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Highest priority is moving the toolbar???
Weren't you able to move the taskbar to the top in like Windows 98 and XP? So they deliberately took away a feature, are adding it back after years, and selling this as "see we listen to our users!!"
I'll believe it when I see it. But I hope I will, I don't want to be cynical.
Back a decade or so, the Visual Studio experience was terrible, the team promised they were going to fix a lot of it, I didn't believe them, and they actually delivered. No VS is not perfect. But it was on a downward spiral and they got it out.
I hope they deliver now, and bring back my inner Windows fan which they eroded and then killed with the abomination that is current Win11.
Too little too late.
Oh goody. I left windows but this really makes me want to come back: More control over widgets and feed experiences!
What a list of bangers!
Glad I made the move to Linux when I did. The taskbar being moveable would've passed as satire if it wasn't an offical post.
Left or right task bar placement, finally!
This is awesome! Windows 11 is the best OS I've ever used, and it's great to see them finally fixing these obvious pain points.
Is this a joke? Is this guy for real? And he calls himself a REAL engineer? He’s a manager doing damage control because all this time Microslop is greedy and has stopped caring about power users.
We’re not first time users, we don’t want Microsoft BOB as our UI, we don’t want ads and internet search “functionality” in our Start menu, we don’t want AI everywhere and we don’t want things hidden from us.
Make Windows 11 Pro for real pro users and 11 Home for new users. I hope a few people from MS are reading this, especially Mr Engineer.
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I don’t care.
P.S. Yeah yeah guys, I know about Linux ;-)
Too. Fucking. Late.
At work, I'm switching to Mac for the first time in my life. At home, I'm already gaming on Linux. Windows is dead to me.
Embedding your signature at the end of a blog post is such a bullshit executive move. You just know this guy has been playing corporate politics for the last 30 years.
This is so depressingly off-base and wrong-headed.
It completely ignores the huge UI regressions Windows has suffered over the last... 20 years?
Windows's UI ineptitude has reached crippling levels. Application windows lack title bars, so you frequently don't know what application you're looking at. Applications lack menus; critical functions are scattered all over the place behind hamburger buttons... and sometimes even further, under a "more" item in the menu the hamburger invokes (try saving a file you're viewing in Edge).
Applications eschew the tidy, readily comprehensible, familiar, and efficient File dialog in favor of a bizarre text-based pane consisting of crude, unlabeled boxes and horizontal lines... with no context as to where you are in the file system.
Then there are the baffling functional regressions. Here's one that wastes my time daily: You can't select multiple files in Explorer and say "Open with." WTF, this was old hat 30 years ago. Want to open several PNGs in Photoshop? NOPE, not anymore!
Just dismal.
This is too little and too late, but you must give them credit for having the introspection ability to even go this far. Yes, the bar for microsoft is so low as to be handicap-accessible.
Talk is cheap. Show me the changes.
Key message at Microsoft:
“Windows has lost its way! Move the task bar!”
I recently took a vow to sneer less but it's really hard not to.
> File Explorer is one of the most used surfaces in Windows. Our first round of improvements will focus on a quicker launch experience, reduced flicker, smoother navigation and more reliable performance for everyday file tasks.
Really? it took "user feedback" for one of the world's best software companies to realize one of the most fundamental parts of the OS was broken?
I have been long on $MSFT for a while now, but my faith as an investor stands shook.
If you believe this has any long term staying power at MSFT, I have a bridge to sell you paid for with MSFT stock funded by quarterly earnings reports.
Windows has been going downhill for too long for me to take them at their word. I'll believe it when I see it.
> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.
Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.
If you had to commit to Windows quality you'd have done so a few decades ago.
Also, Linux (via Android, micro computers everywhere and the vast internet) touches way more lives then Microsoft.
At this point in the article I realized I didn't care one bit and stopped reading
If the people in charge of Windows have to solicit customer feeedback to fund out what’s wrong, then I guarantee you the real problems won’t be fixed.
These people don’t even know their own product.
Something tickles me about describing the forced inclusion of Copilot as “entry points” in things like Notepad. It reveals Microsoft’s intentions SO precisely.
They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.
User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.
I started laughing out loud uncontrollably when I got to this point:
> Craft
> To us, craft is the discipline that turns functional products into loved ones through usability, polish, coherence and refinement.
> This year, you will see us invest in raising the bar on the overall usability of the experience, with more opportunities for personalization, less noise, less distraction and more control across the OS. That includes being thoughtful about how and where we bring AI into Windows, leading with transparency, choice and control, so that new capabilities enhance the experience rather than complicate it.
"Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you".
Tell us why it was removed in the first place, why it takes years to put it back and it's still future promises as of March 2026. That's just a clown show.
Reminder: companies don't go on PR blasts without cause. Being cynical about tech companies is always a good bet.
Honestly he should go back to his country and build something for his people.
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth.
You could skip the "almost" if you had stuck to your guns on Windows Phone. It was a good phone OS, and we could have done without the iOS/Android duopoly, but MS chickened out.
There are two wolves that live inside the Windows brain - Apple and Linux (yes, two wolves).
