Senior Microsoft official shares what next major Windows version will be like

MS once again drops the ball

No-one is looking to talk to their PC. Most people don't want an AI recording everything they do; many, like me, simply don't want the current gen of hallucinating AIs anywhere near anything important, let alone in a supervisor role on their machine.

How about this, MS: - provide a quick, light OS that just works, with the fewest required services running, and an easy way for people to _opt_into_ extra features instead of having to _opt_out_ every time they get a fresh machine? - bring features people actually want, like the abandoned feature to run android apps via WSL, or a similar layer - prioritise user experience over business concerns, such that the OS shouldn't lag or lose functionality when your advertising streams are interrupted

I feel like MS was making good progress from win7, through 8, to 10, and has dropped the ball with 11 in several regards, not the least of which is abandoning hardware which is still fully capable of serving user needs, for an artificial requirement of requiring a specific generation of cpu, or requiring a TPM, which has been shown to be not necessary for a lot of users. No worries though - the customers you're bleeding will simply move to Linux, or continue to use outdated versions of your software which are vulnerable, giving your company a bad name.

Fundamentally tying the OS to the cloud and AI makes me think this is really a pretense to move windows to a subscription model, and likely to end data privacy on windows as we know it, paving the way for ad supported OS. Two huge wins for their shareholders and upper execs. I think whether these features a good idea for users, are wanted by anyone, or if they will even work remotely like they are pitching it, is all incidental to achieving the two goals above. Just my guess though.

Voice input: people don't talk to their desktop or laptop computers, because they are sat in front of them with more detailed, immediate and nuanced input devices available; they talk to their phones and other small appliances that are "ambient".

> "Fundamentally, the concept that your computer can actually look at your screen and is context aware is going to become an important modality for us going forward."

I hate to break it to them but they are the people who make the OS that renders all the content on the screen. They could make it more efficiently context-aware without massive privacy risks, simply by using the information they already have at that moment, and introducing APIs that applications could use to communicate context, under their users' control.

They don't want to do this because they don't want applications or users to have that kind of fine-grained control.

Do they think Windows is a Phone OS? A TV OS? A car?