It is no secret I’m a long time now-former Windows system administrator. The first Windows I professionally administered was Windows NT, and I was with it up through Windows 2008 (and a touch of 2012). I ran into an observation today that made me to Hmm, and that leads to blogposts.
@xgranade The common complaint is that you need to be a professional software developer to use Linux. But to use Windows 11 (and have it be usable) you need to be a professional sysadmin who uses terms like “group policy”.
Because this is spot on. I’d argue Linux is usable by non-devs these days, but you still need a tolerance for fiddling and non-standard UI. The Windows side is extremely tr…
It is no secret I’m a long time now-former Windows system administrator. The first Windows I professionally administered was Windows NT, and I was with it up through Windows 2008 (and a touch of 2012). I ran into an observation today that made me to Hmm, and that leads to blogposts.
@xgranade The common complaint is that you need to be a professional software developer to use Linux. But to use Windows 11 (and have it be usable) you need to be a professional sysadmin who uses terms like “group policy”.
Because this is spot on. I’d argue Linux is usable by non-devs these days, but you still need a tolerance for fiddling and non-standard UI. The Windows side is extremely true. Windows in a corporate context is way more tolerable than Windows in a home context because the corporate context has a group of grumpy Windows sysadmins setting new Group Policy every time a security or feature release comes out to turn down the suck. Those grumpy sysadmins are as grumpy at Microsoft pulling this consent-violating shit as you are, and Windows lets you centrally shut it off (in a corporate context.)
Windows has been losing desktop market-share to Apple for years, and the old “Wintel” cash-cow they used to enjoy is not milking as much as it used to. When software makers see flagging revenue and soft user demand, it’s time to do demand forcing! And demand forcing leads to shittier experiences as the use more software! message gets ever more aggressive.
The long time followers of this blog have seen enough of this industry to know the cycle when they see it.
- Darling product stops being darling for whatever reason. Competition, flagging significance, major incident spoiling user trust, private equity takeover, whatever.
- The product’s Product org has to make number go up in spite of all this so jacks renewal prices.
- Renewal prices only jack so far before growth reverses, so Product has to ship new features to justify the price increases.
- Bad uptake of new features means features get added to base plans to justify jacking the price.
- Bad uptake of now baseline features means more aggressive prompting of those features to drive up Monthly Active Users metrics
- Repeat
Do this for enough years and you get the sclerotic Windows 11, full of demand-forcing promptware that pisses your customers off.