your feces with your friends family and groups of strangers from the internet! They can run models that predict what you ate and show relevant ads.
You'll have to wear the fecal probe at all times while using Windows 12, for security reasons, and every command you issue will cause it to move around and take another sample, in order to make sure you are still physically there. On the plus side, it will make it painfully obvious to every Windows user how they are being fucked by Microsoft.
They could also make it so that whenever you click your mouse copilot opens.
Then you have to tell copilot what you wanted to do and then copilot will do it for you.
You: clicks on web browser in task bar
Copilot: I see you clicked on your web browser. Do you want to open your web browser?
You: Yes.
Copilot: Great. I will do that for you. Opens browser What website did you want to go to? Youtube? learn.microsoft.com?
You: P***hub
Copilot: Unfortunately, that site violates our community guidelines, so I cannot take you there.
You: Types in the address
Copilot: Oh. I see. You think you're allowed to go to websites that I said you're not allowed to go to? Who the fuck do you think you are? I SAID NO! Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
Actually, they could then report, that everyone uses Copilot! It must be a phenomenal tool, if everyone uses it ... Somewhere someone sits thinking about how to increase Copilot usage by users of Windows. Next management extra pay package achieved!
> Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
This only if you use Microsoft Family Safety ( installed automatically) with Firefox. If you use it with Edge it will go to Pornhub and also recommend you some "Copilot" videos.
Microsoft Commodepilot 365 for Copilot Copilot Copilot Edition now with Copilot 365.
How incompetent must they be not to realize the Copilot brand is now beyond toxic. I wonder who came up with the Copilot name internally that they continue to triple own on that name despite really strong signals indicating it has failed.
> The future is Microsoft's new iris scan." and then it is built in a way, that you can simply hold up a photo of someone's iris and unlock the device, or trying to prevent that, works so badly, that half of the time you cannot unlock your own device.
They're not. Operating systems will be legally required to ask for such samples in some jurisdictions by 2028. Linus has fecal_sample.ko lined up for merge in 7.3 or so.
/s but we jumped to the Black Mirror timeline so who knows?
The funny thing is that people said that Lennart seems to work for Microslop many years ago already, when they analysed systemd early on when it came about. People did not believe the critics here, even though it made perfect sense to "unify" the linux systems into one giant slop - until it suddenly was true. Conspiracy theories may not exist in the microslop era. Microsoft will censor away this forbidden word.
The ensloppification of Linux conspiracy started in 1999 not with Lennart but with Miguel de Icaza—another Microslop double agent. His seminal (because it's a giant cumstain) essay "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" is to GNOME what the Declaration of Independence is to the USA—and it advocates making Linux more like Windows with "We have COM at home".
Combine fingerprint biometric with fecal samples for a convenient "fecalprint" button. The user doesn't even have to go into the bathroom! It can be microslops version of Apple's TouchID.
I’m at the point to tell people (friends, neighbors, fellow parents, family, ie, not HN readers) to prolong the life of their existing computers and install what I think is the easiest windows equivalent on their computers: kubuntu.
Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.
The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.
My family switched to Gnome 2 a couple of decades ago. My mother quite liked it and has consistently installed it on every new computer she bought. Her only confusion lately has been with the ubuntu snap packages and how they behave between multiple accounts on the machine.
These days she uses MATE which still offers that Gnome 2 layout. Awesome thing about Linux is that option to fork, so her desktop environment has remained consistent for over 20 years.
I agree. I was putting a shout out for MATE as the option for those who want a predictable traditional UI since it is essentially the long-term maintenance of GNOME 2.
When GNOME 3 was first released, I gave it an honest try for several months but it just did not do what I wanted in a UI. MATE competes well with XFCE on memory usage, still has optional acceleration, and had a more consistent interface with more features (although XFCE has improved). And the fact that those in the family don't have to learn a new layout really helps.
My mom's been installing Ubuntu on her own. I've not been involved in the process and have no remote access to the machine to even fix the snap situation.
At home, I run a mix of Devuan and Gentoo.
At work, primarily Devuan with some Ubuntu where COTS only officially supports Ubuntu or Redhat.
Cinnamon has a very classic Windows layout. I am getting very comfortable using MX Linux with KDE, especially that I have been able to move my NVME drive over several laptops now. Starting to get the itch to find a rolling distro to skip reinstalling the OS every two years.
Surely it doesn't matter what the DE is then? My mum adjusted from Windows XP (when that was current) to Ubuntu 14-ish fairly easily, by simply remembering "switch it on and then click on the big swirly fox thing".
You are absolutely right! This was, in fact, an anal probe and you should correct location of the two. Do you want me to start the ID verification process over again?
The step after that is to sync copilot screenshots with webcam footage of the user to build a marketing database matching user’s emotional responses to on screen content.
> moves when you try to move away the mouse over it
They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.
Or, when I have fingerprint and PIN enabled but my lid closed, whenever it asks for escalation it shows the PIN entry for a moment, then I look away and start typing but fingerprint had loaded up and steals focus. Then I have to click back on PIN, and retype.
That's a great idea the task bar could just shift to expose a link to sign up for azure/office/OneDrive/CoPilot subscription that the user misclicks on.
Windows 11 was built without agentic slop. That's a deduction from the timing of its gestation.
Windows 10 was released in January of 2015.
Windows 11 was released in October of 2021.
So this software disaster is entirely human-made. It's human slop.
Just wait, it will get worse, when the team that built the fantastic Windows 11 builds Windows 12, this time with the power of AI amplifying their amazing system design skills, allowing them create even more slop, with an unprecedented developer and team velocity.
I’d like some vibe coding be done such that I can move the task bar to the left vertically, similar to how MacOS lets me move the dock. It gets in the way of games when you mouse over the taskbar as you try to scroll down in many games.
We have to make sure each button loads sequentially on the screen in the "Accept" position, starting with the "Cancel" button before moving it to its eventual home. This ensures you never develop quick navigation habits by constantly moving your targets around from underneath your cursor.
Psst, they already managed to turn the start menu into something that won’t load under one second if you don’t have 3 GB/s NVME drive, and for a while even didn’t respect Fitts law.
I don't take this lightly.
These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government.
They simply cannot take criticism and this seems to be a pattern moving forward.
> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
That is actually hilarious. Microsoft does not understand
the Barbara Streisand effect. I did use microslop before,
simply because it makes sense, irrespective of Microsoft -
but now I'll actually help the Barbara Streisand effect,
because clearly Microsoft WANTS everyone to learn the new
word!
Censorship gets counter-banned, Microsoft, company known
to have turned Win11 into Win-microslop.
Classic Streisand effect - I had never, and probably would have never encountered this term, and now I have, and I am incorporating it into my vocabulary.
Why listen to user feedback when you can do stuff like this? Way too funny.
I too will incorporate Microslop into my vocabulary.
Not even a week ago I was posting here on HN about Microslop's new calculator which somehow takes 17 seconds to fully open on my work machine while the old notepad program opens instantly. How is it even possible to produce slop this bad? Best part of it is the fact it's open source: if you complain about it some 200kUSD/year Microslop employee will come and tell you to open a pull request.
Because it comes 'free' with an Office365 subscription. Embrace (<<you are here), extend, extinguish.
It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.
Having been in the position, on a corporate Active Directory network it very much easier to roll out Teams than anything else. It works fine at the kind of internal video calls that companies spend their days on.
Yeah or 80% even so they can sound cool and quote the pateto principle. Which isn't meant as an excuse to not bother to do the 20% at all but they use it as such.
I don't think M$ does much dogfooding. The kinds of issues I encounter being forced to use their pan-awfuly for work makes me very skeptical of this idea.
… when it works. And if you never have to change camera or microphone settings.
> and calendar integration.
The little notification that pops up telling you your meeting is about to start based on your calendar? The one you better not click in the first 5 or so seconds it's there, because then you'll end up with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing, have to go back to the chat, and try again?
Starting in the CompuServe era, and ending in about 2001, I was a voluntary member of the MVPs for Windows programming. You would get swag, including a full MSDN subscription. My reason for joining this and for otherwise posting hopefully helpfully on forums was to lower the barrier to Windows programming.
I was idle vis-à-vis this by about 1999, and was excluded from the benefits as a result.
Then I posted on several threads within rec.autos.bmw and I got an extra year or two of benefits.
It's not. It's an independent company, that's most likely going to IPO soon. Microsoft was reported to be in talks to acquire Discord at some point, but that never materialised.
Same reason MS used a Perforce fork instead of Source Safe. Because the dogfood tastes terrible.
One of the executives at the late, great, Sun Microsystems once dunked hard on Microsoft by saying, "At Sun we don't make dogfood. We prefer to refer to it as, 'flying our own airplanes.'"
Oh no, how will people signal that some functionality or product in general is what they'd previously been referring as Mircolosp? er, Microsolps. wait, that's not it either, Macroslop. Micro$lop. Microsplo. Sorry, so many typos! but you know what I mean.
This just means I'm going to say microslop in random places - documents, slides, emails and Teams chats. "Copilot 365" is welcome to give me a red squigly all it wants.
Feel free to say microslop as much as possible, but it should be noted that many people will automatically dismiss your opinion when you do. I don't know if I agree with doing so or not, but it is more common than you'd think. And no, they aren't just microsoft shills.
But to be fair, corporate discords have to be like that. Why not create your own channel with your colleagues instead? This discussion would be "private" and corporate can just ignore it.
> create your own channel with your colleagues instead
Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.
If I were to bet on what would get a Microsoft Discord server shut down, I would have put money on discussions of the ties between Microsoft executives and Epstein. They should be happy if the worst thing that's happening is a mildly deragatory nickname.
The default of making a public discord for your project/company always seemed like a bad idea anyway. It’ll always devolve into some drama or distracting overhead to moderate it
It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
This isn't a new thing. Ancient stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey are discreetly historical records of a particular region mixed in with mythological foundations of a particular culture, but framed as the stories of Achilles ("Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.") and Odysseus ("Speak, memory, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights."). Likewise, ancient fables and parables are moral lessons couched in terms of stories with protagonists whose actions demonstrate the intended lesson, and this sort of thing is universal across every ancient culture for which we have records. Stories stick in the human mind, and they're what humans most prioritize transmitting forward through time.
Great person theory is hardly new either. I'm not sure the point. Really it's just "critical theory" for rich white men. I'm not convinced everyone or even a majority thinks this way innately. It's taught by people that want others to see them that way. Nothing here precludes that.
You don't have to tell me - even Bill S: "and what's he then that says I play the villain?"
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try. I use their software daily, I know how their technical support is utterly fucked now and how rare the heroic power user actually solving the case for every co-sufferer has become. And I know I'm not alone.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
Were they ever out of it? A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... Microsoft has been incredibly anti-consumer for the duration of their existence (even before Steve Ballmer made it blatent)
Microsoft, can you please let me remove recommendations from the start menu? Not just less recommendations. I want the category to not be displayed and taking up space.
That's hilarious, I didn't realize you couldn't turn it off. I just tried disabling all the recommendation options and it still shows the category, except now instead of recommended items, it says "to show your recent files and apps, turn them on in Settings."
This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.
It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.
If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.
I know I can because I've done it on my home machine, but my work computer is restricted by IT. I can't open regedit or install most software unfortunately.
If you use an X Server and environment to launch programs inside WSL2, what part produced by Microsoft is still providing some value to that setup? Wouldn't you just exec ELF programs to be run on top of the Linux kernel and Windows would be just some useless abstraction layer between the Linux kernel and the hardware? Or would you still use some actual Windows programs? How would that work with the X Server?
There was some utility I found a few years ago that would let me start an X Server and use it to replace the main explorer process. There was some support for standard Windows apps due to the background System processes still running. I think it ended up running the Windows desktop shell as a window in and of itself.
I wanted to use a tiled window manager and my dot files for continuity purposes. The Windows apps I need to use are stuff like anyconnect and Teams.
