On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR considers the situation most Microsoft users find themselves in these days:
Between the forced updates, the spyware, the adware, OneDrive constantly attempting to suck up all your data, and infinite dark-pattern subscription traps, I’m gathering that many Windows users are now nostalgic for the days when the shit only seemed to be up to their ankles rather than lapping at their nostrils.
The information asymmetry of closed-source software inevitably fucks the user over. I know, I know, I sound like a broken record. I’ve been banging on about this for going on 30 years now and even I get tired of my own rant sometimes.
That’s not why I’m posting today. Instead I want to publicly contemplate an unobvious question: just why is Microsoft treating its users so badly?
“Because it can” is not really a responsive answer. Corporations don’t do evil things because they like being evil, they only do evil things because they think they’re profit-maximizing.
So I understand about the dark-pattern subscription stuff and the adware. That’s slimy, but it’s revenue capture. There’s at least a cold-blooded trade-off you can imagine some product planner making between revenue line-go-up now and pissing off people who won’t be customers later.
But what is Microsoft maximizing by doing things that drive users away from it without any revenue capture? What model of reality, or failure of decision making, do you have to have to think it’s a good idea to push forced updates with work-interrupting reboots that can’t be blocked or delayed by the user?
It would have been trivial to have a pop-up that says: An update is available. Do it now, or defer it until
? The fact that that didn’t happen can’t be ascribed to revenue-line-go-up fever. These are two different kinds of ugly. And that second kind makes me think that there’s nobody left in product management at Microsoft with the ability and authority to veto bad ideas because they will anger the users.
It looks to me like nobody over there is thinking strategically about customer retention anymore. By the time you get to the point where nobody squashes forced-update reboots, nobody can seriously raise the question of whether adware is going to drive away so many users that Windows market share will tank and take all that lovely subscription revenue with it.
This is where I point out, with weary inevitability, that it’s going to get worse before it gets even worse. With nobody keeping an eye on the long game and user retention, the petty money grabs will only accelerate. Microsoft will keep flogging that donkey until it dies.
The irony here is that if Microsoft were an efficient maximizer of long-term profit they would be doing less of the shitty enraging crap that they are now.
How much less depends on how good their judgment is. You can be actively trying to keep a critical mass of your user base happy enough not to bail out and still fail. But at least Microsoft would be trying. Right now, there’s damn little evidence that they are.
