The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
My reasoning is from bitter experience. I saw too many these honest talks/commitments - it always this pattern when product/company starts to decline. Suddenly somebody with technical background shows up talks about past mistakes and what need to fix. Even sometimes holds discussion, which is usually very reasonable. But as time goes there only cosmetic changes with excuses like lack of resources, market wind changed this time, too hard make changes due politics and etc.
What stands out to me is the organization needs to be accept that change is needed and 'walk the walk', and also that those efforts take time. I've no idea what things are in motion in MS, but I wonder how quickly they can turn the ship, how much momentum is in their current direction and how much force is in turning. Moving the taskbar seems like addressing a loud persistent talking point, but it's one among many. What's the timeline (even though windows version timing seems like 'when they need branding')? Win12? Win13?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020204233701/http://www.comput...
The only thing I'd add is that not only did he tweet the infamous tweet that caused the backlash, Pavan ridiculed those in the backlash (since deleted). Also, Satya still spews the same "agentic OS" narrative as recent as last week.
So, I hope for the best, but I don't plan on taking them at their word.
Look where we are now.
Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus.
The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.
perplexity keeps trying to get me to use "computer" and for the life of me I can't think of anything I'd actually do with it.
As I use AI more and more to write code I find myself just implementing something myself more and more for this reason. By the time I have actually explained what I want in precise detail it's often faster to have just made the change myself.
Without enough detail SOTA models can often still get something working, but it's usually not the desired approach and causes problems later.
typing "open hackernews" into copilot instead of clicking the browser and typing hackernews?
99% of OS interactions already boil down to 2 clicks and a search phrase.
- "Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options"
- "Look at my household budget and find ways to be more frugal."
There are thousands of things I can think of when it comes to how an agentic OS would work better than the current Screen Keyboard paradigm. I mean all these things I could now do with Claude or Codex and some of these things I already do with these tools.
> Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options
What part of this does an agentic OS help with? My OS doesn't know my travel preferences, family size, work schedule, etc.
These are more appropriate tasks for a smart assistant.
What specifically does an agentic OS UX look like beyond giving claude access to local files and a browser?
huh? ... this reads to me like you don't need an "agentic" OS to do the things you'd want to use an "agentic" OS for..?
like... it seems you just don't want a keyboard to do the same things you've already been doing? ... is that the crux of it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4
i feel like someone high up in microsoft probably has this pinned in a epic or something somewhere
I think you and I have very different meanings of "intelligent", "understands" and "gets it done"
See how that sounds a bit silly? It's because it presents a false dichotomy. That our choice is between either the current state of interfaces or an agentic system which strips away your autonomy and does it for you.
There's everything wrong when "agentic" means that the regular bread-and-butter functionality of the OS becomes unusable.
Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.
Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.
Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.
I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.
And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.
Yep. That stuff makes money (via upsells) so it will never be removed.
Online accounts are fine when optional, but unacceptable when forced.
They are not even acknowledging that feedback is negative. They make it sound like a love fest where users love windows so much that they want to make it even better.
Even with their proposed “improvements” to Windows Update it would remain inferior in principle to what it was in Windows 7 (or 8 which I never used) and prior when you could “pause” updates indefinitely or, in non-dystopian terms, refuse them. If a third party, even one that you trust, can mandate changes to the software on your computer, then it is not really your computer.
How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?
Now all folders with media files open immediately. Also if you want no wait for video files folders, right click in the folder and select 'View -> Details or View -> List or some other option where it doesn't create thumbnails and it'll load even quicker.
I'm sorry, this is very funny to me in the context of the person upthread arguing about how great "agentic OSes" are. Some people seem to believe that we're living in the future, but I'm pretty sure we're still stuck in Windows '95.
Surely you don't mean remove all columns, and if you did you wouldn't have to also specify removing media metadata columns?
When such basic tasks are failing spectacularly, nobody can have any confidence that complex things can be achieved reliably. Instead of spying on their users and trying to squeeze more and more money from them, they should first focus on making a great product and work on making it better, not researching ways to enshitify things.
That's a why, but it raises more questions than it does answers.
I need that Drake meme here, where he's negative about the idea "Optimize the calculator layout to improve the UX" and very enthusiastic about the idea "Find ways to get incremental revenue from users of Calculator with ads or selling of data"
We're reaching Microslop levels we never thought possible. I actually think Claude Code would have done a better job.
No. "Commitment" in corporate speak is a synonym for "absolute lack of intention". That's why corps 'commit' to reducing emissions, treating employees fairly, etc, ie. to all the things they will not do. But no suit 'commits' to making money. They just make money. It's just a superficial linguistic gesture. Shakespeare got it.
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
And, yes, I am aware that Pro/Enterprise don't suffer from this, but a LOT of computers sold are Windows Home/OEM licenses. It impacts a ton of people.
(that's an overstatement, early OS X were buggy too, but they just switched to Unix after OS9, so, understandable.)
it's just better than Windows, which is just aggressively bad. (and I guess Linux is eating their gamers market with Proton? but I am not a gamer)
- The OS is getting buggier, with every large update getting press coverage on scary bugs.
- The OS is getting overbearing; constant nagging for upsells on Microsoft products with terrible attach rates.
- The OS is getting focused on hype; the latest trend is AI?Let's force a new button on people that will break decades-old workflows. Let's put AI everywhere.
- The OS is getting slow; there's no focus on speed and the place where 85% of the market resides (laptops) is getting completely trounced by Apple Silicon.
- The OS is getting squeezed; under 300$ it's all terrible e-waste in six months Chromebooks. Over 500$ Apple is aggressively entering the market with the Neo. Over 1,000$ Apple has owned a commanding share of the profits there for decades.
There are 994 more problems with Windows but I've made my point; there's just no end in sight to the problems with Windows. I haven't mentioned it's become a minor part of Microsoft's profits!
Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.
My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.
We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.