interior crocodile alligator

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

Lying to the reader

Lying to themselves

Simply misinformed

Not paying attention

Has weird priorities

Assumed you knew

Hates you personally

Bad at communicating

Easily sidetracked

Will believe anything

Has weird prejudices

Microsoft is sitting on decades of legacy code, too much to make sense of and they don't have anyone with a good enough understanding of the OS to know how to make big changes. Which is why every release since 7 feels like they added/modded stuff weirdly onto the previous version. For instance the aero theme is supposed to not be in the OS since windows 8 but up until very recently it was still part of the installer. And this keeps getting worse.

They don't know how it works, so they can't make actual virtual desktops, and it's why the implementation sucks so bad (take a screenshot of the current desktop before leaving to use as a preview next time when sliding, and quickly show/hide windows, because there really still is a single desktop). Also why when they wanted to redesign the start menu in 11 they had to give up on doing it properly and made it react native instead. And also just notice how in the 6 years between 10 and 11, the only actual changes were rounded corners and a few QOL details.

(more personally, I'm also seeing bugs I encounter several times a day when forced to use windows, that are still here a decade later)

And so as modern silicon valley turnaround does its thing, every piece of shittily added code also becomes part of the pile of legacy code, making the OS harder to work on yet again.

The other side of the dead end comes in 2 parts. First part is how god damn complicated windows is to begin with. I've played with the sysadmin side of it very briefly, and the amount of stuff going on that regular users don't even know exists is baffling. Playing with registry is the top of the iceberg. Second part is just how much legacy software relies on windows being the way it is, for basically everyone using windows in a way that's more advanced than just browsing the internet. Including businesses.

And so in one direction, working incrementally on windows is getting more and more difficult, less and less sustainable. Microsoft can make windows 12 out of modifying 11 like they did from 10 to 11, but it will take a very long time and it won't be good. And in the other direction, they can't just start clean to get rid of the legacy, because this would break 90% of software, and being able to trust that your software works is why most people use windows. All businesses that rely on specific, unmaintained software, would have no reason to keep using windows if they're gonna have to find a new solution anyway. Everyone using software that is being maintained will have to wait a year for everything they need to start working again. At this point I wanna go "lol, they should just make the next windows a linux distro with wine preinstalled" and tbh it feels like it wouldn't be that bad of an idea

There's a saying to the effect of "The code reflects the business that built it" (I believe it comes from Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month) and... yea it's entirely possible there aren't many people in the world who actually know Windows end to end anymore, from an architecture perspective. The number of those nerds who have the kind of political clout within Microsoft to pull off a refactor is probably close to zero.

Not that Microsoft cares, anymore. They don't care about user experience, not like they did back in the days when they were trying to convince businesses to buy computers and make secretaries use them. They do not care about expanding market share. They do not care about the developer experience, they do not care about gamers, they do not care about demographics they used to actively court and spend millions of dollars advertising to. I'm not sure where their money comes from anymore but it's not from you and me.

Using their likeness will spark their ire.

Encroachment upon their domain will earn punishment beyond earthly tithe.

The consequences of their regard may be intangible and long-lasting.

Rarely, you may earn their approval, but it is not worth the risk.

You must ask their permission, which is rarely granted.

Once they have you, they will not let you go for a hundred years.

You must be clever and use trickery and wordplay to evade them.

The master of each domain has their own unique and fickle nature, and some are more forgiving than others.