When Microsoft announced Windows 11 in 2021, it angered customers by raising the hardware requirements for the first time in several years. The change was seen as artificial, an overt attempt to goose PC sales. And when it shipped the first incomplete version of Windows 11 later that year, Microsoft was further criticized because there were no inherent advantages to the new platform, security or otherwise. Indeed, Windows 11 was full of functional regressions that ironically made Windows 10 more attractive to users and less desirable to those who had complained about the new system requirements.
But there is an alternative reality in which Microsoft's decision to raise the system requirements was brave, not foolhardy. Or even long overdue. And it is this reality that the company is retroactively now touting--even bragging about--in its recent missives about the so-called Windows Resiliency Initiative (WRI), part of a company-wide effort called the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). To be clear, there's an overt marketing angle to WRI and SFI: Microsoft is trying to overcome the bad publicity triggered by the back-to-back disasters of its embarrassing state-sponsored hack and the CrowdStrike incident. But it's more than marketing.
Windows today is a mixed bag of good and bad. This isn't a recent thing, but it's been amplified in recent years. As I wrote previously, there has long been two Windows, or two Windows teams, one that focuses on the foundational underpinnings and one that supplies the front-end user interfaces, features, and capabilities that customers interact with each day. This has always been the case, dating back to NT and Windows 3.x. And while responsibility for the underpinnings has shifted over time--its with the adults in the Azure group now--there's been a more horrible downward shift with the front-end, or what we think of--because they call themselves this--as the Windows team. I am of course referring to the steady enshittification of the product in recent years which that undermines the user experience and, I think, the platform itself.
Some seem to struggle with this duality. But there's no paradox here, just competing needs within the company expressing themselves simultaneously. Microsoft has a whole needs to correct its security problem and so CEO Satya Nadella has directed each product team to focus first on security. But Microsoft has a whole is also strategically focused on AI and cloud computing. And where Windows was once the core product at the company, and then a core product, today it receives less attention from the senior leadership team than it perhaps deserves, given the several billion dollars in revenues it still generates each quarter. We all understand the chaos that's resulted, with superfluous features added randomly and often with no testing, the net result being that the latest release, 24H2, is the least reliable, lowest quality version of Windows in the modern era.
But there is thi...
The post .
SOCIAL SHARE CARD GENERATOR