My productivity has been reduced to a crawl, and it is all thanks to one company. I have been writing about computers and software for over 30 years. Throughout all of that time, Microsoft was always the bad guy. They took other company’s ideas, bullied the market, ran competitors out of business using unethical methods, and typically produced a sub-standard operating system that many were basically forced to use. Even today their only competition in the laptop and desktop operating system space is Linux (which has much less available software and is more for the techy types) and Apple. The Mac operating system is superior and more robust and more reliable, but it is also a very closed system which is not good for people like me who want to mess around under the hood.
Having dealt with Microsoft for so many years, I know full well how they operate. I have had friends who worked for them in Seattle. The different working groups compete and do not communicate well with each other. It is amazing they get anything out the door.
I wrote magazine reviews of Microsoft products. One of the things they did frequently was ship a product similar to that of a competitors but missing many of the key features since they were rushing it out the door. They would promise those features and more in a future release, but in many cases what they promised never materialized. It would get a lot of people to hesitate before buying the competition, which was the point.
They came up with what they billed as a Flash killer. Flash was a great technology from Macromedia that let you do amazing things in the browser. In my review I pointed out the features that the Microsoft product lacked in comparison to Flash, and pointed out that the many promised upcoming features might or might not actually appear in the product, something all of us in tech knew from experience. My editor contacted me and let me know that Microsoft was furious about the review. It was one of the top Windows magazines (Microsoft was one of their major advertisers), and after that they never hired me again. I felt some vindication when none of the promised features were ever added and the product eventually became orphaned. It would be Steve Jobs who years later killed Flash, for equally non-competitive reasons
I write primarily on a three monitor system. The two side monitors are for my notes and research. It is organized to be very efficient. A recent update from Microsoft rendered my system unbootable. The update locked the system up warning me not to turn off my system, but after a full 24 hours of their little spinning wait icon, my patience was up. Repeated attempts at booting got me nowhere.
After countless wasted hours, I finally got it to boot, but my system was totally trashed. The taskbar was depopulated, and much of my software no longer runs. It is going to be a big job to restore it.
I have written on this blog about my new computer system intended for 3D and video. I thought I would use it until I got the other system fixed. I put off upgrading to Windows 11 on my writing computer, but it came with the new computer. It is terrible. For an extremely minor update it has a huge learning curve because so many features people have relied upon were removed. I don’t know the reason, but I suspect in most cases it was substance abuse.
The worst is the removal of one of the most basic features of modern operating systems, drag and drop. It is integral to the way I work. You just drag what you want to work on from the explorer window into the software. I had this feature on my Amiga computer in the 1980s. Now the closest equivalent in Windows 11 requires a total of six mouse clicks. Yikes. So many things now require additional steps, dramatically slowing your workflow. After a huge outcry Microsoft does plan to restore some of the old features, eventually.
I lost a ton of time trying to do things that no longer worked and trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. It never occurred to me that they would remove such basic features. Until it goes through a few more upgrades, I would absolutely avoid Windows 11 whenever possible.
Right now I do not have Word functioning on either computer. Now I have to hunt for licenses and installers. What a mess and a huge time sink. Thanks Microsoft.