Microsoft, Please Stop. Love, Gamers & Enthusiasts

This is a love letter to Microsoft – or more like an intervention. Love isn’t how most Microsoft users would describe their feelings towards Microsoft, especially recently. I know we haven’t exactly been on the best terms since, well, Windows 8, but that’s also where things started going wrong, and frankly they’ve only really been spiralling since then. This is a plea to please, for the good of everyone, stop the hostility towards the people that literally pay you to be their operating system. Let me explain…

As a tech enthusiast and gamer, Windows has been my operating system not-so-much-of-choice-but-necessity for two decades now. I started on Windows 95 and Colin McRae Rally on a Pentium 3, moved to 98, ME – which broke the system – then got another hand-me-down system with XP. I briefly had a Vista laptop, but that exploded within a month, so my first proper experience with an Aero UI was Windows 7 on a Toshiba Satellite laptop. That ran COD Modern Warfare 2, believe it or not! Windows has been a part of my life for the vast majority of my existence, and it really was the only choice if you wanted to play games. Microsoft has definitely made some mistakes over the years, many people think Vista was one big mistake, but so many of us have pretty fond memories of Windows 7. While it still wasn’t exactly perfect, it was the last operating system that actually felt cohesive, non-intrusive (for the most part), and felt like you actually owned your own damn machine. Sure, us nerds ran some powershell scripts to pull out some of the tracking stuff, but at least you had full control over your own system and, oh, I don’t know, one single place where you can access your system settings!

I appreciate that with the rise of touch displays, Windows needed to be updated to better support that input style, but it’s clear that Windows 8, 8.1, 10, nor really 11 are the apt solution to that. With each new version, Microsoft has been increasingly ignoring what their own users actually want, and more so have been taking every opportunity to make the usage experience worse to enrich themselves. Windows 11 is the pinnacle of that, as Microsoft continues to wage war on their own damn users. Nothing exemplifies that more than the setup process and account creation. Right up until Windows 8, when you created an account on a Windows system, you were creating a local account on that machine. There are exceptions like domain and workspace accounts for companies and schools, for example, but for your average user who’s just bought or built a new system, when you go through the setup process, you are creating a local account that is just for that machine. With the introduction of Windows 8 and the Metro UI – and the Microsoft Store, that’s the important part – when you sign in with a Microsoft account, you are now tying your system to an account you don’t actually control or own. 

That becomes a problem for a whole bunch of reasons – one of which is privacy. By tying your Windows account – and all its actions – to a Microsoft account, you are letting Microsoft track your activities, and tie what you do on Windows to what you do elsewhere on the internet with that account, like your emails and any apps you allow access to your Microsoft account too. There’s also the inherent lack of control too. With a local account, you own that machine. Microsoft can’t suddenly decide you no longer are allowed to access your own machine, and if your Microsoft account gets compromised, you don’t lose access to your entire PC and all its files. The other thing, that’s frankly more insidious, is something they’ve started doing with Windows 11, which is that if you do sign in with a Microsoft account during the setup process, they automatically enable OneDrive, their cloud storage solution, which actively replaces your documents and pictures folders with remote-only versions. That means when you save a file to your documents, that file is stored on Microsoft’s servers, not on your PC. I’m sure Microsoft will say that this is because the average user doesn’t back up their data, so Microsoft forcibly doing it for you is them just being real nice, but let’s be real, they do it because then when you use more than the 5GB of free space they give you, they can flash up big warnings saying “oh no you’re running out of space, quick, sign up for a monthly subscription!” and hey-presto, they’ve got another paying customer. It’s insidious, especially since they push so damn hard for you to “back up your data”, and to then dis-entangle the two is a pain most users won’t bother doing and capitulate to pay the fee. It feels more like extortion than a helpful service, at least to me anyway. That’s not even including the insane amount of advertising the setup process requires you to skip past – Office, Office Basic, Game Pass – all monthly or yearly subscription services that bleed you dry. 

The worst part of this is that up until Windows 10, you could still choose, like a grown-ass adult, to create a local account instead of signing in with a Microsoft one. Windows 11 made it a complicated puzzle to get to the local account screen, having to resort to tricks like purposefully not connecting to the internet, checking the “I don’t have internet” option, then creating a local account. Microsoft decided that too many people bypassed that though, so they disabled that option, meaning if you even have the possibility of connecting to the internet – ie there is a WiFi adapter installed – you cannot set up Windows without internet. At all. How insane is that? There were still a couple ways around the MS account requirement though, my favourite was just typing [email protected] and any password, then it’d break and let you create a local account. They patched that recently. The other was to press SHIFT + F10 to open command prompt, typing BYPASSNRO, then restarting, then it’d let you create a local account. Guess what, they patched that too. Here’s a hint Microsoft – if enough people are using freaking command prompt to bypass your setup process, maybe rethink that setup process, not alienate and inflame your users? Just a thought.

The thing is, it’s clear they don’t care. When they launched Edge and made it not only the default browser, but made it actively difficult to make anything else the default browser, including that time where, for a while, there was no such thing as a “default web browser” but a collection of files that can be opened by Edge (or you can spend 20 minutes swapping every file type over to Firefox or Chrome). Do you want my web browsing data so badly you’d risk anti-trust lawsuits? I mean clearly, yes. The thing is that, at least for us gamers, until pretty recently we really haven’t had any options. Apple has never cared about gaming, nor really let you put MacOS on non-apple hardware, and linux has been both a user experience nightmare, and not compatible with gaming, so Windows really was the only option. Now though? With all the work Valve has put into Proton… man there’s a convincing case for Linux as a gaming OS. A lot of the UX issues have definitely improved too, and frankly when Microsoft finally forces me off of Windows 10 – I’m sticking with the LTSC version for now, but I know the day will come when either for security or by force, I’ll have to leave 10 behind – I’m relatively certain I’ll be firing up Ventoy and installing Debian, or something similar. That is, unless Microsoft looks at the bigger picture. The longer term. Sure, harvesting data and extorting money from people now might bump shareholder returns today, but it brings resentment, distrust, and hatred. Just look at the Windows Recall feature. No matter what they say, I cannot trust them to take screenshots of my screen every few seconds, let alone process those screenshots in some way, let alone store that data securely. Technically, sure that could all be done on-device, securely, no problem, but practically? I don’t trust that Microsoft won’t store those screenshots on their cloud servers, or access the information their AI crap generates from it. That trust is gone – worldwide – and that should be a wakeup call. If you keep fighting your users to extort them for everything they’ve got, eventually that music is gonna stop. And then what? You’re pushing people like me towards Linux. To create tools and programs for Linux to make that better, and if you keep going, you’ll push everyone away. So please, stop the damn war on your own users. It’s in everyone’s best interests.