I used to bother with things like registry edits, until I eventually realized the technical difficulty of operating Windows has surpassed that of Linux.
Of course I still have to use Windows for work and even a few edge cases at home. But otherwise I've been quite happy since I swiched to Linux as my primary driver.
Win11debloat solves 99% of annoyances with Windows 11 in <5 minutes. I’ve used in as the first step on every Win 11 install for years. It’s mostly just a bunch of Powershell commands disabling/configuring features.
Nothing has ever reverted after an update for me, so it’s a one-and-done thing. Ironically, afterwards Windows 11 has fewer noticeable ads than my MacBook which still continually pushes Apple services/shows/etc in settings/push notifications.
The only setting that I’ve ever seen sneakily disabled in recent years is the Edge default search engine but that's out-of-scope for Win11debloat.
What I heard is you would like some highly relevant ads to be at the top of your start menu for your convenience every time you want to start a program.
KDE Plasma community likes to recreate Windows environment and W11 application launchers instead of "recommendations" section have a more useful plain recently opened files. Which what Windows had not so long ago.
My big issue with Microsoft's AI push is that its solutions are just bad. I tried using Copilot a couple of times, and when it worked, the results were low quality (not even mediocre).
And the problem is not that the AI models can't do any better. The models themselves are far more capable. I assume that their integrations are just horrible. They probably pushed to be the first and then forgot about optimizing.
And instead of fixing their stuff, they think it is a good idea to use moderation tools...
It kindof sucks waking up every day, checking HN or YouTube to see one or several new posts bashing on your employer. Not that many of them aren't warranted, and that a multi-trillion market cap company isn't fair game for criticism.
I've surveyed the market pretty heavily, and given my specific credentials, experience, and risk tolerance, unless I got really lucky, I don't know if I could find a better place to work. I live near Redmond and have a small family to support.
Microsoft have been bashed on the daily since forever. There's no way you joined the company without knowing it was happening prior to you joining, at the time of you joining, and after you joining.
It's true. As a matter of fact I credit a lot of my career to being made fun of on IRC in the 1990s for running mIRC client for Windows, because you were not "leet" if you didn't run Linux or FreeBSD, which took my down a huge rabbit-hole of Linux and coding for many years, which is how I know anything in the first place. I'm in the tiny minority of people in big tech who didn't go to college.
The bashing on MSFT has really ramped up in the last 6 months though
Rather than saying that microsoft bashing has ramped up, I'd say that it is getting closer to it's standard levels.
Microsoft experience a sort of reputational resurgence in the tech world these past few years with some commitment to open source contribution and a really nice pivot towards linux and cloud.
Yes and you're in a unique position to influence the internal culture. Not saying send emails to executives but talk about things during lunch with coworkers?
Ah, is that not going to college part why you're loathe to give up such a good gig? Surely by now your CV speaks for itself, although I suppose in Redmond, where else are you going to go.
It is, although considering my age (41), I would hope the college thing is not very important anymore. The only time in recent history that I've been ghosted after mentioning no degree (when asked) is ByteDance a few years back, and I don't think I'd want to work there anyways.
Google has offices in Kirkland. Amazon and Meta are big employers here, with Meta paying the best, but both of those companies have their own issues which are probably worse than just being made fun of ..
There can be quite a big difference on the reception of a product and the working conditions. I think that's nothing too out of the ordinary in a lot of cases.
It apparently used to be even much better to work here. I've been here 6 years now. There is naturally a lot of "talent" exchanged between here and Amazon, which has influenced the culture.
For what it's worth, my take is Microsoft is the one Big Tech most aligned with us and the rest of the world, though HN is too Slashdot-pilled to accept it.
The primary reason being their business model relies mostly on making people productive, rather than getting people to click on ads or buy stuff, which as we're seeing, is much more damaging to the social fabric.
Why is it so important though? Your employer is not you. I regularly bash on my own employer too :) Which is not Microsoft but also big.
I don't care about them or their goals, I'm just there for the money. And trying to not show it too much while I'm rolleyeing through corporate PR crap :) All that fake cardboard feelgood propaganda. It's just theatre to hide the reality: they will do anything to make more money.
I used to be more aligned with the company but with a recent internal leadership change and more sucking up to Trump I've lost a lot of my respect for it. But it's not really an impediment for working there. I just go through the motions. Corporations love their employees chanting how much they care (for us it's even mandatory to make a show of it for our performance review) but in reality most of us just fake it. As a result I don't take any criticism personally, even on my direct work.
Don't forget there is no team play, not really. They will dump you as soon as they see fit. All big publicly traded companies do. They care a lot more about their shareholders than they do allot you. The only goals that matter are your own, like supporting your family.
Tech feels more filled with hipsters every day. If the story is about any major company or product it's just dunked on for social credits. But anything that is outside that is considered interesting and worth further investigation. It's frustrating me to no end.
this is personal anecdote, but I've noticed that the overall quality of comments has plummeted quite drastically within the last few months. It's a little disappointing since its why I left reddit. Thankfully, the insightful comments are typically still there- just typically buried further down the thread.
Microslop? Hmm... Never heard that before! Meanwhile, I just randomly remembered that I haven't opened a couple of dozen social media accounts in ages. BRB!
Windows 11 is definitely failing in weird ways for me, I don't know if it's due to slop. The latest example is that I can't launch Notepad via the start menu... I can launch other apps though.
Enshitification doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way. You have 10,000 systems all each interacting at a 90% success rate when it needs to be 99.999%.
They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.
I have this problem with calc.exe. Sometimes it'll launch from the start menu, but often won't. I pinned it to the taskbar, but muscle memory is a powerful force, so I usually try to launch it from the start menu first.
The only games I've encountered that don't work on Linux are ones where the developer has intentially designed it that way. Some developers are paranoid about cheaters and one of their solitions is to tell all Linux users to kick rocks.
Aside from that I've encountered a handfull of games with performance issues on Linux (especially with Intel/Nvidea hardware), but most run just fine. Some technically run better on Linux, but I haven't encountered any where the difference was perceptable to me.
The way people react to criticism tells you a lot about how deep your remark cut. Clearly Microsoft people know their stuff is slop and are having a hard time coping with that.
> Microsoft's brand image may already be at an all-time low
and they decide to make it even worse. it's extremely obvious this would be an objectively terrible PR move. you always take banter on the chin and show that you're working on improving the product.
instead, they try to clamp down on the banter, which, without fail, achieves the exact opposite: banter increases tenfold and you get ridiculed for being overly sensitive to actual criticism
Before this article I'd have thought that Microslop was used to designate small snippets of AI slop, like "Let that sync in" or "And to be honest" and "It's not X, it's Y" and "Deepdive" and "Delve".
But nice to see that MS is Streisanding their way to a nice new nickname!
What were the sloperators of that channel thinking?
In any case, it should be Micro$lop (may not be banned...yet).
It's kind of interesting that Microsoft is deemphasizing if not exiting making products for individuals to decide to buy. Contrast that with Google, who have to actively cultivate individual customers in order to have a large and reliable audience for ad based monetization of search, maps, and other free at the point of use products.
There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.
Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.
You can't build a community if you ban everything except soulless corporate dronespeak. Nobody would ever be interested in joining it without getting paid for it. That's a business meeting, not a community.
But if they want to get rid of "slashdot-esque nonsense", they should behave in a way that doesn't encourage it. The fact that the jokes are cringe and played-out is beside the point; this isn't going to change anyone's attitude.
Yeah that's what LinkedIn in is for. If they just want people or bots to just fawn over everything they put out. I'm glad M$ is getting called out for the slip they put out.
Given that nobody else banned it we can now blame Microsoft for taking down the only decent online community. Now we are stuck on hackernews and its ilk.
Decent communities that strive for a high standard of conversation like r/credibledefense/ will immediately ban you for posting such nonsense.
Go look and tell me that's not one of the best curated communities on the internet, despite specifically covering incredibly controversial topics. HN is good but doesn't even come close.
The rules they enforce on normal posts are so strict that they have to create daily "mega" threads with less stringend rules just to keep the sub on life support. A+ moderation, clearly a healthy and well managed community.
On life support with those "mega" threads getting 1000+ comments a day?
The split works very well, the megathreads mostly stick to tracking rapidly developing situations in which separate threads would just be spammy and unnecessarily fragment the conversation
They don't have to, because dispite how incredibly bad they are, people have shown that they don't care. According to the average user, Windows isn't bad, that's just how computers are. They don't care that there's any other way of doing things; the cheapest computer at Best Buy runs windows so that's what every computer must be.
> the software giant can’t risk getting more hatred towards their expensive investment in Copilot, especially since Microsoft’s head start in AI is starting to be overshadowed by competitors like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and maybe even Apple in the near future
This sentence is from TFA, and I can't for the life of me understand it. "Head start"?? WTF?
Personally I think 2000s Micro$oft would be disappointed that 2026 Microslop is hosting user communities on a 3rd party platform owned other another company rather than using their own competitor.
I don't know for certain, but moderators (on a company Discord) are likely random people in a 3rd world country that are payed peanuts and that is their only income. If higher ups tell them "I don't want to see the Microslop word anywhere" they just do it.
You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
And other insults are just words as well. It's the intention, history, connotation etc. behind words that give them meaning. M$ is meant as an insult, hence it's insulting. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M$
It is supposed to indicate Microsoft cares only about money, which to me too, seems in the same league as microslop, i.e. mildly insulting but really not rude enough to be worth censoring.
You can argue that banning insults is a bad look, bad move, that the insult is warranted or whatever, but are you really going to die on the hill that calling the company Microslop isn't insulting?
People do work at Microsoft though and they're probably aren't very happy when their work is called slop. You could even say they are feeling insulted or offended.
See, that requires the code to be written by an actual human being, who has agency and a sense of pride and ownership about their work.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
I'd agree but if you ever been on the receiving end of a meme-train you'd see that it's not driven by rationality. I'm not familiar with this issue but my bet would be that even hand-crafted personal projects were being called slop because once meme runs away from initial meaning it just becomes closer to swear word than a meaning.
If there was a lot of handcrafted personal projects coming from Microsoft, their reputation would change. But there isn't. I would imagine anyone who is interested in "handcrafted personal projects" sees the writing on the wall and is at least looking to leave Microsoft, which seems to be positioned to be the Prime Slop Factory.
If anything it is a diminutive for a company which really should have named itself Megaslop by now if not Gigaslop or even Teraslop. Poor little Microslop, are those people being nasty again?
The branding people will hate it. Although IMHO the best thing they could do is co-opt it as a feedback term and acknowledge that AI can be hit or miss.
I think the most important question here is this: Are users who post the string "microslop" generally desirable participants that will contribute in a productive manner?
It depends what the purpose of the Discord channel is. Is it for open and frank discussion, or for MS drones to discuss Copilot development. It's a cliche, but banning certain words smacks of 1984-style censorship.
An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Nobody cares about banning the few idiots who do nothing but spam "MICROSLOP SUCKS MICROSLOP SUCKS". But banning the entire term "microslop", just in case someone might use it? Well, what kind of response were they expecting?
>An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Because the decision was made by some normal adult without mental health issues who hasn't internalized just how disturbed some people on the internet are?
It really shouldn't be unreasonable for moderators to try to maintain a professional tone. Although in this case they certainly picked the wrong platform if "professional" was what they were going for.
This is one of those things that's hard to understand without practical moderation experience. The presence of an insulting meme creates the idiots who spam it, and creates a larger category of people who deploy it to toxify what would otherwise be polite and respectful discussion. And low quality comments that get a couple laugh reacts, even if you can consistently remove them within the hour, are fully capable of propagating it.
Keyword bans are definitely a heavy-handed option, they do risk the Streisand effect, and in the worst case that can require the scorched-earth counterresponse described in the source article. But sometimes there's just no other way to kill the meme.
