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Doesn't it seem like Windows sucks now? Every edition features disappear, things get slower, settings get harder to find, and in Windows 11, it's bad. But, there's something even stranger. Since 2015, Microsoft started letting you upgrade Windows for free. 8 to 10 to 11. But, if Windows is free to upgrade, how is Microsoft making money from it? Turns out that this is all part of the plan. This is the tragic fall of Windows and the rise of Microslop. To understand what went wrong, we need to go back to 2009.
Windows 7 works the way that you want. This is a quote from Steven Sinofsky, a software engineer and a lead developer on Windows at the time. He had an interesting philosophy about the operating system, and in building it, he believed that Windows should build in secret. Instead of over promising and under delivering, Sinofsky wants the client team to do the opposite. Sinofsky also refrained from labeling versions of Windows major or minor, and instead just called them releases. There was something different about Windows 7. The team had spent years studying what went wrong with the Vista,
which had been a disaster. The crashes, the compatibility failures, bloat. The whole point of Windows 7 was to undo it. Reliability and compatibility first. Then, respect the user's workflow and don't get in the way. But, Windows 7 wasn't just stable. There were things inside it that most people touched every day without realizing how good they were. Things that would quietly start to disappear after this. Let's start with the most obvious one, the start menu. Everything is here. Your pinned apps, your recent files, a search bar that worked instantly. And built into it was something called jump lists. Right click any pinned application and you'd see
that app's recent files, your pinned shortcuts, and its most used actions. All of it was specific to that app. Your Word jumplist showed your recent documents. Your browser showed your most visited sites. Most people used this for years without ever knowing what it was called. Over time, it would slowly be stripped back. But, we'll get to that. Next was a feature called the libraries. Want to show a folder in multiple places at once? Easy. Right click a folder somewhere, click include in library, and show that folder in your documents, pictures, videos, whichever you want.
Your documents library could include files from your desktop, an external drive, and another computer on your home network, all appearing together in one place without moving a single file. At the time, this was genuinely revolutionary. I really miss this feature. It's still in Windows 11, but it's hidden. I wonder if that'll be a running theme. There was also Windows Media Center, a full feature complete media hub, live TV, DVR, music, photos, and video, meant to work with a remote control. Of course, not everyone used this, myself included, and it wasn't the best software. But, Windows Media Center had a surprising amount of dedicated fans, fans who would soon be very upset at Microsoft. But, the crazy thing is that
these features are just the tip of the iceberg. Windows 7 had all kinds of functions and features which made it highly customizable, and it's not just Windows. Windows XP, 98, even 95. It's kind of crazy how nostalgic people are for operating systems from 15 or even 20 years ago. But, one of my favorite parts of 7 in particular was how reliable it was. It ran comfortably on 1 GB of RAM. It even booted faster than Vista on the same hardware. The team optimized it relentlessly because making the product feel fast was a design priority. It also just sort of stayed out of your way. No major or minor updates, just updates. No big promises, just make a big product. No subscription nags, no upsells. You installed it, it
ran, and it got out of your way. Same goes for the software, most of which was free or a one-time purchase. Windows 7 quickly gained traction, and in 2011 took the number one spot. Sinofsky years later wrote that Windows 7 was built at the tail end of a vision that would never be realized, the PC as everyone's primary computing platform. In 2010, something happened that changed everything. And the question has arisen lately, is there room for a third category of device in the middle? And what this device does is extraordinary. You can browse the web with it. It is the best browsing experience you've ever had. It's phenomenal to see a whole web page right in front of you and you can manipulate with your fingers.
Almost overnight, every tech executive on Earth became convinced that touch was the future and the desktop was dying. And for Microsoft, this meant Windows needed to be adapted or be left behind. So, they made a decision. One of the biggest problems facing those in software is actually something called legacy tech debt. You know, those walls of code built years ago by a senior developer who's gone now. Documentation is hazy and there are comments that say, "Don't touch this. It breaks everything. We don't know why." Now, no one knows how it works. People have tried to modernize it, and nothing's worked. So, you just keep
using the build that's held together by duct tape. That's because you need a tool tailor-made for this problem. Luckily, there's a solution, Morph. Morph is the world's leading generative AI platform built specifically to modernize legacy codebases. Turn that ancient spaghetti code into something modern, efficient, and maintainable. But, Morph isn't just another AI tool. It's built from the ground up to fix this particular problem. Morph analyzes, maps, plans, executes, tests, and lets you approve every step before anything hits production.
Whether it's moving from.NET 4.5 to.NET 10, LAMP stack to Python, web forms to React, Morph handles it. It's already used by enterprise and industrial customers, and is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant. It's even used by the world's most trusted defense contractors. Morph customers have reported timeline shrinking from years to just a matter of months, weeks, or even less. Engineers spend a ton of time just refactoring someone else's mess from a decade ago instead of actually shipping something new. With Morph, you can do just that. Morph is offering a free trial and a 50% discount on your first year. This is a limited-time offer, which expires on the 30th of April. Go to modelcode.ai/morph. That's m o r p h, and use my code
logicallyanswered to get 50% off your first year. That's almost $5,000 in savings. This is a limited-time offer exclusive to my channel. Link is in the description. Thank you to Morph for sponsoring this video. On August 1st, 2012, Microsoft released Windows 8. And you might think that's quite soon for a new OS, and you'd be right. It was barely 3 years after Windows 7. But, this was about to change everything and not for the better. Microsoft's diagnosis was that tablets are winning. The solution, rebuild Windows for touch. The problem, though, is that over 90% of Windows users were on a mouse and keyboard. The real issue wasn't that they built a bad product. It's that they
stopped building Windows for the person actually using Windows. They built it for a person they wanted Windows users to become. It was no longer, "Don't over promise, quietly build." In fact, it was the opposite. The start menu, gone. Not changed, not reorganized. What users got instead was the start screen, a full-screen wall of color tiles designed for finger taps. On a tablet, fine, sure. On a desktop with a mouse and a keyboard, baffling. And the start button, also gone. To open an application, you had to move your mouse to an invisible corner of the screen and hope you landed it precisely enough for the interface to respond. If you didn't know the corner existed, and most people didn't, you could sit at a Windows 8
machine and have no idea how to do anything at all. It was a disaster. Microsoft had fallen into a classic trap. I've mentioned this in a previous video, but when a new technology arrives, aka touch screens, people tend to overestimate its impact before it becomes normal. It replaced phones, yes, but Microsoft thought touch would replace desktops, too, and it didn't. They didn't even get the way touch screens were used. But, something else was happening at this time. Libraries, that great feature promoted in 7, was gone. Well, not gone, but hidden by default. And for the rest of Windows, you'd have to go through all kinds of steps to get it back.
