Microsoft's strategy for moving customers to new versions of its client software products involves two distinctly different--one might say, incompatible--tactics. The first is the traditional customer-focused meeting of needs that dates back to the company's founding and is the one I suspect most Microsoft employees conjure when asked about their work. But the second tactic is perhaps more familiar these days. Using dark patterns, anti-competitive in-box behaviors, and other means, Microsoft has enshittified its products to make them conform to some broader corporate strategy.
The result is confusing. But it's also not all that uncommon in personal technology. We're all familiar, if vaguely, with the privacy trade-offs we make to gain the advances in Google services like Search, Maps, and Photos, for example. We know that we sacrifice some openness and eliminate choices when we buy into the Apple ecosystem so we can enjoy the "it just works" nature of the company's cross-device integrations. And everyone is perhaps a bit too familiar with the notion that "if you don't pay for the product, then you are the product," without really understanding the implications of the resulting shift to an advertising-focused model for most of the products and services we use every day.
What may be less obvious is that Microsoft, observing these tactics from the outside and over a period that is nearing decades, collectively wondered, "why aren't we doing that?" Microsoft was hobbled by two massive antitrust cases in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it was that hobbling that lead to the creation of today's personal computing market, with multiple companies--Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta among them--now abusing audiences that are much larger than any Microsoft ruled over 20 years ago. If they can do this, why can't Microsoft? After all, it has the resources, the smarts, the cloud infrastructure to compete with the biggest and the best.
And so it has.
We all know that Windows shifted to a cloud-like updating model, Windows as a Service, with Windows 10, and that this system has been made even more terrible in Windows 11, and is now called "continuous innovation." We know that Microsoft quietly changed how Default apps works in Windows 11 and how it now pushes users to Microsoft Edge, even when they have taken the time to configure and use another browser. We know that the new Outlook displays ads that look like email messages if you don't pay for the product, and that that might the least of its problems. We know that OneDrive Folder Backup is silently enabled when you sign in to Windows 11 Home for the first time, and that it will often be enabled for you on Pro, too, even after you've declined the request several times. And we know that Windows 11 tracks your activities, is bundled with crapware, has advertising all over the place to cajole you into using Microsoft products, services, and preferred configurations, and that those advertisements ...
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