Every time I see a headline like "Windows introduces thing, nobody asked for it but it's coming to all versions and can't be uninstalled"
Every time I see a headline like "Windows introduces thing, nobody asked for it but it's coming to all versions and can't be uninstalled"
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I skimmed an article on enshittification yesterday
It mentioned Windows
Can something be enshittified if it was shit from the start?
It wasn't shit from the start though, was it.
Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.
Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.
This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.
Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn't seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They'd realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.
You make a very good point and are clearly a lot more knowledgeable than me.
I'm going to rephrase. Windows 11 was shitty from the start. I can defend that statement, which we both agree with, to save my ego from internal bleeding.
They keep adding shitty things to it.
I agree, 11 definitely was shitty from the beginning.
With 11 Microsoft are not even attempting to "sell" the operating system anymore, but instead are dragging people to it kicking and screaming, while they desperately try to cling to Windows 10.
Tells you everything you need to know about whether it's the consumer or Microsoft who are on the winning side of that "upgrade".
No this isn't right. Windows XP was the enshitification.
Was it?
A lot of people hated XP because of it's 'childish' visual design, but that's not what enshittification is about.
Enshittificstion is when a service becomes progressively user-hostile by implementing patterns that exploit the user and their data for profit.
I used XP plenty, and I certainly don't remember it pushing ads in the start menu, or trying to force me to register a Microsoft account, or constantly harassing me to sign up for paid subscriptions.
You may have personally thought it "was shit", but it certainly wasn't "enshittified"
Yes it was. Windows XP began the phone home for licensing. It also created a tiered system where things are kept from you unless you paid more, but they were not really clear about it. I remember needing a Corporate license to do some things we needed to do. This is also where they realldy fucked up with Active X and tying windows explorer to the system in such a way that made it harder not to use it. Home users could not actually admin local accounts, and security between then was basically non existant.
And then shortly after launch they began the push to get the users to use their home page, msn services, notifications for explorer to be the default browser. The media player started pushing their online services. Live ID became a thing.
If you complained that they had things you didnt want, like explorer, windows media player, windows messenger, etc: they did say you could run a utility to "remove" them. Except it didn't. It removed the icons. So they started the flat out lying to the consumer with windows XP.
Edit: Now I remember, among other reasons, we needed corporate to stop forced updates.
Edit: I apologize for all the after post edits but the longer I think about it the more I think of!
What about the new "buy music online" feature? You could ONLY use Explorer to complete the transaction, no matter if you had a different default browser or not.
Fair, some good points there :)
I'd argue that tiered licensing wasn't really enshittified as it was still just a one time thing where you bought a license and got a product. Not enshittified but simply unnecessarily confusing. And they somehow made that even worse with Vista.
In a similar manner I'd suggest online activation isn't enshittified either, as that's a pretty reasonable behaviour even for an ethical product as it helps prevent piracy. And a key again is that it's a one-time thing, not something constantly bothering you or interrupting your experience over and over.
But the rest of your examples definitely count!
Joke's on you Microsoft, I had already switched to Linux at the time.