Shipping at big companies can often be surprisingly hard so it's impressive to see how fast Microsoft is moving with AI integration into all their products.
It is also impressive how slow they deliver the option of ungrouping taskbar icons, which is requested by masses for years now, and actually worked before. I know, I know, that is a much harder poblem than AI. Maybe they need to improve AI much more first so it could have superhuman powers, solving the task bar ungrouping problem finally for the humanity.
Maybe it's not actually being requested by masses and instead just a vocal minority that you happen to be a part of? Or maybe Microsoft already calculated that fixing it won't bring much if any more money than not and therefore that it's not worth it.
Just because something that you want fixed isn't done does not mean they're "slow". If it hasn't been included after years of being "requested by masses", then it's more likely it just won't be included period.
There is even a paid app doing that now! Beyond free ones. That's how rare problem is this. :D You actually meet with it daily, hourly if using two or more windows by the same app.
Just because you are a hobbist user and never met a productivity problem it doesn't mean that the professional population does not suffer from it (see, I can make unfunded assumptions too about the other end ;) ). All around me have this problem, with various level of seriousity. Google the problem, like I did for prolonged time searching for a good answer, it will bring up masses of troubled people.
> maybe Microsoft already calculated that fixing it won't bring much if any more money than not and therefore that it's not worth it
Can you also have an educated deliberation about the calculations justified the removal of this feature existed before? ;)
Does that somehow change prioritization? If anything, it would lower the priority because there's a workaround people can use.
> All around me have this problem, with various level of seriousity. Google the problem, like I did for prolonged time searching for a good answer, it will bring up masses of troubled people.
If it was as large of a problem as you claim, with as wide an impacted userbase, it would have already been fixed. Yet here we are.
All you've proven is that there is a vocal minority. Which I already said.
At the scale of Microsoft and Windows (1.4 billion active users), for every person complaining about a specific problem, there are literally millions of users who aren't. Just because it is a problem for you does not mean it's automatically a big enough problem to address. If it isn't going to actively lose users (which it clearly isn't, considering people wrote apps to stay on Windows and have this behavior), then it isn't worth it.
> Can you also have an educated deliberation about the calculations justified the removal of this feature existed before? ;)
I'm not a seer, but it's plainly obvious from a software prioritization standpoint. The taskbar was rewritten and the feature was not justified as being important enough to keep. Wow, such deep, so insight.
Things break, the app developers fix it, and then they work again. I don't think there's an expectation anywhere that third party apps will work forever, from the standpoint of anyone involved.
But a viable workaround for users even if it isn't first party will change prioritization when looking at a feature.
I'm sure the issue there is designers believing they know better than power users how things should work, leading to the gradual evolution of software that is usable only by the lowest common denominator.
This happens to a lot of projects, it's a shame it's infested MS.
I don't like a lot of things about the direction that Microsoft has taken Windows's UX, but this is absolutely an edge case that only a tiny % of users care about, and certainly not "masses" of anyone.
There are on the order of Billions of Windows devices out there.
When you make a change like this where there is no configurable option to go back to the old style of working you cause issues for tens of millions of people who developed a workflow that depended on that.
There have been dozens of little things like this. Some got fixed in Win11 eventually (so they were obviously bugs). My example: in Windows Explorer you can start typing the name of a file and as long as you keep a quick pace, you will end up with that file highlighted. When Win11 shipped, it stopped matching at the first letter.
That just means "masses" as a concept gets diluted.
It might be "masses" to a single outside observer, but a drop in the bucket to someone that has a picture of how big that mass truly is compared to the rest of the userbase.
Microsoft doesn’t lose points for not prioritising your personal workflow gripes as a power-user. Honestly anyone that prioritised working on this based purely on what you’ve described would NOT be a good product owner.
They've not shipped this. They're planning to. You're reading a marketing piece about work in the pipe. Like so, so many other company product "launches" in this space that are "already testing with a small group of whatevers".
Microsoft employs somewhere above 200k people. 10k is only a 5% internal rollout. That seems entirely doable without any fanfare.
The numbers are also completely made up, used to illustrate the point. Launching a product to X users is different than scaling up to X*1000 users, if that makes you feel better.
FWIIW, This seems rather similar to Github Copilot in VS Code. Been using it for a year, training data issues aside the product is absurdly good at times.
As someone who had Teams imposed on them at the beginnings of the pandemic, I'd say: it is easy to ship anything fast when your users have no say on whether they want to use your product at all, no one cares that your laptop grinds to a halt when using it, and when no one will hold you responsible for delivering broken code.
Will MS Copilot work? Maybe, maybe not. But as far as Microsoft is concerned it doesn't have to be good - it just has to exist so they can justify charging their corporate users a little bit more.
I was ok with using edge on my corporate laptop (mostly to not install more than the stock software) but that un-hidable discover button that just appeared is making me question my ok-ness. Maybe I'm just angry at the VP who made the decision to let that in that's paid more than I'll ever be. I want to get paid to make boneheaded decisions too.
Same here. Chromium based Edge used to be nice at the beginning, it was a breath of fresh air after Chrome forcing Google services all the time.
But Edge seems to get worse after each update.
Recent updates have give me a new sidebar and video backgrounds on tabs. And a cloud based Microsoft Editor or something that I guess it sends everything I type to the cloud.
On this topic, now that GPT-4 without Bing is available on ChatGPT Plus, it’s noticeable that Bing slows down the generation and can make the output much worse by including Bing crap in the context.
But it’s also sometimes better at things the normal GPT doesn’t know about. I think it’s going to be the best search engine once they improve the speed.
Bing has to be slower since it mixes in context from the web. So technically it does a Web search, feeds the results into ChatGPT, while ChatGPT itself doesn't have this step.