On one hand, Windows has pressure to be something that "just works" like an iPad used to be - users can't screw it up. This is what enterprises want for the daily drivers of their massive user populations.
OTOH, Windows has pressure to be this highly customizable tool for savvy high-agency individuals. This is what we all want.
I can empathize with both needs, for sure, but it is a constant war. They're doing alright, considering.
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth.
This can not possibly be true, in several dimensions/metrics. I understand that this is mostly marketing bluster, but holy cow are they delusional here.
> Desktops showing the taskbar positioned on the bottom, top, left and right side of the screen
Welcome to the 90s?
They are so far off track. I'm basically never leaving Windows 10.
Microslop can commit, but I don't think they can get fix bloatware. Adding customer feedback form isn't going to fix it.
I'm reading this thread and I'm absolutely shocked that people are still advocating for Ubuntu for anything. It was a more user-friendly choice with more up to date packages maybe 15 years ago than the beloved Debian at the time, but that was long ago. Even then I wasn't one to put it on servers unless I had to for whatever reason, it just wasn't stable.
RHEL is mostly what you will see @ Corpo, with some occasional SUSE for Europeans. Given that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL (and no snapd), it is quite well supported. AFAIK, it's also what Linus Torvalds has ran for a long while now.
Oh, someone's feeling the heat of MacBook Neo and getting pressured by their hardware partners.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
Pfft. Still slow, react-based, and ad-riddled
> reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Must have failed to meet the metrics goals
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
You can bet they will still flash the screen take-over riddled with all the dark patterns in the world to get you to upload all your files to their cloud "for backup"
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer [..] quicker launch experience:
Oh, the preloading of explorer into ram before it's launched? Lmao. Entirely embarassed by File Pilot https://filepilot.tech
gtfo.
I love how the second half of this article is obviously just an AI slop agenda. That entirely speaks to how much microsoft "cares".
Frankly, the things they've listed as action items for the future are things that they should have been doing FROM THE BEGINNING.
Like, how on earth was
> Faster and more responsive Windows experiences
NOT a part of just the general release cycle of a major windows update? How was it they didn't notice that the file explorer experience in 11 was noticeably worse than windows 10 and the same hardware?
We all know the answer, it's because the highest priority wasn't a good UX, it was to make sure copilot was integrated into everything.
So long as microsoft management doesn't prioritize performance (and they clearly do not) this is just a natural endstate of any software. If you aren't focusing and paying your developers to make things faster and smoother, you'll get this sort of high memory consumption and janky applications. Making things not janky requires someone in management to care about that.
What about:
- native quick launch bar
- killing telemetry
- killing UI kludge
- permitting non-MS apps again
This reads like the way they'll try to implement is
""" ok copilot, implement these changes, make no mistakes """
Having learned absolutely nothing from their existing sins.
we've heard that before.
Am I wrong in thinking that Windows 95 had the ability to reposition the task bar either horizontally or vertically? And someone actually chose to lead with that.
Windows is no longer on the dominant position it was 20 years ago when it had 90%+ marketshare: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
It's not sitting at 60-65% and has been slowly bleeding for the last 20 years or so. In my opinion, anyone who have figured out how to move his processes, has left the building and never checked back.
Now Windows is being attacked aggressively from multiple fronts:
- macbook neo. Apple is projected to sell roughly 5million of these this year. This is a segment that couldn't previously move out of Windows because of cost not Office.
- improvement in Linux (Desktop/Gaming): This will eat another chunk for people whom Linux didn't function previously.
- HarmonyOS Next. This is underestimated by the rest of the Western world. I think by 5-10 years most of China would have moved to its own OS. Windows highest marketshare is in Asia.
The idea that Microsoft can exist on Azure/Office alone is not valid, in my opinion. Especially for Office, Windows is your portal to the rest of Microsoft stack. If you use HarmonyOS, you'll like use their own Office system. From there, they'll own the rest of the stack.
tl;dr: MSFT is screwed and they know it. They are also going to do nothing about it.
Too late man. Linux made Windows obsolete. There's no going back for me.
It's crazy how windows blew its dominance isn't it?
Even for gaming, the only reason why I would stick with windows is not an issue anymore. Thanks to Steam gaming just works on Linux. I'm using Omarchy and it's very easy.
I can't see ever going back to windows personally.
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth.
Thankfully Ballmer failed and this isn’t even close to true. I, like a lot of highly technical professionals, have been Windows sober for many years now.
I am not convinced that Microsoft is all of a sudden deciding to try again to become a consumer-oriented company based on something Pravan Davuluri says.
Seems more like FUD.
Are they microsofter in the brain than MicroSlop? MegaSlop? GigaSlop? Reading "Windows" and "quality" in the same sentence already triggers every bullshit alert in the book.
ended with windows 2000
“We hear you and will improve quality” is bullshit code. It means “we figured out our strategy long ago and you’re not it”.
Bro Linux gaming is where it’s at - windoze is cooked
Too little too late. Linux can finally handle 90% of the gaming I want to do, and I'm willing to "suffer" not being able to play the other 10%.
Microsoft has proven itself the undisputed king of enshittification and a blog post will not change my mind on that.
Maybe my grandkids will give it a shot.