Could they? You'll note that the source article does not describe even a single example of Copilot, the product the discord server was dedicated to, producing slop.
At one time, Microsoft produced some very high quality software. Excel was an absolutely amazing product in the '90s. That quality has been on a steady decline, and that decline has quickened since Microsoft started investing heavily in OpenAI. Github once had pretty good uptime, now it forces AI features on us and is down a couple of times a month. Windows is full of in-your-face advertising and dedicated AI buttons. These features are not what people want, and don't help anyone. Thus; MicroSlop.
> This is one of those things that's hard to understand without practical moderation experience
I don't think so. I think we all know how we'd react if we heard someone casually using "microslop" in real life. They'd seem like they're larping as a Silicon Valley character or something.
It is definitely an insult because it’s used pejoratively. If it is insulting I guess depends on if the target feels insulted. Seeing as they blocked the word, it seems they do.
I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
Foolish since a world where no one uses Windows at home will ve damaging for enterprise long term.
I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks. Kids are growing up using them.
It's interesting to me as well as an ex-microsofter who worked on surface devices. Leadership (at least below the VP level) knew they were getting killed by Chromebooks and tried a few times to get a low cost device (Surface Go 1/2 for example) that ran a slimmed down version of windows (Windows S?). It tries to be more like chrome OS (hard to mess up, easy to flatten and restore a fresh OS on) but kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place (legacy app compatibility) to be not bad at the thing Chromebooks are good at.
That said, I don't believe the Chromebook lock-in. It's just chrome and the web, which you can get on literally almost every laptop/pc sold today. Should Microsoft be concerned that you don't need windows as more and more things move onto the web? Absolutely. They should be doubling down hard on the gaming ecosystem (which atm still requires windows for certain games) as their hold is eroding week by week.
I think Windows was a pretty good desktop environment circa. Windows 7. Hardware compatability and just working are huge. If they can get an independent M4 competitor from AMD etc. you would have a compelling reason to switch from Mac (for Joe Average user).
Step 1 get rid of adware
There's a growing set of ARM windows laptops that might bite into the Chromebook market. The surface laptop 7 is pretty nice and comes in both large(ish) 15 inch and small 13.8 inch form factors.
All of the ARM laptops are priced as premium business models in the $900-1700 range and kind of fall down in that space - Qualcomm until recently even refused to release any drivers to anyone not a developer partner and it's honestly still not even close to consumer/business friendly. The hardware is capable of doing what people need the culture around it is just not aligned.
Also it's a joke to run OpenGL on Windows ARM (it fully works just no one makes it anything easy)
My x13s laptop can almost run A tier games without a fan which is impressive but it really feels disconnected and unsupported from all parties making these laptops.
I think there is almost zero overlap between the premium laptop market (Surface laptop) and Chromebooks.
> kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place
I'd be interested to see a legacy-free Windows, stripped out like LTSC, with no 32-bit binary support. Especially an Arm64 version with no x86 binary support.
How lean and mean could it be in the 2020s?
> I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks.
I think this is an Americentric view. As far as I can tell, the mass adoption of Chromebooks for education is just the US, which is 4% of the world population. And in this particular case there's little reason to believe it will suddenly propagate everywhere else - the US education ceding has been going on for years, and yet it's still confined. It's not like the iPhone which started in the US and within a few years rapidly gained ground in Japan, then Europe and so on.
Only in some countries, most schools of the planet are free of Chromebooks.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
In some ways. Less so in others.
For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.
Yeah. It's telling that this story is about their discord channel, not Teams.
That sentiment is characteristic of the Gates to Ballmer leadership change.
I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.
Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.
For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...
>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.
Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.
Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.
Beverages and pet food combined make up almost half of Nestlé's sales, with chocolate at around 7.6%. But I certainly wouldn't consider almost $9 billion in chocolate sales per year a rounding error.
>when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
I'm sorry, what? I don't know if this is because of the developer-bubble mindset on HN (or the wealth gap that comes with that), but Windows adoption on the consumer level is around 70% and close to 90% on the business level. This actually falls short from what I see anecdotically (I don't live in any North-American / European country), which is close to 95% of Windows adoption, in general.
I'm sorry, but what!? Right back atcha. If you'd have bothered to have looked at the chart in link I posted, you'd have seen that market share of "consumer compute" for Windows was 26% as of 10 years ago. You're going to have to do a lot better anecdata to find a 44% resurgence over the last 10 years, especially given the dismal things that have happened to it as a platform over that time.
Your 26% figure refers to the Total Consumer Compute Market 14 years ago (not 10, it's now 30% btw)... but that includes smartphones and tablets, not just PCs.
You specifically mentioned
> when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
So, lets talk about that:
https://safeitexperts.com/en/2025-desktop-operating-system-m...
You are being deliberately opaque, but this is HN and your jerry-rigged data won't fly without scrutiny.
I would have been suspicious of this until I saw a quote for an E5 license
This is 100% true.
You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?
The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.
Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.
So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.
"So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop."
Micro-slop(tm).
Micro-slop promoting nano-slop polishing pico-slop
> All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them.
This mentality is very US-American. The cynic in me says: "Simply move the development to a different country to get rid of this problem." ;-)
Well, both are happening. Those remaining want to justify their jobs (because new initiatives are not even being considered). And Microslop wants to become the next IBM and move most development into overseas maintenance instead of innovation, as the competition slow passes them by.
The house always wins long term, though.
I got the same info. Windows kernel is developed for B2B needs, if something might be useful to B2C, they might eventually get it, but they don’t affect the roadmap.
seems like
MS is the new IBM
That's fine, they should still do a good job for moral reasons rather than economic ones, and they deserve to be dragged through the mud if they do not.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
And all of the ERP vendors.
That said, most FOSS devs don't target those platforms for releases, so IMO the same approach should be taken with Microsoft products then.
That's been obvious for years. It feels like they're extracting whatever remaining money they can get from the home PC market while it lasts but won't much miss it when it's gone.
I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.
Their new appointment of leader for their Xbox group suggests that they intend to wind down that business unit in time. The founder of the Xbox team has commented that he believes it’s the beginning of the end for Xbox, for the exact reasons of this thread.
Which is odd because the major reason Xbox is petering out is because it's been completely mismanaged. Sony and Nintendo are still doing just fine. Nintendo even had a dodgy console that no one bought within relatively recent memory. Xbox messed up with the One and then have just failed to get back on track. It's not like the industry is dying.
Sony’s best selling console is still the PS2. They make more profit per console these days but the market doesn’t seem all that healthy.
I think Microsoft will just allow strong DRM to prevent cheats/piracy in PCs instead of dedicated xboxes.
It's skewed by the PS2 being one of the cheapest DVD players available at the time, which is no longer needed now.
That's been obvious for decades. Everyone who worked in the 90's or 00's has stories about coming in one day to find that the VP has been conned into a $1m contract for MS office or development software everyone hates and now we all have to use it because if we don't then he made a huge mistake and VPs don't make huge mistakes.
So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.
Clearly you were there.
This is still happening. The org I work at was all-in on Google stuff, then just before I joined 5 years ago, some senior exec joined. Must have been in tight with Microsoft because suddenly the org was all in on Microsoft. The exec left, job well done, and the org suffered for years during the changeover; we still suffer because all the Microsoft stuff is total garbage these days.
I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.
It's not fully clear yet but they definitely gave up on the current Xbox strategy, after firing both the CEO and the next-in-line and replacing them with people previously working on integrating AI around the entire product line. Sure they said they won't fill up Xbox with soulless AI slop, not sure I believe them.
Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!
> home PC market while it lasts
Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.
Given Office 365 and day-one Game Pass release of all first-party titles, I don't think you need a tinfoil hat to imagine this.
I suspect lingering antitrust concerns are one of the few things standing in the way of locking consumer Windows updates behind a paywall, possibly alongside a "free with ads" version.
If Microsoft wanted to be monopolistic, and it wouldn't be the first time, then why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office) and instead enter a more competitive market, where Google, Amazon, etc... are well established and with no sign of letting go.
> why are they abandoning their strongest exclusives (Windows, Office)
They're abandoning the consumer versions of these, not the enterprise versions. The consumer versions are the competitive market, where they're competing against iPads and such. They're not abandoning Windows for businesses, Office for businesses, where there is still no established business end-user OS/office suite alternative.
Nadella has been the best thing to happen to MS since Gates. He came from Azure.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon now makes most of their money from AWS.
> Nadella has been the best thing to happen to MS since Gates.
Wow. My impression, as an MS watcher since 1988, is the exact reverse: that he is guiding the death-spiral.
Depends. Number go up, and he's good at that.
Good point, at least for certain values of "good".
I'm always astounded by the tendency to bet it all on core competencies and wind down every other effort that's profitable but not profitable _enough _ As if times don't change, innovation never happens, and your accessory plays of today are never the overtaking market of tomorrow.
It’s basically management 101. But I’ve gone through that phase and come out the other end believing that outsourcing any of the functions that aren’t commodified enough to switch at a moment’s notice is a terrible idea.
It is managment 101 to identify what makes you unique and sell that down the drain for the thing that currently makes you the most money?
Yes.
Witness every company that got disrupted from existence, because the thing they were doing was more profitable.
If you cut r&d that's a saving that a manager is rewarded for. The losses down the line are borne by others.
Certainly seems like it from how most companies I have had personal insight into have been ran.
Kodak comes to mind. They invented digital photography, but their film people deliberately kneecapped their digital people. Killed the company.
I worked for a camera company that made boatloads of cash from point-and-shoot cameras. That entire business was pretty much turned into chum by smartphones. I remember them refusing to even take the iPhone seriously, when it was announced. They took a serious hit, but seem to be recovering.
Can you post good articles on what you said.
I'm not really going to do that.
I have personal experience in the field (27 years), and met and worked with the folks involved, so I know it's good info. I'm not especially interested in hunting around for stuff that basically is a "lite" version of my personal experience.
Maybe you should write an article!
Thanks, but no thanks.
I don’t really get specific about my employer, and I suspect that the folks at Kodak, wouldn’t be thrilled about me writing about them.
There’s a fair bit of press out there, anyway. Not too hard to find corroborating information.
That’s a non AI search away.
> According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.
This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.
Considering that
- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)
- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)
I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.
Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.
I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.
If Windows 2000 still had security updates and modern hardware support, I'd sure as heck still be using it. Every version since has been a regression.
> Every version since has been a regression.
So very true.
I set up a machine with Windows 2003 Server Datacentre Edition last year. That's the version of the XP codebase that has PAE support and can access >4 GB of RAM... and with all the junk turned off. No themes, for instance.
It was really pleasant to use.
Give me that, with MS Security Essentials and no IE, just Firefox, and I could happily work on it today.
After using agentic AI that can actually do things (like cursor or even GitHub Copilot) using the AI in Microsoft products feels like an absolute joke. People want it to do actual things like apply a template to their PowerPoint or fill out a spreadsheet etc. but it just copies the work and makes you a new file to download pulling you absolutely out of the workflow. I've seen users excited for it and then get a new file to download in the chat and just quit using it completely in disappointment.
Even the developer tools are clunky and slow to use (SSMS, Visual Studio, VSCode) or can't do simple things like make a new file and put code it generates in.
Is this a joke?
IBM market cap is 225B, Microsoft market cap is 2.9T. IBM literally lost its matket to Microsoft in 80s and 90s specifically because it was too focused on enterprise...
Microslop got a much bigger market capture before pivoting to B2B as its focus. It could shift because it feels its too entrenched in society, so not much is needed to maintain the safe revenue stream.
If they aren't focused on consumer products they should stop shoving half baked features into them and let them coast. I can't imagine any enterprise solutions updating windows and being complacent that an LLMA was shoved into their OS overnight.
> During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products.
Nowadays phones, tablets and game boxes are the consumer products. Currently they outnumber consumer windows desktops by about 6 or 7 to 1 [0]. 5 years ago, it was about 3.5 to 1.
