95 to 98: decent experiences because of a lack of competition back then, but bad at security and stability, but no one really bothered that much back then about such things
ME: basically 98, just a low-effort cash grab
2000: promising new platform based on the superior NT kernel, but not mature yet for widespread consumer use
XP: probably the first widely usable consumer OS, decent, but it took until SP2 to fix security and stability problems
Vista: beta version of 7, sold as non-beta
7: the last decent Windows version. Windows dominance starts slowly dying after this one
8, 8.1: basically still 7 but with an UI experiment gone horribly wrong, plus the first beginnings of unwanted cloud integrations
10 (First Windows version with Nadella as CEO): okay so we just need to not do weird UI experiments and then we’re probably fine. Oh, by the way you can actually put spyware into everything with some opt-out options and not really get into trouble for it, and this will give us extra profit? Let’s fucking go!
11: okay so this spyware and cloud integration stuff went great overall, so let’s push even more! Also let’s add AI stuff which is also even more spyware and cloud integration stuff
<next version>: will feature even more AI and cloud integrations and thus even more spyware that will be even harder to circumvent. It’s likely that at this point or the very next version afterwards, that your Windows will likely turn your once “Personal” Computer into a fully Microsoft-owned and operated one.
Microsoft is a public company, which means it is driven by investors. Investors demand the promise of constant growth in a finite market that they’ve already been dominating (for now), which forces Microsoft to resort to “innovation” in ways to be anti consumer and in flashy features that sound cool and futuristic in an investor presentation but that no user really wants.
When you dominate a market, you stop selling your product to the consumer and start selling it to investors. It is an unbelievably wasteful system if you think of it, wasting tons of resources into making a product worse.
They’ll go the same way Intel currently is at some point. Hopefully Linux development stays stable and we don’t wind up with an AMD equivalent picking up the pieces and continuing the enshittification
My view on the versions of Windows:
Microsoft is a public company, which means it is driven by investors. Investors demand the promise of constant growth in a finite market that they’ve already been dominating (for now), which forces Microsoft to resort to “innovation” in ways to be anti consumer and in flashy features that sound cool and futuristic in an investor presentation but that no user really wants.
When you dominate a market, you stop selling your product to the consumer and start selling it to investors. It is an unbelievably wasteful system if you think of it, wasting tons of resources into making a product worse.
They’ll go the same way Intel currently is at some point. Hopefully Linux development stays stable and we don’t wind up with an AMD equivalent picking up the pieces and continuing the enshittification
I completely skipped XP and ran Win2k past EOL until I was basically forced to update to 7 due to software incompatibility.
By that point, of course, my only PC still running Windows was my gaming rig.