Microsoft Executives Discuss How AI Will Change Windows, Programming -- and Society (windowscentral.com) 68
"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," Microsoft's president of Windows Pavan Davuluri posted on X.com, "connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere."
But former Uber software engineer and engineering manager Gergely Orosz was unimpressed. "Can't see any reason for software engineers to choose Windows with this weird direction they are doubling down on. So odd because Microsoft has building dev tools in their DNA... their OS doesn't look like anything a builder who wants OS control could choose. Mac or Linux it is for devs."
Davuluri "has since disabled replies on his original post..." notes the blog Windows Central, "which some people viewed as an attempt to shut out negative feedback." But he also replied to that comment... Davuluri says "we care deeply about developers. We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences. When we meet as a team, we discuss these pain points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows..." The good news is Davuluri has confirmed that Microsoft is listening, and is aware of the backlash it's receiving over the company's obsession with AI in Windows 11. That doesn't mean the company is going to stop with adding AI to Windows, but it does mean we can also expect Microsoft to focus on the other things that matter too, such as stability and power user enhancements.
Elsewhere on X.com, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared his own thoughts on "the net benefit of the AI platform wave ." The Times of India reports: Nadella said tech companies should focus on building AI systems that create more value for the people and businesses using them, not just for the companies that make the technology. He cited Bill Gates to emphasize the same: "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it."Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to Nadella's post with a facepalm emoji.
Nadella said this idea matters even more during the current AI boom, where many firms risk giving away too much of their own value to big tech platforms. "The real question is how to empower every company out there to build their own AI-native capabilities," he wrote. Nadella says Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is an example of zero-sum mindset industry... [He also cited Microsoft's "work to bring AMD into the fleet."]
More from Satya Nadella's post: Thanks to AI, the [coding] category itself has expanded and may ultimately become one of the largest software categories. I don't ever recall any analyst ever asking me about how much revenue Visual Studio makes! But now everyone is excited about AI coding tools. This is another aspect of positive sum, when the category itself is redefined and the pie becomes 10x what it was! With GitHub Copilot we compete for our share and with GitHub and Agent HQ we also provide a platform for others.
Of course, the real test of this era won't be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights. When a pharma company uses AI in silico to bring a new therapy to market in one year instead of twelve. When a manufacturer uses AI to redesign a supply chain overnight. When a teacher personalizes lessons for every student. When a farmer predicts and prevents crop failure.That's when we'll know the system is working.
Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits. And every firm needs to make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty vs just a press release with a Tech/AI company or worse leak all their value through what may seem like a partnership, except it's extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run.
But former Uber software engineer and engineering manager Gergely Orosz was unimpressed. "Can't see any reason for software engineers to choose Windows with this weird direction they are doubling down on. So odd because Microsoft has building dev tools in their DNA... their OS doesn't look like anything a builder who wants OS control could choose. Mac or Linux it is for devs."
Davuluri "has since disabled replies on his original post..." notes the blog Windows Central, "which some people viewed as an attempt to shut out negative feedback." But he also replied to that comment... Davuluri says "we care deeply about developers. We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences. When we meet as a team, we discuss these pain points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows..." The good news is Davuluri has confirmed that Microsoft is listening, and is aware of the backlash it's receiving over the company's obsession with AI in Windows 11. That doesn't mean the company is going to stop with adding AI to Windows, but it does mean we can also expect Microsoft to focus on the other things that matter too, such as stability and power user enhancements.
Elsewhere on X.com, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared his own thoughts on "the net benefit of the AI platform wave ." The Times of India reports: Nadella said tech companies should focus on building AI systems that create more value for the people and businesses using them, not just for the companies that make the technology. He cited Bill Gates to emphasize the same: "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it."Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to Nadella's post with a facepalm emoji.
Nadella said this idea matters even more during the current AI boom, where many firms risk giving away too much of their own value to big tech platforms. "The real question is how to empower every company out there to build their own AI-native capabilities," he wrote. Nadella says Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is an example of zero-sum mindset industry... [He also cited Microsoft's "work to bring AMD into the fleet."]
More from Satya Nadella's post: Thanks to AI, the [coding] category itself has expanded and may ultimately become one of the largest software categories. I don't ever recall any analyst ever asking me about how much revenue Visual Studio makes! But now everyone is excited about AI coding tools. This is another aspect of positive sum, when the category itself is redefined and the pie becomes 10x what it was! With GitHub Copilot we compete for our share and with GitHub and Agent HQ we also provide a platform for others.
