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PaulHouletoday at 5:22 PM1 replyview on HN

Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.

One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"

Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.

Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.


Replies

ifwintercotoday at 6:07 PM

Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.

I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage