So…yeah. Seems MS, in their endless wisdom has decided to rename their virtual desktop software, called before as “Remote Desktop” (and good luck trying to find issues with that that are not related to the old RDP tool MTSC.exe) to… “Windows App”. Perfect. Now everything will look like everything, and there’s no way to ever try to search for help for it. Next in line, I guess they can call it just “App”. I’m sure that will help everyone.
This started a few months ago across the board. It’s the dumbest realignment of their application stack ever … With that being said, I think it’s clear that the future of Microsoft is going to be them attempting to move the entire OS experience into the cloud no matter how misguided or unwarranted that approach may be.
Mainframe for the home user, with all files on their servers and, thus, controlled by them. That’s always been their goal, but the tech just didn’t exist until recently.
Oh, I can help remotely… I just need you to open Windows App.
Which app?
Windows App.
I get that, I’m running Windows, but which app?
Windows App.
Look, are you being smart? I’m in Windows, say I click on the Start button, which app do I click on?
Windows App.
Allright you, let’s say the app is already running…
Sure.
And I press CTRL-ALT-DEL and open Task Manager.
OK.
WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE APP I WOULD SEE IN TASK MANAGER??!???
Windows App.
I’M ASKING YOU, ‘WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE APP’???!??!??
I’m telling you, ‘Windows App.’
You did it so well, I started hearing it in their voices after a few lines. Well done.
What’s the original? Sounds as fun as ‘Front fell off’
Oh you’re in for a treat!
I would add… Slowly I Turned…
xkcd spotted <3
Good eye
Next in line, I guess they can call it just “App”.
Saw this yesterday which is relevant
Is that Steve Jobs with a Butthead mouth? Beautiful.
It definitely made me think of Jobs when I saw it. Not sure about the mouth part, but if thats what you see, its probably what was intended.
It’s about time that someone cleaned up that stupid mess on the left.
I’m going to name a game I’m making “a game”
could it be that i already lost the game?
Impossible to pirate. Money printingachine
Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
I remember Noam Chomsky talking about this a number of years ago. It’s true. We don’t want technocrats, but worthless dumbfucks are also quite scary.
Thank you so much for posting this. I already liked Ed’s work but this one was a cut above and it’s going to be marinating in my head for the foreseeable future.
zitron is godly
You’d think a company that runs a search engine would understand SEO…
Anti-SEO pushes you to use AI to get help instead
AI still uses SEO or it’s database equivalent to figure out what you’re talking about about. Or to scan for new info - which they currently do
Yeah, retrieval-augmented generation and AI web-search will still run into some trouble with this. But if it knows about it in its weights, then it will be fine.
This would probably matter more if every search for “windows 10 problem XY” wouldn’t turn up 100% garbage from their support forums anyway.
Hello my name is Ranjid, im a MSVP, but not associated with Microsoft. Have you tried reinstalling Windows or talking to your system administrator?
Can you run sfc /scannow? Post the entire contents of your event log. Okay, now that you have done this I will proceed to not reply to this thread anymore.
Here’s a random non-Microsoft article I found on the web, and which you’ve probably already seen
Have you tried SFC /scannow, dism repair, or factory reset?
These answers to a question why the task bar can’t be moved to the side anymore.
I HAD JUST FORGOTTEN I LIKE MY TASKBARS ON THE SIDE NOW I’M GONNA REMEMBER AGAIN AAAAAAAA
I saw a video recently they said the google search being bad is intentional. Because then you have to spend more time on google, thus seeing more ads.
That’s a bold move cotton. Let’s see how it plays out
But if you can’t google a solution to a problem there is no problem.
Yes, but I feel that’s strategic to make us feel we need AI to do the work for us.
Except the AI needs that info searchable for itself. L
So, no. It’s just dumb.
There’s a reason why I never use Bing
Ahh windows. How I don’t miss you.
Had been windows 10 user since 2015 (no pc before that), installed linux mint a month ago and was surprised how smooth everything was!
Sorry windows but Im never coming back.
Microsoft seems lost, they’re so interested in constantly changing everything to steal more of your information instead of just maintaining the massive lead they have.
They can’t seem to just make something work, always manipulating the systems, and such none of it is very good, but when you try to be the best at everything you end up mediocre. Good thing they got a market lock when they did.
Microsoft is a collection of fiefdoms, each led by a Lord (Product Manager) who drive projects which have two possible motivations: 1) promotion 2) bonus. Quality is not a factor and hasn’t been for decades. Cohesion? No. The lords sometimes fight amongst themselves. They serve the line go up. Everything is line go up. There is no bottom to the products. Line must go up
Yep, used to work for them, this is a very accurate and succinct analogy to use.