Of course, the real test of this era won't be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights. When a pharma company uses AI in silico to bring a new therapy to market in one year instead of twelve. When a manufacturer uses AI to redesign a supply chain overnight. When a teacher personalizes lessons for every student. When a farmer predicts and prevents crop failure.That's when we'll know the system is working.
Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits. And every firm needs to make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty vs just a press release with a Tech/AI company or worse leak all their value through what may seem like a partnership, except it's extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run.
While we're quoting Bill Gates... (Score:2)
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
It's change for its own sake (Score:2)
Microsoft has to have a reason to get corporations to buy Windows 12. Exclude web based applications since Windows 10 and what's really new over the last 4 years?
Third party apps adding AI, Office adding AI, developer tools adding some form of AI....
All of those can run on a Windows 11 machine and do not need Widows 12 features.
Most business users use little more than a web browser, Microsoft Office, an email program and a chat/video conference application - all of which run on Windows 11.
A guess here is
"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score:5, Funny)
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Seems to be happening more often these days.
Re:"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score:5, Insightful)
The last great holdout for windows was games. For office stuff, the transition from monolithic AD/Exchange stacks to cloud based stuff made Macs a viable platform for many organizations, particularly with software devs finding the Unix system under the hood productive for developments meaning that while Sysadmins have traditionally been mac hostile, devs are often mac friendly (well, other than the dotnet guys), and with the corporate drones enjoying the user friendlyness and fashionable appearances of the machines, windows centrality to the office has been under serious challenge.
But games where unchallenged. While modern macs are respectable for games that have been ported, its undeniable that windows was clearly the winner in this field, with access to Nvidia (and increasingly AMD) GPUs and APIs well suited to gaming.
But Valve has different ideas, and despite the attractiveness of the XBOX subscriptions, Valve have a near monopoly on the ecosystem, and Valve do NOT like Microsoft breathing down their necks. So proton (A wine fork that works shockingly well) has been under constant development and is now at the stage where many windows-only games run as well, if not better, under Linux, even on small machines like the Steamdeck (I have one at home, and it runs..... every game I've tried. Oh and with the emulation stuff makes a pretty great nintendo switch emulator too)
So yeah, the final fortress in windows dominance has toppled. Linux is just a straight up better server. Macs are viable and friendly. And now Linux even plays games better, or at least competitively.
And with Microsoft hell bent on turning windows into a hellscape of chatbots , corporate surveilance, subscription slop and advertising, people have had enough.
If Microsoft doesnt change its ways, its going to lose everything its worked for.
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Also its worth noting that because Macs are *nix underneath even your average mac laptop could in theory be used as a productive server too. Just like Llinux (and every other *nix) there's none of the artificial desktop-server divide MS introduced into Windows order to generate $$$ for upgrades.
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You can, although i dont recomend it. That said, repurposing old macs into home servers is something I've seen a fair bit of.
I *suppose* the mac minis could be quite useful for an office mac if you have a primarily mac infrastructure, but Apple have discontinued MacOS Server since 2022, so YMMV
mac has the hardware cost issues (ram / storage) a (Score:2)
mac has the hardware cost issues (ram / storage) and the app store only push.
Also mac is fast to drop legacy stuff. they dropped firewire when no other os did.
Re:"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score:5, Informative)
I get that techies like the ability to pick their favorite distro and I get that Ubuntu is gotten close to being the default but in practice it's not.
There really needs to be a consistent way to install and deploy software and a consistent set of tools and libraries for accessing things like audio and video and for programming things like basic UI components.
If Linux could just settle on one distro and maybe two or three desktops (a light one, the heavy one for mainline desktops and maybe one for mobile and tablet) I think it could capture a lot more market share. Sort of like how stuff like ruby on rails and a lot of frameworks get popular because while they might not do things the best they just pick a way to do something and go with it.
Choice paralysis combined with diluting the developer pool creates all sorts of problems at this junction.
And I really really want a good competitor for Windows. Because holy crap Windows 11 is terrible. It is the most user hostile software I have ever seen in my life.
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And you wish the only car on the market was a Frod F150?
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False analogy. Looks matter with cars along with price and there is no car that can do everything due to physical limitations. None of the above apply to linux distros.
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A better analogy is I want my car, the hardware, to work with my phone. I don't want 50 different phone operating systems that my car company has to build interoperability for so that the hardware I bought, a car, has to support 50 different variations on phones.
Competition is good but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There is value in standardization especially for complex things that require interoperability.
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What web browser do you use? If you use anything other Edge, why are you contributing to the problem by using a third-party alternative browser? Microsoft already picked the "standard" browser for you!
Re:"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score:4, Funny)
And my desktop is evolving into Linux!
The year of the Linux desktop is upon us all!
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I'm doing my part!
