Most of the problems that human beings experience are usually self-inflicted and therefore very well deserved. Once or twice, however, human beings manage to create problems that make life unpleasant for millions of others. History is full of them, from Eve to Hitler to the head(s) of design and/or their minions at Microsoft.
Billions of people around the world have had their technological experience shaped by Microsoft's Windows operating system which has, through sheer discipline and excessive common sense, managed to remain mostly familiar to most people. A person who used Windows 95 will thus find Windows 10 fairly easy to use and a good number of the things they are used to where they are usually located.
However, it seems Microsoft, like many other tech companies, chewed khat and somehow thought changing up the user interface was a good thing which may not necessarily be a bad thing until you realise they announced they are taking a new direction and herding us along like some kind of sheep.
The first sign of trouble was when Microsoft decided to get rid of Windows' default user interface design language (not C# but the way they choose to draw their interface, similar to the way Mercedes makes their Benzes and Bata their Toughees) and go for a look they called 'Metro' in Windows 8 which they thought was a good idea until users called it shit and made them make a halfway compromise by making the tiled 'Metro' interface optional in Windows 8.1. Metro was shit. It was so shit that it has taken me more than eight years to make any sense of its quirks of navigation. In fact, now that I remember, I think they were designing it for a tablet- centric, touchscreen-mediated world which most Windows users are never going to be a part of because - well, most people use it to browse the internet, write emails, Word Excel Powerpoint and watch porn. These activities are not friendly to touch-centric PCs. On top of that, laptops and desktops do not lend themselves easily to regular usage of touchscreens, which is probably why Apple have not incorporated them into their Macbooks.
So, anyway, with Windows 10, Microsoft appeased their users by returning to the old ways and building a desktop-centric system and added little tidbits like an antivirus, factory reset and disk defragmentation by default which go a long way in ensuring PCs perform relatively well for much longer.
However, because of Microsoft's design choices (or what their PR people may have called "the future of computing"), they decided that Windows 10 was a good time to start getting rid of tools and tricks normal users would find useful, like the control panel, snipping tool (they added Snip and Sketch! Argh! Si wangetoa bas kama hawakutaka ikuwe?) and sticky notes. This one is actually my biggest gripe with Microsoft; they decided they would be getting rid of the control panel and replace it with Settings, which they ended up doing half-heartedly like a wife who decides to have sex with the shamba boy instead of leaving you outright.
These half-hearted design decisions have followed them into Windows 11 which they decided to make to beat look (make it beautiful) and then go behind our backs and get rid of the taskbar's right-click to get to Task Manager's shortcut. Even worse, they made the control panel a complete mess by marrying it completely with Settings and making a barely comprehensible mule out of it. For instance, devices and printers will take you to an awkward list of items in Settings for different things like bluetooth and then, right at the bottom of that list, when you click on more options, it takes you back to the file explorer interface! Another one will get you back to the old Control Panel! Another one does not even have that option! What the hell men!
It was my impression when I first observed this phenomenon that someone at Microsoft feels overpaid and underworked and somehow has to change things up once in a while to justify their salary. Well, they are doing a shit job.
With Microsoft's move toward gobbling Linux and all things open source, it should have been obvious or at least dawned on them that stealing or copying Linux's user interface philosophy might have been a good idea, that is copying the way Gnome, KDE, Wayland and all the other interfaces can be plugged in and unplugged or installed and uninstalled by default. The underlying shell and functionality would still be the same. The old or 'normal' Windows user interface could be called Redmond, then you would have Metro and other pluggable interfaces as free or purchasable options.
But I know what Microsoft are doing. I think they are studying Linux systems so they could build apps for both Windows and Linux that can both be paid for and very difficult to crack. This would help to boost their revenues and strengthen whatever prison it is they are trying to build.
I would like to say, "Count me out" but I have counted myself out of that statement already.
In the eyes of the "economy", you are just a means to an end. Someone has to make money off of you. This statement belongs elsewhere, but here is good enough to stick it.