True pioneers of corporate neofeudalism.
Well said.
I finally had enough about a year ago and decided to bite the bullet and just install Linux. I honestly expected to run into all kinds of problems, particularly since I primarily use my desktop for gaming, but I’ve been very surprised how few problems I’ve actually had. It’s certainly not been completely problem free, but I wouldn’t say I’ve encountered more problems with Linux than I have in Windows. Different problems for sure, but not more, and honestly about equally difficult to fix.
I feel like there’s more options to fix things in Linux. On windows it felt someone’s your just got a brick wall with an issue just because Windows want designed around the fix you envisioned.
What distro are you using? I really wanna take the leap and have the same worries
Linux mint for the first timers or UBUNTU is the safest
Linux Mint Cinnamon is very low friction to install and use for first timers from Windows
So that’s a difficult question to answer. I’ve actually used Linux dual boot off and on a bunch of times over the years, but I’ve always kept my main desktop on Windows because as I said it’s my gaming system. I’ve tried a bunch of distros and they all involve tradeoffs.
My personal favorite is any Arch based distro because it’s usually easy to get up to date versions of anything you need. The flip side of that though is that it can be more unstable and fixing things when they break is often a bit more technical. The install process can also be a bit intimidating for a newcomer (although it’s really not that hard). I’m currently using Garuda which is a gaming focused version of Arch.
On the more traditional side you’ve got a lot of options. Mint is a popular recommendation for newcomers. I think Pop!_OS is also a really good option despite the really unfortunate experience Linus (Sebastian not Torvalds) had when trying it out.
About the only things I’d recommend staying away from would be Gentoo (nobody has time for that), NixOS (cool in theory, a nightmare to actually daily drive), and pretty much anything Fedora based (I’ve had lots of problems with RPM based distros in the past and libraries and programs are often many versions behind).
I have a mini PC that I dual boot (separate drives), but struggle with Linux on it, I have a couple other systems running Linux (Mint), and since it only streams Jellyfin I just don’t put the effort into the full switch. Biggest concern is my with comp, but can’t do much about that
We’re still feeling the damage done by the Microsoft monopoly from the '90s. Only historians will be able to say how far they sent us back.
recently, I need to remote desktop from Mac to Windows, and I was searching around for products, and I came across a blog post recommending Windows App, and I had no fucking idea what it was. I thought it may have been a windows 8 app that is discontinued. The geniuses at microsoft SUCK at naming. Xbox, Xbox 360, xbox One (which was actually the third iteration, for some reason), xbox series x/s. Like wtf.
Windows 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, 7???, 8, 8.1, 10???, 11, 11 21H2, 11 22H2, …
You forgot Windows 3.1. That one was a pretty significant update
AFAIK, Windows was discontinued after Vista. Windows 7 is actually the 7^th iteration of the Microsoft version of OS/2, which was rebranded as Windows NT with the release of the third version, and as Windows sine NT with the seventh version. Windows 9 had to be skipped because a sloppy version check for Windows 95/98 would have failed.
Kind of right. Windows ME was the final version of windows (you probably forgot about that one).
After that, XP, vista, windows 7, were all based on NT.
Ah, I got that wrong. Yes, Windows XP was the rebranded Windows NT 5. Thank you for the correction.
I have not forgotten Windows ME. It still haunts me in my dreams. Active Desktop crashing all the time was iconic af
Ah yes, who stood up in a meeting at Microsoft and said “What if the desktop background was a webpage! And what if the web engine behind it was just internet explorer 6 but worse.”
When windows 9 comes out it will all work again.
Bold of you to think the next one will not be called Windows365
that’s a strange name for an operating system i’d’ve called it Chazzwozzers
hey andy!
What’s the good word?
I like the cut of your jib
That already exists as their cloud virtual desktop service.
Edit: I could see them releasing a line of products and an ISO for Windows365Client that just makes the machine a thin client dedicated to rdping, or I guess Windows Apping now, to the Windows365 PC.
Bold of you to think I have any expectations of Microsoft to not suck. I will wait until 9 comes out before I put another windows OS on my machines. Since why after all this, would anyone trust a software company to do anything well that can not count to 10?
I thought they were supposed to do the whole “last version of Windows that will be updated forever” with Windows 10, and of course abandoned that some time ago.
My gut feeling is that their product management marketing folks came to the conclusion that Windows as a subscription was not going to work for the consumer market where the OS is something that’s just part of the device you buy. And in discussions with system OEMs they made the decision that consumers like it when the version number goes up, so increasing that windows number every several years will move systems.
Windows 11 displays as Windows 10 in a large number of places internally. It’s just a later revision than any of the “actually” Windows 10 ones.
Interesting. Maybe that supports my guess.
It’s not without precedent though. I remember seeing NT references for a long time from win2k on.
The geniuses at microsoft SUCK at naming
Apple is worse. Everything has the same name but gen 1, gen 2, gen 3 as a suffix.
At least the numbers are sequential there, though…
don’t worry, microsoft will surely make a discord where all their knowledge bases and information will be moved to, making it even easier to find info than it already is /s
But first they’ll buy Discord and force everyone to abandon their exiting usernames to use a Microsoft account with it instead.
I honestly would be down with that.
Mostly because I’d love to see discord go under and to have tech support and interaction go back to websites and forums, where they are indexed, searchable, and archivable so information can be easily searched for again, and not lost forever should a discord go under.
Autopilot and Autopilot Device Preparation spring to mind. Two distinct products, and yet they’ve gone down the Wii U naming route
Same but - I was actually relieved Microsoft finally MADE an RDP client for Mac again. What was wrong with RDP for Mac? It was fine and they axed it. But them replacing RDP everywhere is just hilarious.
They didn’t even change anything except the ui. It’s still just old rdp with less features.
I don’t work for them, but I’d recommend Jump Desktop for that. Works very well and has been out for quite some time.
Are they doing this on purpose? Why would they even do something like that?
Having worked on products that are renamed to something equally ambiguous, I’d say they are trying to make it more difficult to find because they are trying to redirect customer attention to other places, and are deliberately making it difficult to talk about or search for. Unfortunately this is a very successful strategy. It’s also very user hostile, and product engineer hostile. My heart goes out to any engineers that work in this product.
So they dont want people using remote desktop? What would they even get out of that, just making windows even worse to use. I guess its one less thing to maintain. Well, windows becoming worse is good for linux userbase so this is kind of good news in a way.
Probably another case of too many bean counters (and marketing majors), and not enough software developers. Windows hasn’t innovated in forever. Seems like they’re the Walmart of operating systems, just cheaper and easier for most people.
I don’t want my OS to innovate. I just want it to be reliable. I can say this for MS, I haven’t seen a blue or any other color screen of death for, God, a decade? I’m pretty happy with Windows these days.
I’ve had the opposite happen since switching to Windows 11. Multiple BSODs a week on both machines. Super frustrating.
If you have the Pro or Enterprise variant of Win11 you can delay feature releases for a year. Makes it way more stable. Here is a link. The anchoring might be off a bit(it was for me). I had to scroll down a bit further. You still get security releases, it’s just all the ‘features’ that get delayed so you can figure out how to work around them.
Awesome thanks for the info on that.
Did Microsoft leave their marketing department to AI or something? They really seem to be dropping the ball rn with app names, and recognition.
(Teams New vs. Teams (New))
Outlook (deprecated)
New Outlook
Outlook
New Outlook 3DS XL
Outlook (new)
Outlook (New)
Microsoft Outlook
Outlook (formerly Outlook New) for Live (formerly Outlook Cloud)
You forgot the “classic” version(s?)… God dammit I hate it so much. Why? I can’t even tell the difference and I’m the reactionary kinda guy that ditched Ubuntu over the gui switch in 2012!
not to be outdone with “google meet” and “google meet (original)”
Outlook (classic)
This seals it for me. They aren’t using version control but are making copies of the working directory with this result.
AI would do a better job
Even better than that, the old remote desktop app from the Windows store is being discontinued and has a banner at the top telling you to use the Windows app instead. The new Windows app does not support RDP on Windows:
Did microsoft make a new protocol that isnt rdp? Or did they switch to a new one?
I use rdp a lot to remote into work so if that changes, i need to know 😅It probably still uses rdp, but doesn’t let you connect to your own instances, just the cloud ones.
No they just have no replacement for it yet other than the inbuilt RDP app that comes with Windows (or third party apps). I don’t believe the protocol itself is changing
Then the “windows app” can do nothing? If they dont have rdp support, and remote desktop uses rdp, then it cant do anything??
It let’s you access Windows 365 and Azure virtual desktops but nothing local
Of course it does, microsoft are building themselves out of business.
To be fair Store apps need to die. Any multi-user system and its a clusterfuck to keep them updated and secure.
I don’t use Microsoft…or apple
Makes sense, the CEO was just saying the other day that 30% of their code was written by AI