I'm two months in and after the first couple of days I haven't booted up windows other than to check how I had something setup or if I could find an old file in weeks now.
I don't see a reason to keep windows. If I need an office document format I can use web versions. Almost every game just works at this point and the performance deltas are tiny.
The downsides are nothing compared to the benefits imo. It's still tough for the typical non-technical user though to make a change like this beca
Re:"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score:4, Interesting)
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> For people who have to use Windows for work purposes, you can shut down about 2/3 of all running services with no loss in functionality
You're lucky if your corporate laptop isn't locked down way past the point of being able to install a program like Window Blinds, let alone having admin access to shut down a few services. Corporate Windows is the shittiest OS ever.
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There are alternative shells for Windows 11? I had thought all of those projects stalled at Windows 10...
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Just finished building a Nobara Linux game system for my wife. She's been supporting Windows for decades and with Win11, she is so over it.
Cisco has the best AI strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds like the Cisco "AI" is old school statistical analysis and fuzzy logic. Which is a Good Thing.
99 ways to f*** it up again for Microsoft (Score:4, Funny)
Wonder how they'll manage to do it this time.
agentic OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
That won't be an option if MS gets is way!
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Well, maybe eventually it may make sense.
But not anytime soon: https://www.schneier.com/blog/... [schneier.com]
Obviously, Microsoft is prioritizing profits over everything, as usual.
Luddites Unite! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck this AI shit. It's just going to be used for swamping every avenue of human communication with marketing.
Defenestrate AI (Score:3)
Proton/Wine are now more than good enough now, if not better, for gaming. Once I confirmed all of my games worked, including cheat protected ones and even my VR headset, Windows was chucked out of the Window and it's old drives reformatted EXT4.
Wow (Score:1)
MBA school must consist of memorizing BS... (Score:3)
Davuluri says "we care deeply about developers. We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences.
Windows 95 and 98 shipped with "Progman", a UI shell that loosely mirrored Windows 3.1. Windows XP, and even Vista, shipped with a "classic mode" Start Menu. My standards are lower now; if they could stop breaking ExplorerPatcher and OpenShell, that'd be great.
When we meet as a team, we discuss these pain points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows..."
And do what? Develop UWP apps to be sold in the Windows Store that was so poorly implemented and curated that it's useful for almost-nobody - the developers still writing desktop Windows software likely have an established distribution channel at this point, so they don't need to pay the MS tax. The users have no need for it because they're either doing everything in a web browser, or using their existing software that already has a distribution channel of some kind. This means that the software on offer amounts to mostly-shovelware.
The good news is Davuluri has confirmed that Microsoft is listening, and is aware of the backlash it's receiving over the company's obsession with AI in Windows 11.
Tangential because it's Office...but they could show they're listening by making Copilot an icon in a corner when logging into Microsoft365, rather than spitting the user into a chat window by default. They're still trying to find a use case for on-device AI, and it's pretty telling that they're shoving it into the OS via annoyances, while their best example (Recall) is something that made more people say "that's creepy" than would say "that's useful". Copilot is the new Clippy in Office, there are memes about how plain-English formulas in Excel make obvious mathematical mistakes, and this is all on the backdrop of sucking everyones' data into OneDrive.
That doesn't mean the company is going to stop with adding AI to Windows, but it does mean we can also expect Microsoft to focus on the other things that matter too, such as stability and power user enhancements.
...So, by the author's admission, AI isn't a feature that matters? ...Seriously, I'm half asleep and I can still come up with holes in this argument...I don't think it's going to stop until the AI bubble implodes; the best we can hope for is for MS to implement fewer nags about it, but if Edge is any indication, I've got no confidence.
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Hell has finally frozen over?
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Microsoft keeps claiming they're changing and then I keep seeing new ads for functionality I don't want to use pop up to distract me while I'm trying to work, and yes this is a locked down work environment where an effort has been made to turn all of that shit off. But you fire up Teams after some trivial update and it wants to tell you how you could use AI in it, no I am literally never going to do that on purpose. If Microsoft has changed it's only that they're adding more gaslighting.
They "discuss" the pain points? (Score:2)
Indianization in action (Score:5, Insightful)
MS is basically your typical scammy Indian corporation at this point. Gates and Ballmer were not great either, but somehow the company is getting even worse and worse with all these indian executives laser-focused on shareholder value.
God imagine this company in the next couple or so decades. Hopefully MS gets put out of its misery before then but I doubt our government will let it die out that easily.
Re:Americanization in action (Score:4, Informative)
Wait what? *All* executives are laser focused on increased shareholder value. It's Americanization in action.
