I read Microsoft's Windows 11 'quality' progress report - and the subtext says it all

Windows 11 'quality' progress report - and the subtext says it all">

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Earlier this year, Microsoft Windows boss Pavan Davuluri wrote an open letter addressed to the Windows Insider community but really aimed at a much larger cohort of frustrated Windows enthusiasts and power users .

That post laid out a laundry list of improvements that would be coming to Windows: more control over updates, a "more intentional" approach to AI, more attention to performance and reliability, and some enhancements to the user experience that customers have been complaining about for five solid years.

Also: Microsoft announces sweeping Windows changes - but no apologies

"We're listening to customer feedback" was the ostensible message, but the subtext was really a confession that Microsoft had been ignoring customer feedback for years. And last week, we got an update on that admission.

As I pointed out more than three years ago , Microsoft has focused all its energy on turning Windows into a billboard for the company's other products and services: more promotions, more nudges, more cross-selling, more pressure to use a Microsoft account, more hooks to subscription-based services, and more "recommended" content. The bottom line is that Windows has become increasingly annoying, not by accident but by design, with monetization as the end goal.

Also: If Microsoft really wants to fix Windows 11, it should do these four things ASAP

The turn toward "improving Windows quality" represents a belated recognition of that reality. "The team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback," Davuluri said. "What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better."

Davuluri shared a progress report last week. It wasn't so much a list of successes as a summary of work in progress.

If you've been testing Windows Insider builds, you've seen some of the changes, but the rest of us won't see anything for months. (The smart money says early October.) Others are vague and impossible to quantify, like this summary of performance work:

[W]e've steadily been introducing several improvements to the memory efficiency of Windows, from taking advantage of a more efficient memory allocator to reduce overhead across apps and components, continued tuning of WinUI 3 so that apps built on it use less memory by design, as well as driving efficiencies across Chromium and Webview2 components when they appear in the operating system ... Boot and logon times are also improved.