Microsoft is a split personality. On one side, DX12 — a watershed in graphics APIs. On the other, the right-click menu, which takes three seconds to open.
Compare: on a Mac, you click once and the icon bounces — you know it opened. On Windows you have no idea: did I click it? Click the wrong thing? Is it frozen, or still loading? You can build DX12 and Prism, but you can’t make “did the app open” legible?
The pattern is findable. Microsoft’s strongest technology is precisely what it rewrote on blank paper: DX12, Prism, Azure, VS Code, TypeScript. Its worst experiences are precisely where it must stay compatible with thirty-year-old software. The longer the history, the heavier the baggage — even the elementary fact of “you clicked” gets buried under thirty layers of sediment.
The after-sales absurdity completes the picture: reinstalling the OS, which at most companies counts as an incident, is at Microsoft a dignified service. That reinstalling wipes your data goes unmentioned.
Someone will say compatibility is a moat, untouchable. True — but this moat charges interest: every new user pays, every day, for decisions made thirty years ago.
Being able to delete history and rewrite is the real test of technical strength. Those who pass build new things; those who fail guard old ones.