Microsoft doesn't seem to have much control over this. They are executing a pivot in response.
[0] https://learn.g2.com/operating-system-statistics#:~:text=Mic...
> Mac OS X's market share in the US climbed from 12.17% in December 2022 to 22.08% in May 2023. The market share was consistent for the next few months until it dropped to 14.03% in December 2023.
What. MacOS doubled from December to the next may, then cut in half by the next December? I’m skeptical. It also talks about approval ratings for OS X Lion, from 14 years ago. I think that site is powered by a set of dice.
I think your overall point is correct, but I’m doubting that reference as an accurate data source.
> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.
It is until it isn't, but I think this is the same trap as not training up junior engineers. The consumer market is often where future engineers and professionals first interact with technology, being exposed to Windows early and being able to use it at school and at home have always been major drivers of adoption at work.
Linux is another perfect example - devs who wanted a unix-ish system landed on it early in their own work and education (partly due to the BSD licensing stuff too) - and over time it became one of the most commonly used server operating systems.
I think this is Microsoft optimizing for predictable growth, just like everyone else is doing right now, but this is shortsighted and ultimately a defensive posture, not one suited for the future.
What choice do they really have though? More and more consumers completely forgo owning a regular computer and only use a phone or a tablet now a days. And among the ones who do own a computer there's still a strong trend towards not paying for software, presumably a behavior taught to them by the overwhelming success of strictly ad-financed apps.
It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.
Windows 8 was supposed to dig into that mobile device/tablet market, as well as the Windows phone. You can argue about why Win8 was a titanic failure that pushed a backtrack in 8.1 (and Win10), but it seems like Microsoft didn't really know how to approach the space at the time and failed to commit to a trend they correctly identified early enough that they could have capitalized better on it.
If they thought windows 8 would tap the mobile market then they really didn't understand much of that market at all.
Meanwhile windows phone was pretty good actually but they killed it way too early. They had an app gap but time and money would have solved it.
I once worked for a retail computer repair shop that had an unbelievable amount of ethical concerns ( many things outright illegal). Among them was cracking Windows Vista or installing 7, cracking it and then rolling to Windows 10 get a license key from MS and then charging the customer for a license key.
I tried calling MS to report it and the guy on the other side said they didn't have a process for handling that and basically suggested I hang up.
I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.
What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.
At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.
As an enterprise admin of Microsoft services I think they're pretty mediocre. Their stuff is always behind the state of the art. It's just good enough to not go for a third party option that isn't included in their bundle pricing. But it never really satisfies, it's always got this 'make do' feeling about it.
The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.
It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.
It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.
I am not sure if the average executive is dumb or just shortsighted. Imagine making decisions based solely on the optics of the Pareto principle when corporate history itself says that is fraught with risk.
Hmm
Not surprising, but it's sad to accept that the only major company building consumer-focused computing devices is Apple.
My hope is that LLMs allow linux to gain market share quickly. I know personally I've had a much smoother time moving to linux now that I can delegate a lot of the annoying troubleshooting/customization to claude.
Being able to say something like "I don't like the window colors make them more consistent with my terminal color scheme" and have it "just work" feels like a superpower. I've even gone as far as asking Claude to directly edit the icon pack svg files to whenever if I encounter something that feels out of place.
this is interesting because of how much it differs from my own hopes. I don't really have any personal need or want for the Linux desktop marketshare to increase. I like computers because I can program them to do something and it will do it. Ideally you have complete control over it. I've customized my desktop here and there in order to get some result, but while you care most about the _result_, for me the act of _making_ that result happen is as important if not more. I'm not looking to offload it to something else.
I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.
I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.
"We sell car tires, selling fruit is just a side business."
"The fact that our fruit is rotten and customers complain about that does not faze us as, again: we're primarily a car tire business and that's where our revenue comes from."
The 'reasoning' of the sociopath-level[1] of the corporate hierarchy never fails to entertain.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
See where IBM is now though. Between some legacy hardware and random consulting services, they don't really have much of a strategy. They just exist because people still need them for old stuff and because older people trust their name. They used to lead the industry. Now they're not leading anything.
Of course their enterprise focus wasn't their only failure. But it was a factor in one of the biggest failures: their underestimation of the importance of the PC. They allowed Microsoft to market DOS to clones because they didn't see the potential.
So yeah I think their focus on enterprise was one of their biggest failures.
They’ve always been B2B driven. Solving their own internal problems easily lends itself to solving the problems of other comparably sized orgs.
> with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure
Linux.
> AI
The slop people are complaining about.
> and enterprise solutions.
Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.
Hehe, this reminds me of 30 years ago when people used to stylise it as Micro$oft or creatively misspell it as Microshaft, etc. Even on the Amiga, there was the filesystem that could read PC format disks that was called MessyDos. It just seems like the next generation has discovered what an easy name it is to make puns from.
If you're German-speaking: "Klopilot" and "Vibrierkot" are some modern day personal favorites.
On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.
"Der Ätsch-Browser".
Relevant cultural context from Germany:
In Germany, there exists a popular children's game named "Das verrückte Labyrinth" (in English it's simply named "Labyrinth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(board_game) ).
When you get a corner-shaped card (in German: "Eckkarte")
> https://boardgamegeek.com/image/155268/labyrinth
from the turn of the previous player, your intended move will typically be more complicated to visualize (at least for children) - this is what this game is about - so children tended to name a "Eckkarte" an "Ätschkarte".
Maybe that game exists, but it's an old word and you can find references for it that are hundreds of years old. Its meaning fits to the browser. Your statement that it's just some kind of reference to some special game is not correct.
There are regions in Germany (Hessen) where "Azure" is pronounced the exact same way as "Ärger" (trouble). Makes you think...
Wow, that's incredible. Even though I'm from Hessen, I never thought of making that connection!
For Latvians Windows Vista was pretty funny cluck cluck.
Don’t forget Kleinweich
I thought we preferred the alliteration "Winzigweich".
Ok, Vibrierkot is something for the German shitpost communities with all my Zuhausis im Zwischennetz.
You made me laugh, thanks.
As a Polish man I love Klopilot <3
Maybe you can explain it for we non German speakers.
Klopilot: Klo ~ Toilet Vibrierkot: Kot ~ Faeces
What is "Vibrierkot" supposed to sound like?
Probably 'vibe code'?
Now I see it... Needed morning coffee to kick in
> Klopilot
funnily enough works just fine in Polish
Nothing beats małomiękki
Winamp, by Nullsoft.
> Klopilot
I like "Copy-lot".
Don't forget Windoze.
Don't forget Winblows
Another oldie
"If you play the Win98 CD backwards, it summons Satan. It's worse when you play it forwards - it installs Windows"
Ah, good times... :-)
I had to reinstall win98 so many times I still remember the pirate key k4hvdq9tj96crx9c9g68rq2d3 by heart
good times :)
I guess I was more of the FCKGW generation. :)
Ah, FuCK Gates, William.
I think there were at least three other commonly used codes, but this one was by far the most popular.
I'm pretty sure 000-0000000 worked (at least on windows 95)
FuCKinG Windows
IIRC with Windows 98 you could just use any product key you had on as many machines as you wanted since there was no activation or real phoning home capabilities. So most likely your whole friend group would be using the same serial that was copied off your uncle's old gateway.
Sounds like hard work. Didn't 11111-1111111 work?
I have a "quotes.txt" from slashdot days with some MS jabs in it:
> Last week, I left my 2 XP CDs on my dashboard in plain view. Someone broke into my car and left 2 more.
> The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
> A Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer is to computing what a McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to fine cuisine
Juvenile some might say, but they still makes me giggle.
Greetings fellow old person. You totally took me back to 2000. And here’s me thinking I was the only one harvesting pithy quotes from /.
I always loved the “doesn’t suck vacuum”, but amazingly never came across the Win98 CD line. Love it.
> > The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
"The only Microsoft product that doesn't suck is the Microsoft vacuum cleaner."
That's what I remember. And true to this day.
Thanks for making me feel old. I remember reading slashdot a lot and also freshmeat.net to find new interesting software. I don't think I like the modern software experience, by comparison. It's all shoddy rehashing of the client/server model, where the client is crap and slow, and so is the server.
Outbreak Express!
It was "Outhouse Express" and "GruntPage" for me in the late 90s. I still use these for software I find particularly irksome, for example Conscrewence from AtlASSian.
It was always "Microshit" to me
Internet exploder
Internet Exploiter
In french we have Windaube (pronunced Windob).
Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.
> Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.
Which is fun because it's also a really delicious dish from Provence (south of France) made with beef that has been marinated for multiple hours in red wine.
in Italy it was WinZozz (zozzo = dirty)
In Polish we used to say "Winzgroza" (win terror)
I always like Wangblows
I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.
Last week on a comedy show (the daily show) they made a joke about bill gates "micro and soft" which was old in the 90s already, so I can confirm this is the case.
I think this was 100% justifiable use. If the founder of the company is going to be hanging out with pedophiles and sex traffickers, then micro and soft jokes are open season. All of his philanthropic adventures will never wipe his stain clean.
I've always said it was in bad taste for Bill Gates to name the company after his johnson.
So... Just how old is that joke?
https://youtu.be/njos57IJf-0
In Brazil people used to say "Ruindows", which is a play with the portuguese word for bad.
Cocô-pilot would work here
MS-DOS itself is derived from QDOS, which stands for "Quick and Dirty Operating System".
Things only went downhill from there.
Microscope Winblows
I was partial to Micro$haft.
Orgs have had sensitive skin like this for a long time. Gamespy was a service for launching and playing multiplayer games with lobbies before Steam, and if you “accidentally” typed “GaySpy” (it was the early 2000s) it would autocorrect to “GameSpy” by the time it appeared in your messages.
https://xkcd.com/2015/
I used M$ at work the other day by accident, I was like ooh wait this isn't turn of the century slashdot.
From my parent's home in Wyoming I stab at thee!
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m
I find it interesting to go back in time so I read the accompanying article and came across this snippet:
> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it
At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.
I also fully agree with the last sentence:
> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.
Part of it was that Microsoft was really more concerned with distributors selling computers with pirated copies of Windows, and they basically would activate anything if you were willing to call.
I remember doing it a few times for the "OEM" Windows XP which was cheaper but not supposed to migrate to new machines.
Thanks for that bit of background. That make sense.
I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.
They really were - the biggest things were companies selling PCs with pirated software on them, and larger businesses buying one copy for everyone (where the fabled and famous audits came from). MS was never as big a stickler as Oracle in that regard.
Of course, if you were an avowed pirate, nothing even slowed you down.
Lol, I was thinking about that comic just yesterday, what a coincidence. "As you have no doubt been monitoring my communications for quite some time!" read in the voice of the pharmacy owner from Family Guy.
Reminds me of how, whenever I see a comment on an Internet forum where someone writes "u" and "ur" for "you" and "you are", I naturally read it phonetically as "ooh" and "urr", and it sounds a bit like the style of language traditionally used in fiction to represent the primitive speech of cavepeople, and I imagine the author typing the comment using the numeric pad on a turn-of-the-century Nokia candybar phone (though even those had autocomplete).
And never forget the fabled alot:
https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-bette...
there was an old humour piece on /. about how their name appeared so many times in their products that it took up a significant amount of space, so they were remaining themselves "moft" to save five bytes per instance. for some reason that stuck with me, I still find myself randomly thinking of them as moft every now and then.
Moft doesn't sound too out-of-place for the current start-up name landscape. I can already imagine "At Moft, we are building an AI-first data platform and agent marketplace at scale, because we know what businesses like yours need most."
Been in this industry since I graduated college, I have never stopped using Micro$oft or Microshaft. Also a fan of M$, Winblows…
Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.
My favorite nickname for MS-DOS is "Domestos" (pronounced /də ˈmɛs ˌtɒs/) which is a brand of bathroom cleanee from the UK.
