The problem I think is the same one that ISPs face: some products really should be “boring” but companies hate that. Just like ISPs hate being dumb pipes that do a good job and stay out of your way, Microsoft just can’t resist being in your face when it really has no business doing so.
The ideal OS, much like the ideal ISP, stays the hell out of the way and does an excellent, efficient job, doing only what you need it to do.
I think this hits the nail on the head and you can see lots of examples of companies worsening their product overall by trying to add features that go beyond its scope, e.g. trying to capture away the role of other products. In my opinion, smart TVs are an example.
I often find myself asking: Is this product designed to help the consumer achieve what they want to achieve, or is it designed to steer the user into what the designer wants to achieve? Sometimes this perspective is really illuminating, e.g. for some websites and how they make information available/discoverable.
Of course, there's also another aspect you're getting at, feature creep: If you're designing a product you really care about, it's hard to keep perspective and know when to stop versus a "more is better" mentality. I can understand/relate to that a bit better. But anyway, one thing I like about Linux is that I very rarely feel any of these criticisms apply.
I wonder how much of this is due to being a public company. Shareholders want to see their investment go up, so companies need to keep doing things like this to increase their value and revenues.
I wish they didn’t think that this was the way to add value. They should move into new areas and focus on stability.
Unfortunately, modern companies seem to forget that it used to be cool to simply make some profit, even if it was modest and trickling in at a slow pace. It was more important to have continuous and stable profits, than it was to have ridiculous profits. Now we seem to have this squeeze-out-of-a-stone approach that ruins experiences. They push and they push, then act surprised when all the users bail.
I think this is most of the problem: Wall Street thinks tech companies have constantly increasing share price and the executives are keenly aware of that. At some point sanity will set in as more people understand that the industry has matured and it'll be more acceptable to deliver stable results but bubble thinking will drive a lot of bad decisions until then.
> I wonder how much of this is due to being a public company
Private companies want to make money too; this is just how an evergreen OS where users don't pay for updates feeds into MS's desire need for recurring revenue, which isn't a desire unique to publicly-traded firms.
I’m not putting an upper limit on how many things an OS can do; it can have hundreds or thousands of features that are still largely invisible (excellent file systems, secure networking, massive APIs to help developers create apps supporting a wide variety of standards, etc.). You would never convince me however that a user is “asking” Microsoft to pop up crap in their face when trying to browse the hard drive. There is no one “asking” to have their laptop automatically rebooted and reimaged with an entirely new system that has a brand new and unfamiliar UI that breaks not just one but several of the applications needed on a daily basis. A lot of the changes to Windows lately have been actively user-hostile and it’s even more egregious that these things are present in paid versions of the system.
The ideal OS, much like the ideal ISP, stays the hell out of the way and does an excellent, efficient job, doing only what you need it to do.