Why, Microsoft?

I’ve been on a vacation. Not anymore. I came to the office, greeted my co-workers, turned on my laptop. There seemed to be an update, but I’m already used to seeing those at random moments. What I’m not used to seeing, however, is software I have never installed popping up in the foreground.

I didn’t install Teams on my laptop. I use it on a daily basis, but I never had a need to install it locally. I’ve always had a suspicion that the “native” version is just the web app wrapped in Electron, taking up more RAM than the web version (Slack, anyone?). I decided I must have done that by accident or to experiment or something in the past. That timestamp speaks for itself, though.

After getting rid of the Teams app, I got down to catching up with all the e-mails, only to be interrupted again. You’ll never guess.

As I had only 20 minutes to save my work, I cued the restart and went to grab a coffee. Half an hour later, I restarted the machine stuck on the HP boot logo. Yes, it had happened before. After clicking the tray notification about a failed update, I got no useful information that could be passed along to my IT department. The failed update wasn’t even on the list. Thanks, Microsoft. Whatever, as long as the rest is working, I can do my job.

Later during the day, I wanted to check my Skype (the regular one). I was greeted with the usual UAC prompt and clicked “No” without much hesitation. Not today. Let’s do it some other time.

Only after trying to run Skype three times, I noticed that it would not start the app without the update. What utter nonsense. And this isn’t even the version of Skype for Windows 10 that cannot be easily turned off. Don’t get me started on that. I sighed and let the updater do its thing just to be able to read my co-workers’ messages.

Later in the day, I wanted to listen to some music. My headphones failed to connect. The Settings app, trying to be helpful, informed me that I should turn onn Bluetooth. Sadly, the Bluetooth switch was nowhere to be seen. Another tip from Settings also failed - the device was not visible in the Device Manager (thankfully, that hasn’t been ported out of the Control Panel yet). I could not even attempt to reinstall the device drivers. I restarted the computer. The headphones reconnected. They now lag even without multi-point Bluetooth enabled. And those are $350 Bose headphones. That’s some material for a whole another rant, though.

I know that supporting thousands of different hardware configurations is a spectacular feat. I know that trying to visually update such a huge pile of legacy code is no easy task. I know there are many backwards compatibility issues along the way. What I don’t understand is why such a monumental undertaking coincides with the relatively recent Microsoft reorganization, one that seemingly lowers Windows’s importance in the company’s vision of the future.