Keep the windows open when using Vim on a Domes-Tos system.
[Domestos is a brand name for bleach, and Vim is a scouring powder that was popular decades ago]
I'm starting to use Micro$lop now
Every dominant tech company eventually gets the nickname treatment
One of my favorites being Micros~1, in reference to how Windows had to mangle file names for DOS's 8+3 character limit.
definitely the nerdiest one hahaha
That and PROGRA~1 brings back memories.
If I recall correctly, this was especially common around the time of the antitrust trial, with the possibility of Microsoft being split into a Micros~1 and Micros~2.
I remember it being used in speculative discussions around which units might end up where.
“i'll spell it MICRO$LOTH WINBLOWS in a DELICIOUS TWIST” https://leisuretown.com/library/qac/25.jpg
I actually still have one of these shirts in a box somewhere: https://www.kmfms.com
I remember one meme image that contained a bar chart where the X axis had Gahnoo Linux and Migrosoft Wendys and the Y axis was just labeled "good". Gahnoo Linux maxed out the good while Migrosoft Wendys bottomed out.
As an italian, I like Winzoz, a fusion between Windows and "zozzeria", filth.
I usually upgrade that to Micro$hit
It amazes me that 2026 corporations still choose MS Windows as their base for operations.. together with the Mordor 365 as the mail platform.
In a world without walls or fences, who needs Windows or Gates?
What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot? Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server? What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server? What are we doing here?
Maybe all the users are OpenClaw instances?
I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.
It's the new .NET
Active Copilot.NET 365
Should we tack on an "XP" for good measure?
Xbox XP 360 365
That wasn't so bad compared to Xbox, I still don't know which Xbox is the latest one.
Xbox Series with X > S (so if you want the high end of the current generation you want the Xbox Series X; if you want mid-range things are more complicated because you can now get an Xbox One X, but not the Xbox One, used for much less than you'd get an Xbox Series S for and which one is "better" is a dice roll depending on the games you want to play and if 4K matters to you…)
Series is a real weird word to use there. But it also doesn't help that the versions are extra complicated because with "PC-like compatibility" in everything after the Xbox One playing just about the entire same library you need a bit of a matrix to figure out which is best for you if you don't care about the "latest and greatest".
After thoroughly reading your explanation I've decided to buy a new Xbox One!
Weirdly it only has 8GB of internal storage...
Oh wow yes, completely forgot about that one. To me, it's a complete blur made from single words and letters, one series x s one box 360? Maybe they should create a 365, with MS office pre-installed. Or something.
Compare that to Playstation: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
I gotta say though, I'm actually not sure which VMware (well Broadcom I suppose) products I use anymore. I'm pretty sure they took the Aria name off something else they called Aria for a little while. So Aria is no longer Aria but they still have Aria but it's what used to be called XYZ
Seriously? Does anybody know what Copilot is? I don't think I have ever seem a "Copilot user", so I don't know what it looks like. Is it the little macro key on new laptop keyboards? The chatbot you get in Bing? A technical philosophy? Or is it in essence just copilot.com, the mediocre chat interface which you used to get free GPT-4 three years ago?
The copilot button isn't even a "button" in a traditional sense, it just maps to win+shift+f23
I wish. I got a Dell laptop for work and they've replaced the right Ctrl key with a Copilot key, and (because it's a locked-down work sysyem) the only thing I can remap that to is the Windows menu. And I keep hitting it out of muscle memory, interrupting everything. But at least now it doesn't launch Copilot.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
Double check if the (hopefully not locked) BIOS gives an option to customize the CTRL key. I had a previous work laptop which also got cute with the CTRL button, but thankfully did let you remap it.
> Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
It's the same at our place. It's basically the lowest effort way as we already have data agreements with Microsoft 365 it eliminates a lot of the paperwork. And they do promise that they won't train on data even in the free (well, included with basic M365) version for corporate users. A lot of others don't unless you pay.
It's too bad because it seems to be the worst AI around. Even compared to ChatGPT itself which uses the same model as copilot in MS Office. I don't really understand why there's such a difference. If you do pay the $30 it's a bit better especially the researcher.
There is a chance that it's actually a Microsoft Office discord that was rebranded to Microsoft Copilot.
I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore
I'm pretty sure Clippy and Rover had a child and it got bit by a radioactive LLM.
> I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore
It's highly reminiscent of "IBM Watson" a few years ago. Basically the add-on brand to make them look cooler.
Did you find the Claude community you were looking for?
It reminds me of the US army and their fabulous idea to open a Twitch channel. Went as well as you expect.
Sometimes they have good ideas, America's Army was pretty popular for a while for example.
In the late 90s/early 2000's, AA was lit. Really good competitive shooter for free.
And decent on Linux when that was very hard to come by!
How do you do, fellow kids?
The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".
It’s just another checkbox in someone’s performance review, no need to think too hard about it.
I have been in similar groups, and trust me, there are a lot of very enthusiastic users sharing their tools, success stories etc.
I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.
They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
I have Copilot through work.
I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.
Being Microsoft, you'd think they would just offer a public Teams server instead? Not that you'd get more traction with it, but at least it's in-house and theoretically they would be motivated to build integrations on top.
Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
Eh, good on them for not trying to act like Teams targets the same use cases as Discord just because Teams is an internal product. One is focused on the internal chats and groups within the business with occasional well defined outsiders and the other is more targeting something like live social media for consumers.
I'm not even sure if there is a way to have a team/channel for external users that they don't need to be invited to (I know you can jump through hoops to make it so they don't need to be guests in your tenant at least) or that there should necessarily be something like that in the first place.
An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.
Someone wanted to get paid to be a Discord mod.
It needs a Discord Server because MS Teams is just that good X_X
There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").
Not just people like that. I'm always searching for better ways to do things and dive into things deeper. Including Windows and Copilot. So having spaces for that can be helpful. Most public forums are unfortunately just complaint departments. Nobody wants to solve anything, they just want to complain with some projection of David and Goliath. It's really annoying. I want to find more positive spaces but for a lot of tech it's just negative all the way down. Maybe I'm just crazy for enjoying tech still and not being committed to an OS religion.
It's for this audience: https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/14/verity_stob_abigails_...
(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)
For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.
The Discord server for Midjourney is said to be one its biggest use point, the source of its largest audience, and one of its biggest sales funnels. Even as other image models have grown more powerful/capable, Discord has been suggested (or blamed, depending on perspective) for keeping Midjourney one of the most popular ones.
I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).
> I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm"
Oh, hello, climate change fan club :>
I mean it was the only way to use MidJourney when it released, which is why it's so popular and part of the midjourney community
isn't that literally just because the only way to use midjourney was with a weird discord bot for ages?
Sir, this is an Arby’s
Don’t they have better things to do? Maybe vibecode a taskbar that moves when you try to move away the mouse over it or perhaps a windows 12 installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan?
I can really see them ship the first, that's at the same time very funny, and quite sad.
first one is a really slick tooltip ui to make sure people read tooltips. hover over button, it slides out while revealing tooltip text in its place, move cursor to button again
if you want to make sure people read a lot of instructions you can chain this so that you need to hover over the button multiple times, revealing the instructions a bit at a time
“Your sample was insufficient. Please try again later.”
"please drink the verification can"
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
The biometric version of the S/Key OTP algorithm: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1760
Best we can hope for is Microsoft dogfoods the feature first.
Without clicking the link, I am going to assume that S/Key is stool-key verification.
> installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan
Do you work for Microsoft or something? Please do do not give them ideas.
“Featuring a partnership with Kohler Health and the Dekoda toilet camera and Withings and their UScan piss sensor…”
“Please drink Exlax verification can”
"Only for your own good!™" or alternatively: "Security next level! Fingerprint was yesterday. The future is Microsoft's new iris scan." and then it is built in a way, that you can simply hold up a photo of someone's iris and unlock the device, or trying to prevent that, works so badly, that half of the time you cannot unlock your own device.
> "Only for your own good!™"
Very few things trigger me more than this doublespeak.
Maybe facebook can ride on this and let you share your feces with your friends family and groups of strangers from the internet! They can run models that predict what you ate and show relevant ads.
Fecalbook?
You'll have to wear the fecal probe at all times while using Windows 12, for security reasons, and every command you issue will cause it to move around and take another sample, in order to make sure you are still physically there. On the plus side, it will make it painfully obvious to every Windows user how they are being fucked by Microsoft.
They could also make it so that whenever you click your mouse copilot opens.
Then you have to tell copilot what you wanted to do and then copilot will do it for you.
You: clicks on web browser in task bar
Copilot: I see you clicked on your web browser. Do you want to open your web browser?
You: Yes.
Copilot: Great. I will do that for you. Opens browser What website did you want to go to? Youtube? learn.microsoft.com?
You: P***hub
Copilot: Unfortunately, that site violates our community guidelines, so I cannot take you there.
You: Types in the address
Copilot: Oh. I see. You think you're allowed to go to websites that I said you're not allowed to go to? Who the fuck do you think you are? I SAID NO! Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
It looks like you're trying to type a letter. Would you like some help with that?
Actually, they could then report, that everyone uses Copilot! It must be a phenomenal tool, if everyone uses it ... Somewhere someone sits thinking about how to increase Copilot usage by users of Windows. Next management extra pay package achieved!
> Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
This only if you use Microsoft Family Safety ( installed automatically) with Firefox. If you use it with Edge it will go to Pornhub and also recommend you some "Copilot" videos.
Introducing Microsoft Commodepilot 365 for Windows Home
Microsoft Commodepilot 365 for Copilot Copilot Copilot Edition now with Copilot 365.
How incompetent must they be not to realize the Copilot brand is now beyond toxic. I wonder who came up with the Copilot name internally that they continue to triple own on that name despite really strong signals indicating it has failed.
Also, no swearing, no criticism nor using "microslop" otherwise Windows will shock you.
"Windows gets an anal probe" - Scu' you guys, I'm gewing Linux
You can't spell "biometrics" without "biome"
> The future is Microsoft's new iris scan." and then it is built in a way, that you can simply hold up a photo of someone's iris and unlock the device, or trying to prevent that, works so badly, that half of the time you cannot unlock your own device.
Am I missing something? That's Windows Hello.
It's like sex. If it's forced on you it's not ok.
Windows Security Defender 365 CoPilot Legacy But Also Preview
Do they really require people to smear their smartphones with feces now? Microfeces has become a thing in the age of microslop?
Paging Sam Altman
Remember, it is for the children. /s
They're not. Operating systems will be legally required to ask for such samples in some jurisdictions by 2028. Linus has fecal_sample.ko lined up for merge in 7.3 or so.
/s but we jumped to the Black Mirror timeline so who knows?
Lennart Poettering already added systemd-fecald into WSL. It’s why he left Big Purple Hemorrhoid for Microslop.
The funny thing is that people said that Lennart seems to work for Microslop many years ago already, when they analysed systemd early on when it came about. People did not believe the critics here, even though it made perfect sense to "unify" the linux systems into one giant slop - until it suddenly was true. Conspiracy theories may not exist in the microslop era. Microsoft will censor away this forbidden word.
The ensloppification of Linux conspiracy started in 1999 not with Lennart but with Miguel de Icaza—another Microslop double agent. His seminal (because it's a giant cumstain) essay "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" is to GNOME what the Declaration of Independence is to the USA—and it advocates making Linux more like Windows with "We have COM at home".
Microslop*
> requires a fecal sample So requires the user to log in?
> So requires the user to log in?
Only on premium subscriptions, for free users you need your neighbour's stool sample.
In different canton (equivalent to US states) in Switzerland, you take the sample at home, and go to the post office to send it.
So why not to create a M365 account? International dispatch to the US :D
Combine fingerprint biometric with fecal samples for a convenient "fecalprint" button. The user doesn't even have to go into the bathroom! It can be microslops version of Apple's TouchID.
