I don't think I ever got to talk about much I hate Microsoft. I will use this post to express how much I hate Microsoft.

I'm pro-FOSS and pro-Freedom, however, people who know me know that I do hate Apple and other big tech, but just not as much as I hate Microsoft. I believe that Microsoft is responsible for making one of the most terrible operating systems ever (along with other many low quality products) which was (is?) responsible for making the computing experience really terrible for people who are not much into computing. This resulted in making every task that might require using a computer a burden to these people.

I'm not talking about power users or developers who can work around Windows' quirks (like removing copilot or using the server version of Windows 10 for their desktop). I'm talking about your aunt who needs to send an email, the small business owner trying to manage inventory, the teacher preparing a presentation. Microsoft took what should have been straightforward tasks and wrapped them in layers of mysterious failures, cryptic error messages, and mandatory restarts.

The real issue isn't that software has bugs, every system does. The real issue is that Microsoft built an operating system that treated its users with contempt. Windows 95 through Windows 11 trained an entire generation to believe that computers are fundamentally unreliable, that losing work is just part of the deal, that random crashes are inevitable.

They normalized dysfunction. Microsoft convinced the world that computing is inherently fragile and frustrating.

Modern Windows is an archaeological dig. You've got Control Panel coexisting with Settings, two different interfaces for system configuration because Microsoft couldn't commit to either. You've got ancient Win32 APIs next to WinRT next to whatever they're calling the current framework (and don't get me started at how they name it). Each generation of Windows just changes (or contributes to) how terrible the experience is.

This matters because it destroys predictability. In any well-designed system, once you learn the patterns, you can reason about how things should work. Windows teaches learned helplessness. Settings might be in Control Panel, or Settings, or a right-click menu, or a PowerShell command, or not exposed at all, or in some registry, or in a file under System32 folder. Every task becomes a treasure hunt.

People who defend this as "backward compatibility". It is not. Backward compatibility is running old binaries. This is keeping decades of UI confusion and architectural mistakes on life support because Microsoft can't be bothered to make clean breaks¹.

Microsoft normalized the idea that computers need to be rebooted to function properly. Not rebooted to apply updates, that's reasonable. Rebooted because something got into a weird state and nobody knows what. Rebooted because that's just what you do when Windows acts up.

This became the universal tech support answer because it actually worked disturbingly often. That's not a feature, it's an admission that the system's state management is so broken that burning it down and starting over is easier than debugging.

Servers running Linux or BSD regularly go years between reboots. macOS machines might reboot for major updates but rarely for anything else. Windows? "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" became a cultural meme specifically because of Microsoft's inability to build a stable operating system.

Microsoft had the resources and market position to build something genuinely excellent. They built something barely adequate and spent decades defending it. They trained the world that computing is supposed to be painful.

That's why I hate Microsoft more than Apple or Google or any other tech giant. Apple locks you into their ecosystem, sure. Google vacuums up your data. But Microsoft convinced generations of people that computers are fundamentally hostile tools that barely work. They normalized dysfunction at a scale that damaged the entire industry's relationship with its users.