I thought Windows 8 was pretty good at the time, in hindsight because I had a Surface Pro and that was the computer that it was entirely designed for. Their three-column splitscreen layout was neat, if you could look past only having about 5 of the newfangled-touchscreen-UI-apps worth installing in the entire store. Or if you treated the OS as mostly being a OneNote launcher.
These days I'm inclined to agree with you. Windows 7 was the peak, newer versions have gone far downhill with trying to make me accidentally open Bing everywhere and automatically installing Candy Crush products that no one asked for.
When this computer dies, decent odds I replace it with a Steam Deck. Doubly so if they can stuff Thunderbolt into the next one and sell me a GPU dock with it.
But someone made the Bing metrics go up for a few years, so surely that's worth burning any customer goodwill to the ground.
Why does customer goodwill matter at all? Even if they make everyone absolutely hate using Windows, what are customers going to do, switch to a different OS? Decades of experience has shown that people will whine and complain endlessly about Windows, that this is the last straw, and how they're going to switch to Linux "real soon now", and they never do.
These days? They won’t lose all their business users immediately, but the shitty $300 laptops with 15” 1366x768 displays are being chipped away at by iPads and Chromebooks, and the less shitty laptops could mostly be replaced by a MacBook Air which is a frighteningly capable computer. I do think making their OS worse is accelerating this.
These days I'm inclined to agree with you. Windows 7 was the peak, newer versions have gone far downhill with trying to make me accidentally open Bing everywhere and automatically installing Candy Crush products that no one asked for.
When this computer dies, decent odds I replace it with a Steam Deck. Doubly so if they can stuff Thunderbolt into the next one and sell me a GPU dock with it.
But someone made the Bing metrics go up for a few years, so surely that's worth burning any customer goodwill to the ground.