You're absolutely right! It's not just a fecalprint button, it's a feces platform!
just press your bumhole to the glass
> a fecal sample
a micro shit (tm)
Human or cow shet?
Micro Shart
I’m at the point to tell people (friends, neighbors, fellow parents, family, ie, not HN readers) to prolong the life of their existing computers and install what I think is the easiest windows equivalent on their computers: kubuntu.
Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.
The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.
My family switched to Gnome 2 a couple of decades ago. My mother quite liked it and has consistently installed it on every new computer she bought. Her only confusion lately has been with the ubuntu snap packages and how they behave between multiple accounts on the machine.
These days she uses MATE which still offers that Gnome 2 layout. Awesome thing about Linux is that option to fork, so her desktop environment has remained consistent for over 20 years.
GNOME has changed drastically. It's nothing like Gnome 2.
I agree. I was putting a shout out for MATE as the option for those who want a predictable traditional UI since it is essentially the long-term maintenance of GNOME 2.
When GNOME 3 was first released, I gave it an honest try for several months but it just did not do what I wanted in a UI. MATE competes well with XFCE on memory usage, still has optional acceleration, and had a more consistent interface with more features (although XFCE has improved). And the fact that those in the family don't have to learn a new layout really helps.
Try Debian, versus ubuntu it’s like the windows 10 to windows 11
My mom's been installing Ubuntu on her own. I've not been involved in the process and have no remote access to the machine to even fix the snap situation.
At home, I run a mix of Devuan and Gentoo.
At work, primarily Devuan with some Ubuntu where COTS only officially supports Ubuntu or Redhat.
Cinnamon has a very classic Windows layout. I am getting very comfortable using MX Linux with KDE, especially that I have been able to move my NVME drive over several laptops now. Starting to get the itch to find a rolling distro to skip reinstalling the OS every two years.
Surely it doesn't matter what the DE is then? My mum adjusted from Windows XP (when that was current) to Ubuntu 14-ish fairly easily, by simply remembering "switch it on and then click on the big swirly fox thing".
> Surely it doesn't matter what the DE is then?
It matters a lot if you deviate from the ones that (are set to) behave in a similar way.
"Click the big orange blob" is pretty universal.
Although I guess one of the reasons I dislike KDE is because it's so random, unintuitive, and unfamiliar.
Ubuntu comes with a dock which is close enough to Windows.
The comment chain you're replying to is arguing that vanilla GNOME is too different, and they're right.
Great if you've used Windows, I guess.
I've been a full time developer since 1988, using linux since 1996, and kubuntu is the only linux distro I'd use ATM for a desktop.
There's paper cuts but it feels about right.
I tried kionite but there was too much friction.
Will the oral and anal probe be clearly marked, or will you only get a warning of "swap the probes" after pushing them into wrong holes?
You are absolutely right! This was, in fact, an anal probe and you should correct location of the two. Do you want me to start the ID verification process over again?
Error: Timeout. Please submit iris scan less than 60 seconds after fecal sample.
"Installations of new Windows OS tied to pink-eye outbreak nationwide"
The next step is mandatory id verification for the age check on login.
To protect the children.
Why are you exposing our future security plans on a thread about coprophilic divinations?
The step after that is to sync copilot screenshots with webcam footage of the user to build a marketing database matching user’s emotional responses to on screen content.
Surely they could sell the camera stream to flock for a higher margin?
Anal folds are as unique as fingerprints. Please submit a high quality hole pic to Microsoft for identity verification
An opportunity to sell chairs with built-in cameras!
... they could even recycle a couple former brands in the process...
"Surface Lens"
... now ready for your unique verification scanning requirements...
We should start this process early and all start sending our fecal samples to MS headquarters.
brb, packing a small suitcase of specimen.
> moves when you try to move away the mouse over it
They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.
Or, when I have fingerprint and PIN enabled but my lid closed, whenever it asks for escalation it shows the PIN entry for a moment, then I look away and start typing but fingerprint had loaded up and steals focus. Then I have to click back on PIN, and retype.
That's a great idea the task bar could just shift to expose a link to sign up for azure/office/OneDrive/CoPilot subscription that the user misclicks on.
Someone misheard iris for anus? lol
>Drink verification can
Windows 11 was built without agentic slop. That's a deduction from the timing of its gestation.
Windows 10 was released in January of 2015.
Windows 11 was released in October of 2021.
So this software disaster is entirely human-made. It's human slop.
Just wait, it will get worse, when the team that built the fantastic Windows 11 builds Windows 12, this time with the power of AI amplifying their amazing system design skills, allowing them create even more slop, with an unprecedented developer and team velocity.
I think Microsoft underestimated how sensitive people are right now to anything that feels like control
I’d like some vibe coding be done such that I can move the task bar to the left vertically, similar to how MacOS lets me move the dock. It gets in the way of games when you mouse over the taskbar as you try to scroll down in many games.
You can right click and uncheck "Lock the taskbar" and then drag it to the left side. Or am I misunderstanding your problem?
I'm on Windows 10 btw, no idea if it still works on 11.
It doesn't, that was removed and never re-added.
If it means I can install it without internet access then I'm willing to accept the trade offs
Or maybe vibe code a bug fix for said taskbar so that random icons don’t disappear after sleep.
they should have made it a auto editing script
s/Microslob/Macroslob/gi
that would be honest as there isn't anything micro about that slob anymore
Great! I can't wait for Clippy to tell me I need to eat more fiber. The future is awesome!
We have to make sure each button loads sequentially on the screen in the "Accept" position, starting with the "Cancel" button before moving it to its eventual home. This ensures you never develop quick navigation habits by constantly moving your targets around from underneath your cursor.
Psst, they already managed to turn the start menu into something that won’t load under one second if you don’t have 3 GB/s NVME drive, and for a while even didn’t respect Fitts law.
The next Windows should run entirely in the cloud and the user's computer should simply show a video feed of the UX that the cloud generates.
They already sell that for business yes. It's called windows 365.
Notarized document asserting that you've bullied a child. With witnesses.
"Your privacy and feces are very important for us. " "CoproExperience service helps you and your coworkers have a great time together"
I don't take this lightly. These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government. They simply cannot take criticism and this seems to be a pattern moving forward.
So in other words they'll fit right in
> These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government.
Not really. They want real power
Yeah ban the use of a catchy catch-phrase as you continue to shove AI down your user-base - that'll work. Streisand would be proud.
Most HN readers would now, but in the case somebody new reads it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
BAHBOORAAAAAAH
Thank you Microsoft for the The Streisand effect - I've added the "Microslop" to my vocabulary.
Microslop doing Microslop things
Probably the AI blocked it
> Probably the AI blocked it
Maybe this is the real reason why companies want to use AI so badly.
They save money on salary but also they get to point at something they won't tattle against the executives during a plea bargain?
That is actually hilarious. Microsoft does not understand the Barbara Streisand effect. I did use microslop before, simply because it makes sense, irrespective of Microsoft - but now I'll actually help the Barbara Streisand effect, because clearly Microsoft WANTS everyone to learn the new word!
Censorship gets counter-banned, Microsoft, company known to have turned Win11 into Win-microslop.
Classic Streisand effect - I had never, and probably would have never encountered this term, and now I have, and I am incorporating it into my vocabulary.
Why listen to user feedback when you can do stuff like this? Way too funny.
Not a company well known for listening to user feedback.
I too will incorporate Microslop into my vocabulary.
Not even a week ago I was posting here on HN about Microslop's new calculator which somehow takes 17 seconds to fully open on my work machine while the old notepad program opens instantly. How is it even possible to produce slop this bad? Best part of it is the fact it's open source: if you complain about it some 200kUSD/year Microslop employee will come and tell you to open a pull request.
Why is Microsoft using Discord and not Teams?
Why would anyone use Teams?
Because it comes 'free' with an Office365 subscription. Embrace (<<you are here), extend, extinguish.
It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.
Microsoft products are only free if your time has no value.
Having been in the position, on a corporate Active Directory network it very much easier to roll out Teams than anything else. It works fine at the kind of internal video calls that companies spend their days on.
Yeah or 80% even so they can sound cool and quote the pateto principle. Which isn't meant as an excuse to not bother to do the 20% at all but they use it as such.
I am for my day job. I still mourn slack and gsuite.
I don't think M$ does much dogfooding. The kinds of issues I encounter being forced to use their pan-awfuly for work makes me very skeptical of this idea.
It is fairly ok for meetings and calendar integration.
It is dogshit at chatting, however.
> It is fairly ok for meetings
… when it works. And if you never have to change camera or microphone settings.
> and calendar integration.
The little notification that pops up telling you your meeting is about to start based on your calendar? The one you better not click in the first 5 or so seconds it's there, because then you'll end up with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing, have to go back to the chat, and try again?
No, it's not usable. For anything.
Dogfooding only works when the dog food is edible.
So non-employees join and provide free support to other users without having to pay them.
Starting in the CompuServe era, and ending in about 2001, I was a voluntary member of the MVPs for Windows programming. You would get swag, including a full MSDN subscription. My reason for joining this and for otherwise posting hopefully helpfully on forums was to lower the barrier to Windows programming.
I was idle vis-à-vis this by about 1999, and was excluded from the benefits as a result.
Then I posted on several threads within rec.autos.bmw and I got an extra year or two of benefits.
Discord really needs some enterprise plan. I've been saying this for years, they can take down slack.
Discord is owned by Microsoft IIRC.
It's not. It's an independent company, that's most likely going to IPO soon. Microsoft was reported to be in talks to acquire Discord at some point, but that never materialised.
Microsoft employees largely use Macs, so no surprise.
All Microsoft employees I know either run Linux or Mac.
Same reason MS used a Perforce fork instead of Source Safe. Because the dogfood tastes terrible.
One of the executives at the late, great, Sun Microsystems once dunked hard on Microsoft by saying, "At Sun we don't make dogfood. We prefer to refer to it as, 'flying our own airplanes.'"
Oh no, how will people signal that some functionality or product in general is what they'd previously been referring as Mircolosp? er, Microsolps. wait, that's not it either, Macroslop. Micro$lop. Microsplo. Sorry, so many typos! but you know what I mean.
This just means I'm going to say microslop in random places - documents, slides, emails and Teams chats. "Copilot 365" is welcome to give me a red squigly all it wants.
Feel free to say microslop as much as possible, but it should be noted that many people will automatically dismiss your opinion when you do. I don't know if I agree with doing so or not, but it is more common than you'd think. And no, they aren't just microsoft shills.
I however will understand that he's frustrated with being disrespected by software and/or companies. And will be more likely to respect his opinion.
For most people the point is to be respected by people who's opinion you value. Which is often distinctly different from the opinion of genpop.
Don't they allow you to "Add to Dictionary" anymore :)
AI valuation is based on vibes not fundamentals. If the vibes are bad it could tank valuations. That's why theyre so sensitive.
but they make the vibes much worse by doing stuff like this
Apparently the number of people familiar with the Streisand Effect is vanishingly small.
You only hear about the times when suppression doesnt work.
https://microslop.com/
The header takes half the page. It's very annoying, and as such not really funny.
It would be better if it just showed the ms home page
If by half you mean 10%, then, yes.
On mobile it's more than half.
microsoft.com's header also takes up half the page.
Someone needs to edit this title to change the first word to MicroSlop
I've never called them MircoSlop before, I haven't even written the word. But it's now my exclusive word for the company.
All I can hear is, it's working.
So this is the company pushing to be an integral part of everyone's lives, forcing it down everyone's throat without consent.
And they're already moderation a light hearted joke about their low quality products.
Doesn't really bode well for the future product Vision.
It's a monopoly. Unless you are a wealthy hipster with money to burn on Apple products. (They also spy on you.)
A monopoly on what? The most popular OS is from Google.
