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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Only tangentially related, but is there a single Microsoft product that is prevalent by virtue of its actual quality, as opposed to inertia from widespread business adoption decades ago? Windows is so much worse than OS X. Outlook is so much worse than Gmail. Teams is so much worse than Zoom. XBox is so much worse than PlayStation/Nintendo. I don't know a single person who uses anything from Microsoft by choice.

Vscode was a breath of fresh air when it released.

Microsoft teams was quite good at release. They made it progressively worse, but its V1 was pretty good. Then they added the telemetry.

Windows 7 was excellent.

Github copilot was an excellent V1. They failed to capitalize on it, conceding ground to cursor and later Claude code. But, the first release was magical.

Linkedin has stayed good-ish. For a platform that was meant to be corporate-slop by design, it has stayed inoffensive. Compared to the decline of Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook & Twitter, Linkedin is the only era-1 social network that still functions the way it is supposed to.

Vscode was a breath of fresh air when it released.

Windows 10 was actually amazing on (pre)release -- I still have somewhere an install disk from one of the first Tech Preview versions that I wouldn't mind figuring out how to hack the time-bomb on. It ran great on old Core2 era laptops, and was generally unobtrusive -- I even put it on an original Intel (white) Imac, and it was miles ahead of Snow Leopard or whatever OS Apple decided to abandon those with.

Since then basically everything about the OS has gotten worse -- work put Win11 on my laptop, and it's not so much a new OS as a slightly shittier Win10 -- essentially just following the pattern of previous Win10 update versions.

It's like they have a competent team who builds stuff, and then hands it off to the enshittification team who fails (for instance) eliminate the remaining XP-era dialog boxes and fucks around with misfeatures and generally bogging things down.

Those are the consumer facing products, Microsoft makes the majority of their money through selling to other companies, in particular cloud services and servers like with Azure/GitHub/SQL Server/etc and Microsoft office products like Excel. Even Windows now is mostly a product for other businesses to pay.

C#/.NET is rock solid, that's about the only one I'd give them credit for.

Microsoft Excel is better than other spreadsheet software.

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