Why? For a reason that would become obvious in the near future. While some features were hidden, others were just removed, like Windows Media Center. Fans created a petition, made all kinds of complaints, but to no avail. Plus, many existing Windows functions like photo viewer were slower and just worse. But what they did add was the charms bar. Essentially, a worse start menu. But look, there is a start button, except it looks a bit different. So, Microsoft released a new OS.
Well, sort of, 8.1. The start button was back, some more apps, more improvements. Better to be sure, but people were still using seven. In 2013, Windows 7 held a roughly 61% of Windows version market share, more than every other version of Windows combined. Windows 8 and 8.1 took 15 months to reach 10% market share, which Windows 7 had done it in just six. Enterprise IT departments outright refused to deploy it, and tablet users just used Android or iPad. Microsoft realized 8 was a disaster, so soon enough, they released another OS. Only on this channel do you get speeches about forgotten library functions from 16 years ago. So, subscribe. Before the next OS came, another important event. February 4th, 2014, the
first day of the new CEO, Satya Nadella. He sends an email out to employees. While we have seen great success, we are hungry to do more. Our industry does not respect tradition. It only respects innovation. This is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft. Make no mistake, we are headed for greater places as technology evolves and we evolve with and ahead of it. Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and a cloud-first world. Then came the next big milestone for Windows. Windows 10, which was good. At least maybe in retrospect. Start menu back, snap assist, virtual desktops, faster than Windows 8, more stable. Nice. And unlike 8, it rapidly gained market share. It quickly passed 8 and even 7. Although, users soon noticed some
quirks. For one, it was free. It seemed like an apology from Microsoft for 8, but not exactly. Windows 10 shipped with telemetry that sent usage data, search behavior, and diagnostic information back to Microsoft by default. For home and pro users, this couldn't be fully disabled. Only enterprise editions could turn it off completely. Not only that, a fresh Windows 10 install came populated with tiles for apps you'd never downloaded. Candy Crush, Twitter, Minecraft, not installed by you. These were now in the start menu and search bar, just there for some reason.
There were also now two settings. Control panel, robust and easy to navigate, and settings, sleek and modern, but confusing and weirdly limited. And then we got Windows 11, released October 2021. Remember what I said about Windows staying out of your way? Well, this little wants me to do updates every other second, and there doesn't seem to be an actual reliable way to disable automatic updates in Windows 11. Yet, despite being a free upgrade, it was weirdly restrictive. Windows 11 required a TPM 2.0 chip, which meant a lot of PCs couldn't upgrade.
Around 400 million PCs were declared incompatible, not because they couldn't run it, but because Microsoft said so. Of course, some people figured out some workarounds, but it felt much slower and everything felt weird. First, there's the start menu. What even is this? At first, I kind of liked the center taskbar, but the more I use Windows 11, the more annoyed I get. Better than 8 to be sure, but there are some problems. The reason it was in the bottom corner was so you could always move and click on it, even without looking. It also used to feel like a bunch of pathways that let you get to just about anywhere.
Now, it's just a pile of programs you might use. For the record, I never pinned a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint here. Microsoft did. Then, there's the search function. Ads, news stories, AI tools, games for some reason, just like Windows 10. In Windows 7, results appeared as you type. On many Windows 11 machines, clicking the search bar takes two to four seconds just to load. People have been reporting this on Microsoft's own forums since launch, and it's never been fully fixed. And no, Microsoft, I don't want to search the app I'm trying to open on Bing. Then, there's Copilot, pushed everywhere into Windows, slowing everything down while it simultaneously can't do anything.
Windows felt like it was a bloated, slow, and filled with well, slop. Why was this happening? Well, the same reason they pinned those apps for me. The same reason they made a Word a subscription and give Windows as a free upgrade to all their users. Why they seem to show ads all over the place. The same reason they hid libraries so you could pay for OneDrive to do something eerily similar. The same reason they push you to use Bing. Windows used to be a product you bought. Now, Windows 11 is free, but really, it's a gateway to more Microsoft products and upsells.
365 Copilot, OneDrive integration, Outlook, all kinds of upsells. The free calendar and mail apps, gone. Now, new Outlook, which of course shows you ads if you aren't paying. Upsells and subscriptions produce recurring revenue. So, why get people to buy Windows once every five years when you can get them paying for stuff every month? Less control, less ownership. Windows 10 had problems, but 11, they've pushed it even further. Windows 10 support ended October 14th, 2025, so Microsoft could have more people in the new ecosystem of the future. Microsoft didn't lose their way.
They just found a new one. Though, there is one silver lining. No one seems to be using Copilot despite billions of investment from Microsoft. And now, they finally seem to be pulling back a bit. Is there hope for Microsoft? Check out this video to learn more, but until then, I'm Harry, and I'll see you guys on the next one.
