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Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I started on Windows XP and left on Windows 10 (skipping Vista and Win 8.0, and part of 8.1)

… I started on Windows XP and left on Windows 10 (skipping Vista and Win 8.0, and part of 8.1). Windows was always a tool to get things done. Buy a software license and you can be pretty sure you can run things indefinitely on it. Everything (almost?) was accessible by clicking, so ultimately discoverable. No need to learn arcane commands, just follow and imitate. And you mostly have to do the training once. Linux was an expert tool and macOS (I used it since Mojave) always felt like it's for people who compute, but mostly as a secondary activity (shiny and pleasant, but always lacking the remaining bit). I've never thought of myself of being a Microsoft customer, just like you don't think of being a Dell customer or HP customer when using their monitors or printers. You need to get something done and Windows was the bedrock for that. Especially if you were hiring people to do it. But now it's like seeing your workbench animating and contorting itself in new shapes every time you come close. Insulting your intelligence all the while.

Original discussionRecall: Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC378 source comments · at import
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WW

> I used to work on Windows at Microsoft, prior to Windows 10. I've always kept some Windows machines around because I felt that Windows was actually not that bad of an operating system, having personally reviewed a good amount of its source code and seen what the engineering culture was back at the time I was there. I'm curious how the culture was though. I always get the vibe that Microsoft has never been "end user oriented" if that makes sense. They always seemed to be making a product for other businesses. To this day, Windows, Office, and especially stuff like MS Teams feel like they were designed from the ground up for a heavily managed business environment with heavy surveillance and tight controls. Stuff like Telemetry and requiring MS accounts for logging into Windows 10+ seem more of a nod to employers. It's really amazing how much MS has been able to convince users to give con…

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UT

Clippy: I see you keep your #2 Phillips screwdriver in a dedicated slot on your workbench. We've replaced that slot with an ad and moved your screwdriver into a box in a drawer in a closet in the shed. Aren't we so helpful?

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WW

The amount of times that Teams has gone down, or Teams broke, or Teams wouldn't let me do something literally every other chat program did because of policy or management or because Teams wasn't built that way for compliance reasons or lalalala. You can't even search messages more than a certain age because they're gigantic Microsoft Exchange objects. Somehow Discord can give you instantaneous results but Teams is a giant piece of crap. That's kinda what I was getting at. And don't even get me started with Windows file permissions, or Windows' way of doing symlinks, or Windows' way of doing keyboard hotkeys that no other OS on this planet does.

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