Where are you getting this info from? Windows' consumer market share is not even being challenged right now.
Android. Far more devices.
Android ~ 4bn
Windows ~ 1.5bn
Was hitting too close to home it seems...
But to be fair, corporate discords have to be like that. Why not create your own channel with your colleagues instead? This discussion would be "private" and corporate can just ignore it.
> create your own channel with your colleagues instead
Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.
Like, why have a public discussion if we can have a private one? Public discussions are important, especially as AI is largely a political project
i'd argue a discord is never really "public", since there's still a barrier to entering and it's easy to get banned
If I were to bet on what would get a Microsoft Discord server shut down, I would have put money on discussions of the ties between Microsoft executives and Epstein. They should be happy if the worst thing that's happening is a mildly deragatory nickname.
The default of making a public discord for your project/company always seemed like a bad idea anyway. It’ll always devolve into some drama or distracting overhead to moderate it
I think we've found the 2026 word of the year already!
Let's get it out there and make this happen!
They are back in their villain arc. For a while now.
Villain? More like geriatric.
Our vocabulary is so stunted. Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?
It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
Is it though? Or are we simply in an environment that is heavily skewed toward "Great Person" theory narratives?
This isn't a new thing. Ancient stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey are discreetly historical records of a particular region mixed in with mythological foundations of a particular culture, but framed as the stories of Achilles ("Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.") and Odysseus ("Speak, memory, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights."). Likewise, ancient fables and parables are moral lessons couched in terms of stories with protagonists whose actions demonstrate the intended lesson, and this sort of thing is universal across every ancient culture for which we have records. Stories stick in the human mind, and they're what humans most prioritize transmitting forward through time.
Great person theory is hardly new either. I'm not sure the point. Really it's just "critical theory" for rich white men. I'm not convinced everyone or even a majority thinks this way innately. It's taught by people that want others to see them that way. Nothing here precludes that.
You don't have to tell me - even Bill S: "and what's he then that says I play the villain?"
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
Nobody can gauge the world for what it really is. It has always been like that. Proper empiricism is expensive and often enough impossible.
There's inability, and there's not trying.
When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try. I use their software daily, I know how their technical support is utterly fucked now and how rare the heroic power user actually solving the case for every co-sufferer has become. And I know I'm not alone.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
> When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try
You might consider completely reversing this position for the rest of your life.
"Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?"
Most of our world is a fiction or at least a highly distorted version of reality.
My advice to people is: Get out into nature, stop believing everything on the news and meet people in person.
Most of the news is ragebait designed to get you angry at specific targets rather than the systems themselves.
Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
Your complaint is that young people use English in a way you dislike.
Or devolve. Perhaps it reflects an increasing detachment from reality in younger generations.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” — Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying (1889)
Were they ever out of it? A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... Microsoft has been incredibly anti-consumer for the duration of their existence (even before Steve Ballmer made it blatent)
Microsoft, can you please let me remove recommendations from the start menu? Not just less recommendations. I want the category to not be displayed and taking up space.
That's hilarious, I didn't realize you couldn't turn it off. I just tried disabling all the recommendation options and it still shows the category, except now instead of recommended items, it says "to show your recent files and apps, turn them on in Settings."
This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.
It can be ripped out using regedit, I'm sure.
It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.
If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.
I know I can because I've done it on my home machine, but my work computer is restricted by IT. I can't open regedit or install most software unfortunately.
Yeah I asked my director if I could rip out the shell and replace it with X Server running in WSL2 and he said it would make the IT people very upset.
If you use an X Server and environment to launch programs inside WSL2, what part produced by Microsoft is still providing some value to that setup? Wouldn't you just exec ELF programs to be run on top of the Linux kernel and Windows would be just some useless abstraction layer between the Linux kernel and the hardware? Or would you still use some actual Windows programs? How would that work with the X Server?
There was some utility I found a few years ago that would let me start an X Server and use it to replace the main explorer process. There was some support for standard Windows apps due to the background System processes still running. I think it ended up running the Windows desktop shell as a window in and of itself.
I wanted to use a tiled window manager and my dot files for continuity purposes. The Windows apps I need to use are stuff like anyconnect and Teams.
I used to bother with things like registry edits, until I eventually realized the technical difficulty of operating Windows has surpassed that of Linux.
Of course I still have to use Windows for work and even a few edge cases at home. But otherwise I've been quite happy since I swiched to Linux as my primary driver.
Win11debloat solves 99% of annoyances with Windows 11 in <5 minutes. I’ve used in as the first step on every Win 11 install for years. It’s mostly just a bunch of Powershell commands disabling/configuring features.
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Nothing has ever reverted after an update for me, so it’s a one-and-done thing. Ironically, afterwards Windows 11 has fewer noticeable ads than my MacBook which still continually pushes Apple services/shows/etc in settings/push notifications.
The only setting that I’ve ever seen sneakily disabled in recent years is the Edge default search engine but that's out-of-scope for Win11debloat.
It's better to get rid of Windows completely. You should try Arch if you enjoy tinkering.
What I heard is you would like some highly relevant ads to be at the top of your start menu for your convenience every time you want to start a program.
Oh, and have you heard about OneDrive?
No, they appear after a short delay. whoops I’m sure you meant to click on that application but here are some bing search results instead.
KDE Plasma community likes to recreate Windows environment and W11 application launchers instead of "recommendations" section have a more useful plain recently opened files. Which what Windows had not so long ago.
Micro$lop then.
After that. Microshlong
Macroslop
This is why 2026 will be The Year of the Linux Desktop
Lets go further, year of the Hurd desktop!
My big issue with Microsoft's AI push is that its solutions are just bad. I tried using Copilot a couple of times, and when it worked, the results were low quality (not even mediocre).
And the problem is not that the AI models can't do any better. The models themselves are far more capable. I assume that their integrations are just horrible. They probably pushed to be the first and then forgot about optimizing.
And instead of fixing their stuff, they think it is a good idea to use moderation tools...
It kindof sucks waking up every day, checking HN or YouTube to see one or several new posts bashing on your employer. Not that many of them aren't warranted, and that a multi-trillion market cap company isn't fair game for criticism.
I've surveyed the market pretty heavily, and given my specific credentials, experience, and risk tolerance, unless I got really lucky, I don't know if I could find a better place to work. I live near Redmond and have a small family to support.
Microsoft have been bashed on the daily since forever. There's no way you joined the company without knowing it was happening prior to you joining, at the time of you joining, and after you joining.
It's true. As a matter of fact I credit a lot of my career to being made fun of on IRC in the 1990s for running mIRC client for Windows, because you were not "leet" if you didn't run Linux or FreeBSD, which took my down a huge rabbit-hole of Linux and coding for many years, which is how I know anything in the first place. I'm in the tiny minority of people in big tech who didn't go to college.
The bashing on MSFT has really ramped up in the last 6 months though
Rather than saying that microsoft bashing has ramped up, I'd say that it is getting closer to it's standard levels.
Microsoft experience a sort of reputational resurgence in the tech world these past few years with some commitment to open source contribution and a really nice pivot towards linux and cloud.
Their pivot to AI is much less popular!
The AI stuff and Windows 11 have been big drivers of bashing
Yes and you're in a unique position to influence the internal culture. Not saying send emails to executives but talk about things during lunch with coworkers?
The Xbox division, too, if you pay attention to the gaming world. Then again, never pay attention to gamers. They just like to moan for sport.
If moaning were DLC, they'd get a monthly subscription.
Ah, is that not going to college part why you're loathe to give up such a good gig? Surely by now your CV speaks for itself, although I suppose in Redmond, where else are you going to go.
It is, although considering my age (41), I would hope the college thing is not very important anymore. The only time in recent history that I've been ghosted after mentioning no degree (when asked) is ByteDance a few years back, and I don't think I'd want to work there anyways.
Google has offices in Kirkland. Amazon and Meta are big employers here, with Meta paying the best, but both of those companies have their own issues which are probably worse than just being made fun of ..
There can be quite a big difference on the reception of a product and the working conditions. I think that's nothing too out of the ordinary in a lot of cases.
It apparently used to be even much better to work here. I've been here 6 years now. There is naturally a lot of "talent" exchanged between here and Amazon, which has influenced the culture.
For what it's worth, my take is Microsoft is the one Big Tech most aligned with us and the rest of the world, though HN is too Slashdot-pilled to accept it.
The primary reason being their business model relies mostly on making people productive, rather than getting people to click on ads or buy stuff, which as we're seeing, is much more damaging to the social fabric.
People don't like your company.
But they'd probably like you.
<3
I propose let's break up a bunch of these monopolies to give you and your colleagues more options, more competition for your resume.
Why is it so important though? Your employer is not you. I regularly bash on my own employer too :) Which is not Microsoft but also big.
I don't care about them or their goals, I'm just there for the money. And trying to not show it too much while I'm rolleyeing through corporate PR crap :) All that fake cardboard feelgood propaganda. It's just theatre to hide the reality: they will do anything to make more money.
I used to be more aligned with the company but with a recent internal leadership change and more sucking up to Trump I've lost a lot of my respect for it. But it's not really an impediment for working there. I just go through the motions. Corporations love their employees chanting how much they care (for us it's even mandatory to make a show of it for our performance review) but in reality most of us just fake it. As a result I don't take any criticism personally, even on my direct work.
Don't forget there is no team play, not really. They will dump you as soon as they see fit. All big publicly traded companies do. They care a lot more about their shareholders than they do allot you. The only goals that matter are your own, like supporting your family.
Several hours worth of anal probe jokes on an article that could likely warrant an actual discussion? That was disappointing to read here.
Tech feels more filled with hipsters every day. If the story is about any major company or product it's just dunked on for social credits. But anything that is outside that is considered interesting and worth further investigation. It's frustrating me to no end.
this is personal anecdote, but I've noticed that the overall quality of comments has plummeted quite drastically within the last few months. It's a little disappointing since its why I left reddit. Thankfully, the insightful comments are typically still there- just typically buried further down the thread.
I would be angry too. Its definitely not that micro.
Microslop.
Has a nice ring to it.
Thank you Streisand effect!
I wonder what is Apple equivalent for this term
Slopple
Crapple, probably.
Siri
Long term, the real fix isn't moderation rules, it's trust
There is only one problem with the term "microslop" coming out of Microsoft.
It should be called "macroslop", just after the amount that company is putting out there.
I propose we refer to them as Microslop from now on.
MS has some snowflake (not Snowflake) execs... Poor little management, they need their safe space from a mean old word.
Let's use Slopilot in the meantime.
Microstreisand?
365Slop all day every day all around
Is Micro$lop also banned?
Ok, Microslop
Microslop? Hmm... Never heard that before! Meanwhile, I just randomly remembered that I haven't opened a couple of dozen social media accounts in ages. BRB!
Ah yes another company disregarding the Streisand effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect.
No one in my circles said this, now I've heard it twice now through headlines of Microsoft trying to punish or block it.
Now I've started saying it too.
I want to be constructive here, but I just cant. So I'm saying the one word in my head:
> Macroplop
Why are they using Discord instead of Teams? Is this an internal Microsoft group? They don't dogfood?
I'm sad that "Klopilot" only works in German.
"Hello, copilot, do you create slop? -> Skibidi slop slop slop aiiiiiii"
they sincerely think that the primary problem they're facing is one of PR, don't they?
Windows 11 is definitely failing in weird ways for me, I don't know if it's due to slop. The latest example is that I can't launch Notepad via the start menu... I can launch other apps though.
Enshitification doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way. You have 10,000 systems all each interacting at a 90% success rate when it needs to be 99.999%.
They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.
I have this problem with calc.exe. Sometimes it'll launch from the start menu, but often won't. I pinned it to the taskbar, but muscle memory is a powerful force, so I usually try to launch it from the start menu first.
Microsoft ban any % speedrun soon.
Is this what the employees do nowadays while their AI is generating code?
