Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need

Summary

OPINION From desktop alerts begging you to sign up for Xbox Game Pass to a second-chance out-of-the-box experience that insists you need Microsoft 365, Windows has a hard time taking "no" for an answer. The operating system's corporate parent isn't a good listener either, festooning the OS with useless features no one asked for. In recent years, we've seen Redmond push for useless local AI features, in a bid to sell everyone Copilot+ PCs that they don't need. The house Bill Gates built has turned Windows into a piece of spyware, insisting that you sign in with a Microsoft account so it can gather more data about you, and cajoling you to run Recall, which takes snapshots of your sensitive personal information. But the company hasn't done much to improve user productivity. In an interview with the Windows IT Pro channel on YouTube, Microsoft's OS overlord, Pavan Davuluri, assured users that the beatings would continue until morale improves. "I think what human interfaces look like today and what they will look like five years from now is one big area of thrust for us that Windows continues to evolve," Microsoft's corporate VP of Windows + Devices said. "The operating system is increasingly agentic and multimodal and voice and vision and touch, just like we use mouse and keyboard . . . I think that is an area of tremendous investment and change for us." So get ready to do away with that old mouse and keyboard and start yelling at your computer. I'm sure you'll get your work done faster and more accurately by dictating than by typing. We should also push the touch interface over a traditional, windowed GUI since it worked so well in Windows 8. The big question Microsoft never addresses is "who asked for this?" Who was begging for local image generation in Microsoft Paint when a million websites, including Bing, offer it in the cloud? Who demanded that AI and tabs be built into Notepad, a program that people loved for its simplicity? And just who is the constituency that...