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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft says it’s refocusing Windows on performance and reliability.
- File Explorer, Search, and Start are getting responsiveness fixes.
- The pressure to add new AI-based annoyances hasn’t gone away.
Earlier this year, Microsoft Windows boss Pavan Davuluri wrote an open letter addressed to the Windows Insider community but really aimed at a much larger cohort of frustrated Windows enthusiasts and power users.
That post laid out a laundry list of improvements that would be coming to Windows: more control over updates, a “more intentional” approach to AI, more attention to performance and reliability, and some enhancements to the user experience that customers have been complaining about for five solid years.
Also: Microsoft announces sweeping Windows changes – but no apologies
“We’re listening to customer feedback” was the ostensible message, but the subtext was really a confession that Microsoft had been ignoring customer feedback for years. And last week, we got an update on that admission.
The pressure to monetize Windows
As I pointed out more than three years ago, Microsoft has focused all its energy on turning Windows into a billboard for the company’s other products and services: more promotions, more nudges, more cross-selling, more pressure to use a Microsoft account, more hooks to subscription-based services, and more “recommended” content. The bottom line is that Windows has become increasingly annoying, not by accident but by design, with monetization as the end goal.
Also: If Microsoft really wants to fix Windows 11, it should do these four things ASAP
The turn toward “improving Windows quality” represents a belated recognition of that reality. “The team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback,” Davuluri said. “What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”
So, how’s it going?
Davuluri shared a progress report last week. It wasn’t so much a list of successes as a summary of work in progress.
If you’ve been testing Windows Insider builds, you’ve seen some of the changes, but the rest of us won’t see anything for months. (The smart money says early October.) Others are vague and impossible to quantify, like this summary of performance work:
[W]e’ve steadily been introducing several improvements to the memory efficiency of Windows, from taking advantage of a more efficient memory allocator to reduce overhead across apps and components, continued tuning of WinUI 3 so that apps built on it use less memory by design, as well as driving efficiencies across Chromium and Webview2 components when they appear in the operating system … Boot and logon times are also improved.
Also: Windows Search just got a faster, cleaner overhaul – how to try it today
Sounds great, right? Except none of those boasts are accompanied by a single benchmark. No measurement of any kind. Without numbers that outsiders can confirm for themselves, it’s just hand-waving.
Neglecting Windows fundamentals
Collectively, the entire list adds up to an admission that Microsoft has been seriously neglecting Windows fundamentals for years.
Here’s a summary:
- Search with less clutter and fewer promotional distractions
- Widgets and feeds made quieter by default
- More user control over Start and the taskbar
- Improving responsiveness rather than adding new features
- Making updates less disruptive
Take a look, for example, at the description of improvements in Windows Hello: “It’s part of our broader focus on the everyday experiences that should just work.” This implies that many of those everyday experiences aren’t “just working.”
Another example: “[E]xperiences like Start, File Explorer, Search, and Snipping Tool are faster and more responsive. Our focus has been on improving these experiences, so they are responsive, free of stutters and delays, and customers enjoy a reliable experience every time.”
The improvements to File Explorer include “foundational architecture enhancements designed to improve responsiveness and reliability across launch and navigation. We’ve addressed long-standing feedback about Home, including unstable transitions and blurry thumbnails. We also made updates to address File Explorer reliability, readability, and usability across the Address Bar, file size formatting, keyboard navigation, and renaming…”
Also: Why your Windows installation files keep getting bigger – AI is filling up smaller drives
Those are all tasks that any serious Windows user performs every day, using a basic tool that has been part of Windows forever. Windows 11 isn’t some newfangled product that was just released. It has been generally available for nearly five years. The fact that the company is only now getting around to fixing multiple longstanding issues with responsiveness, reliability, stability, and usability in File Explorer is an admission that core parts of the user experience simply haven’t been working properly.
Anyway, Microsoft says it’s doing great, and it’s expanding its focus to include some more areas: a “faster and more efficient out-of-box experience,” refinements to parental controls, and improvements to make voice “more natural and fluid to interact across the apps you use every day.”
And, most significantly, “Memory optimization for 8GB and above – Reducing Windows memory footprint to deliver a fast and responsive Windows experience across the PCs customers use every day.” Again, this has been one of the loudest complaints about Windows 11 since day 1.
What’s next?
Don’t get me wrong. I applaud this effort. This is the first time in many years that I can recall a senior member of the Windows leadership team talking about the things people use a Windows PC for instead of promoting whatever irrelevant feature the marketing team wants highlighted. Remember mixed reality and Paint 3D? Remember Cortana? Remember when you were going to be able to run Android apps on your Windows 11 PC? All of those features were hyped to the moon, and they’re all gone now.
Also: Microsoft goes all in on new AI-powered Windows security strategy – what it means for you
I was actually encouraged to see that AI got only a passing mention in this progress report, and then only in the context of integrating those features where they’re most useful. The focus right now seems to be on the accumulation of unfinished and neglected features that have made Windows increasingly irritating to use.
The big question now is whether Microsoft’s top management has the willingness to continue shifting resources to this core work instead of spending those dollars on new AI-based features. The company’s history suggests that removing annoyances is easy when it puts its mind to it. Resisting the urge to add new annoyances is much harder.