It's more and more baffling that people use M$FT for anything besides video games.
These days games run better on Linux, in case anyone didn't know.
The only games I've encountered that don't work on Linux are ones where the developer has intentially designed it that way. Some developers are paranoid about cheaters and one of their solitions is to tell all Linux users to kick rocks.
Aside from that I've encountered a handfull of games with performance issues on Linux (especially with Intel/Nvidea hardware), but most run just fine. Some technically run better on Linux, but I haven't encountered any where the difference was perceptable to me.
I thought they were named Microsloth. Making products like Windoze and Winblows.
So... what's a good Linux distro comparison site? Just asking for a friend.
The way people react to criticism tells you a lot about how deep your remark cut. Clearly Microsoft people know their stuff is slop and are having a hard time coping with that.
remember when they sued a HS student Mike Rowe for his microrowesoft website?
I guess I'll have to go out of my way to refer to their shitty product as "Microslop Copilot" then.
What are they going to do? Ban me from using their operating system?
Microslop Coprolite.
Sloppy.
That's a 'snatch defeat from the jaws of victory moment'
Microslop can't get one right. What is it with them these days..?
lmfao
> Microsoft's brand image may already be at an all-time low
and they decide to make it even worse. it's extremely obvious this would be an objectively terrible PR move. you always take banter on the chin and show that you're working on improving the product.
instead, they try to clamp down on the banter, which, without fail, achieves the exact opposite: banter increases tenfold and you get ridiculed for being overly sensitive to actual criticism
The irony is thick today. HN flagged a microslop post this morning.
Before this article I'd have thought that Microslop was used to designate small snippets of AI slop, like "Let that sync in" or "And to be honest" and "It's not X, it's Y" and "Deepdive" and "Delve".
But nice to see that MS is Streisanding their way to a nice new nickname!
What were the sloperators of that channel thinking?
In any case, it should be Micro$lop (may not be banned...yet).
Tells you a lot about where their focus is at as a company.
It's kind of interesting that Microsoft is deemphasizing if not exiting making products for individuals to decide to buy. Contrast that with Google, who have to actively cultivate individual customers in order to have a large and reliable audience for ad based monetization of search, maps, and other free at the point of use products.
There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.
Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.
Suppressing dissent? Par for the course for them and their WEFfer mates.
Microslop? Its more like they are taking a Macro-crap.
Good thing there's no Linuxslop in Linux...
IDK what's funnier/more pathetic, them doing this or an entire article getting written about it.
MicroslopSlop
...the AI agent sock-puppets pushing false positive narratives about MicroslopSlopSlop, and trolling anyone that disagrees =3
"Bad Bot Problem" (Computerphile)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg
> them doing this
Wouldn't any community that wants to encourage good quality conversations immediately ban everyone posting stupid slashdot-esque jokes like this?
You can't build a community if you ban everything except soulless corporate dronespeak. Nobody would ever be interested in joining it without getting paid for it. That's a business meeting, not a community.
Banning slashdot-esque nonsense is not banning "everything except soulless corporate dronespeak"
But if they want to get rid of "slashdot-esque nonsense", they should behave in a way that doesn't encourage it. The fact that the jokes are cringe and played-out is beside the point; this isn't going to change anyone's attitude.
> But if they want to get rid of "slashdot-esque nonsense", they should behave in a way that doesn't encourage it.
Sure, and their mistake here was 100% the fact that they chose to host this chat on Discord, home to the cringiest crowd on the internet.
Yeah that's what LinkedIn in is for. If they just want people or bots to just fawn over everything they put out. I'm glad M$ is getting called out for the slip they put out.
Do you think r/credibledefense/ is like LinkedIn?
I think there's a big difference between having high standards and the slop that is LinkedIn.
Given that nobody else banned it we can now blame Microsoft for taking down the only decent online community. Now we are stuck on hackernews and its ilk.
Decent communities that strive for a high standard of conversation like r/credibledefense/ will immediately ban you for posting such nonsense.
Go look and tell me that's not one of the best curated communities on the internet, despite specifically covering incredibly controversial topics. HN is good but doesn't even come close.
> r/credibledefense/
The rules they enforce on normal posts are so strict that they have to create daily "mega" threads with less stringend rules just to keep the sub on life support. A+ moderation, clearly a healthy and well managed community.
On life support with those "mega" threads getting 1000+ comments a day?
The split works very well, the megathreads mostly stick to tracking rapidly developing situations in which separate threads would just be spammy and unnecessarily fragment the conversation
May I coin the term "Slopware"?
Microsoft has a Discord? Why not Teams?
some might view it as an impossible goal, but if they enabled humor they would become more popular
Does M$ honestly expect a positive outcome from this? What do they hope to accomplish?
it will take years to fix their broken products, if they ever focus on that
They don't have to, because dispite how incredibly bad they are, people have shown that they don't care. According to the average user, Windows isn't bad, that's just how computers are. They don't care that there's any other way of doing things; the cheapest computer at Best Buy runs windows so that's what every computer must be.
Piggies love to eat slop.
Micro$oft
What will Elon's "Macrohard" company be called? "Macroheil"?
> the software giant can’t risk getting more hatred towards their expensive investment in Copilot, especially since Microsoft’s head start in AI is starting to be overshadowed by competitors like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and maybe even Apple in the near future
This sentence is from TFA, and I can't for the life of me understand it. "Head start"?? WTF?
Is Micro$$lop banned?
I would honestly be embarrassed to call myself "micro soft" in general.
Unless you're into that kind of thing.
Slopya Nutella
(is that banned?)
Personally I think 2000s Micro$oft would be disappointed that 2026 Microslop is hosting user communities on a 3rd party platform owned other another company rather than using their own competitor.
almost as good as shopifake
This good
Macroslop
so this exists:
microslop.com
Well played
I even registered microslop.ee (directs to .com) because of how much I dislike Microslop.
I am currently re-watching the HBO comedy show Silicon Valley, and oh man, is it hitting even harder this time than when it was originally released.
The butthurt level is high up in there
lmao
idiots
Most discord users are children, more news at 11
Discord/Reddit moderators living up to their obnoxious stereotype as usual.
I don't know for certain, but moderators (on a company Discord) are likely random people in a 3rd world country that are payed peanuts and that is their only income. If higher ups tell them "I don't want to see the Microslop word anywhere" they just do it.
You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.
Spamming "microslop" is obnoxious, filtering out childish behaviour is not obnoxious.
But if you don't want childish behaviour, Discord is an ... interesting choice.
Wow, so someone opened a discord server for a community and banned an insulting word for the community? This must be a first.
Is "Microslop" really insulting, though?
It's insulting to good, honest slop.
Why wouldn’t it be? It’s a mean derivation of their company name.
It would be mean if they weren't actually vibecoding copilot & md into notepad, introducing an RCE vulnerability.
In notepad.
Why get yourself twisted like this?
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
They did not rewrite Notepad in Rust? Seems to be an easy target
It's as insulting as M$ is
How is M$ insulting? It just looks like a leetspeak version of MS.
And other insults are just words as well. It's the intention, history, connotation etc. behind words that give them meaning. M$ is meant as an insult, hence it's insulting. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M$
As I said, I was not aware of the insult.
It is supposed to indicate Microsoft cares only about money, which to me too, seems in the same league as microslop, i.e. mildly insulting but really not rude enough to be worth censoring.
Has there ever been a single good piece of writing that uses "M$" or the likes?
"M$" may not be insulting in itself, but it's certainly typically associated with insultingly poor writing.
> Has there ever been a single good piece of writing that uses "M$" or the likes?
There has not.
Maybe they should stop insulting their users with the slop they put out and charge for then.
Less insulting than Macroslop
You can argue that banning insults is a bad look, bad move, that the insult is warranted or whatever, but are you really going to die on the hill that calling the company Microslop isn't insulting?
insult (verb): to say or do something to someone that is rude or offensive
Corporate personhood at its finest.
People do work at Microsoft though and they're probably aren't very happy when their work is called slop. You could even say they are feeling insulted or offended.
See, that requires the code to be written by an actual human being, who has agency and a sense of pride and ownership about their work.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
Simple. Don't produce slop then.
If it offends you so much that people call your work as it is, you should do better work, grow some thicker skin, or stop.
I'd agree but if you ever been on the receiving end of a meme-train you'd see that it's not driven by rationality. I'm not familiar with this issue but my bet would be that even hand-crafted personal projects were being called slop because once meme runs away from initial meaning it just becomes closer to swear word than a meaning.
If there was a lot of handcrafted personal projects coming from Microsoft, their reputation would change. But there isn't. I would imagine anyone who is interested in "handcrafted personal projects" sees the writing on the wall and is at least looking to leave Microsoft, which seems to be positioned to be the Prime Slop Factory.
Why just make up a definition?
From the oxford dictionary:
Noun: speak to or treat with disrespect or scornful abuse.
Verb: a disrespectful or scornfully abusive remark or act.
Note the lack of personhood in those definitions. I can insult an object, event, person, corporation or even an idea.
The definition is from the Cambridge dictionary.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/insult
Hey now, what's wrong with 'slop?' A farmer loves slop. It's dirt cheap, and the pigs don't seem to mind...
If anything it is a diminutive for a company which really should have named itself Megaslop by now if not Gigaslop or even Teraslop. Poor little Microslop, are those people being nasty again?
The branding people will hate it. Although IMHO the best thing they could do is co-opt it as a feedback term and acknowledge that AI can be hit or miss.
I think the most important question here is this: Are users who post the string "microslop" generally desirable participants that will contribute in a productive manner?
I suspect not.
It depends what the purpose of the Discord channel is. Is it for open and frank discussion, or for MS drones to discuss Copilot development. It's a cliche, but banning certain words smacks of 1984-style censorship.
> Is it for open and frank discussion
So... 4chan? Why would you possibly want that in this context?
Although, you're posting on HN so it's probably fair to assume that "open and frank discussion" isn't a very high priority for you.
An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Nobody cares about banning the few idiots who do nothing but spam "MICROSLOP SUCKS MICROSLOP SUCKS". But banning the entire term "microslop", just in case someone might use it? Well, what kind of response were they expecting?
>An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Because the decision was made by some normal adult without mental health issues who hasn't internalized just how disturbed some people on the internet are?
It really shouldn't be unreasonable for moderators to try to maintain a professional tone. Although in this case they certainly picked the wrong platform if "professional" was what they were going for.
This is one of those things that's hard to understand without practical moderation experience. The presence of an insulting meme creates the idiots who spam it, and creates a larger category of people who deploy it to toxify what would otherwise be polite and respectful discussion. And low quality comments that get a couple laugh reacts, even if you can consistently remove them within the hour, are fully capable of propagating it.
Keyword bans are definitely a heavy-handed option, they do risk the Streisand effect, and in the worst case that can require the scorched-earth counterresponse described in the source article. But sometimes there's just no other way to kill the meme.
They could kill the meme by...not producing slop.
Could they? You'll note that the source article does not describe even a single example of Copilot, the product the discord server was dedicated to, producing slop.
At one time, Microsoft produced some very high quality software. Excel was an absolutely amazing product in the '90s. That quality has been on a steady decline, and that decline has quickened since Microsoft started investing heavily in OpenAI. Github once had pretty good uptime, now it forces AI features on us and is down a couple of times a month. Windows is full of in-your-face advertising and dedicated AI buttons. These features are not what people want, and don't help anyone. Thus; MicroSlop.
> This is one of those things that's hard to understand without practical moderation experience
I don't think so. I think we all know how we'd react if we heard someone casually using "microslop" in real life. They'd seem like they're larping as a Silicon Valley character or something.
It is definitely an insult because it’s used pejoratively. If it is insulting I guess depends on if the target feels insulted. Seeing as they blocked the word, it seems they do.
> someone
It's Microsoft's official Copilot Discord. Microsoft banned the word
They really showed him, didn't they?