Irrespective of the nationality of the people making decisions, I think what the GP is getting at is that there were different philosophies over the decades at Microsoft. Amongst the things Ballmer is most famous for is his "Developers, developers, developers, developers" mantra...and the idea was to make Windows the easiest platform to develop software for, and the developers would write software that would encourage the proliferation of Windows in the market. It was a rare case of growth by "trickle-down economics" - take care of the developers, and the developers would grow the market for the platform.
Microsoft's method of increasing shareholder value during the Ballmer era was indirect - value was sought after by market capture, which was fulfilled more so by third party developers than by Microsoft itself. By contrast, the Nadella era has been about "increasing shareholder value" by pushing everyone to Azure and Office subscriptions and by putting ads into Windows and by data harvesting.
Neither era was some sort of pinnacle of customer care; both were concerned about increasing shareholder value. I think the GP is at least somewhat justified in having concern about Microsoft's shift toward increasing shareholder value by making the Windows platform being actively-user-hostile, rather than developer-friendly.
cool! (Score:5, Funny)
"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS,"
That's awesome. Can't wait for the day I can tell my agentic OS to automate turning off OneDrive after every update!
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User: I'd like you to turn off OneDrive after every update from now on, ok? ...
Agentic: Certainly. That is a very perceptive request. I will be sure to improve OneDrive during every update.
User: No, no. I asked you to *turn off* OneDrive!
Agentic: Of course! Turning off, and updating immediately. 5, 4, 3, 2,
Re: cool! (Score:2)
Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
They've never gotten anything. I recall it took them years to realize the internet even existed. They know nothing. You might as well ask your plumber for medical advice.
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I'm banking on that
Buzzword Soup (Score:3)
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I begrudgingly use a cracked Windows 11 Enterprise box to
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I hate to say it.. (Score:3)
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AI is going to look really dot com hype shark jumping in 2-3 years after the bubble bursts
Yep, and just like happened to the Internet, after the bubble bursts everyone will realize the tech is useless and it will quickly fade into obscurity. Same thing that happened with the telecom bubble and the railroad bubble. So much fiber / track that got laid and then never used.
Windows is already the worst dev OS (Score:3)
Dear MS (Score:3)
Haven't you done enough damage already? Stop, just stop.
connecting devices, cloud, and AI (Score:3)
Good luck with that.. (Score:2)
AI is built on computers and software, two areas that microsoft have never been good at
AI (Score:2)
Can it put the fecking taskbar icons back where they were? And let me drag it around the screen? And bring back the start menu? And finally move everything into either control panel or Settings (but not both)? And actually let me choose to NOT update if I so wish? And making things an OFF BY DEFAULT OPTION first, and never removing an option, just switching it off for those who don't want it? And letting me theme Office again so I can make it look like Office 2000? And ....
Because I absolutely hate A
"Secure work anywhere" (Score:3)
Last time I checked , this is not what businesses want. Business leaders want the end of remote working, they want bums on seats to justify the expense of owning large offices to their investors and therefore maximise the cost to the environment.
Re: "Secure work anywhere" (Score:2)
AI, described in the most eloquent BS I ever heard (Score:2)
I don't need to hear an executive (Score:2)
Copilot and Windows (Score:3)
Summary (Score:3)
Maybe I should just feed the "summary" into an LLM and ask it what the hell they're talking about.
This is what MSFT should do (Score:2)
Windows Pro Classic: latest kernel and security enhancements but removes the Windows 8 - 11 inspired UI changes. More importantly, it has none of the icky marketing desperation found in today's Windows. Target demographic: anyone with an ounce of self-respect.
Windows AI: an evolution of Windows 11 with all of the agentic clippy-on-crack baked-in, start menu advertisements, and 10 notifications/day about a non-essential Microsoft features/products. Target demographic: masochists.
Do these guys make up their own language? (Score:2)
"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS,"
agentic?????
The world according to ClippyAI (Score:2)
$ClippyAI: Gates said: “I believe that if you’re a software developer, you have a responsibility to make people’s lives better and make your software addictive. People are going to use the software, and the more addicted they get, the more they’ll rely on it.”
Can AI rescue the sh*tty Office developers? (Score:2)
Maybe AI will help M$'s shitty developers hurry up and provide easier importation of .pst files into Outlook 365 or "new" Outlook. Quick background: my main desktop just died, so I'm having to ship it off for a warranty repair, and I ordered a new desktop because my spare desktops are all slower and running Windows 10.
Instead of buying another copy of Office, I thought I would give Office 365 a try, but there's no easy way to get my .pst file into Outlook 365. It's f-ing crazy that M$ wants people to move
Agentic Incompetence (Score:2)