Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world. They got there by buying out smaller competitors, by blowing competition they couldn’t buy out of the water, by providing really good software for free as part of a package deal for buying the OS, and many other little perks and benefits that, over time, solidified them as the number one choice for businesses and home consumers. Most games assume you have a Windows device. Most softwares make allowances for Apple and then treat anything else as an edge-case. Now, Microsoft is indisputably the default. They won business forever! Yippee!
So why are customers starting to refer to Microsoft as “Microslop”? So often that the CEO tried to ask people to stop doing it?
Well, while they got big by doing cool stuff, they’re remaining big by getting annoying to the customer. Not anything I’d explicitly label “anti-consumer”, but things that just make them a little worse than they once were. For example: older copies of Windows had the Microsoft Office Suite included. Then they didn’t, and you had to purchase the Suite separately. And then the Suite required a subscription. A subscription that was then extended to be monthly and with no proration options. You want to cancel outside the seven-day grace period, you could pay for three weeks of service you didn’t want or need because you missed the window. Don’t miss it again! That’s annoying, isn’t it? Even if you like the product, don’t you wish that wasn’t the way it was now?
Another example: searching the taskbar on previous versions used to only pull up relevant files. You know, files, things on the device. And then they changed that to include web results. And then removed the option to NOT include web results unless you want to start touching stuff in the registry. Now OneDrive wants to upload files and then fully remove them from the computer in a way that sometimes seems random, and getting them back on the device so that you can access them without internet feels unintuitive, to say the least. The UI keeps getting slicker and slicker, to the point I’m not actually fully sure where the built-in XBox screenshots are going on my Home edition, because the obvious answers remain empty.
And this is just what directly affects me, trying to use my device. What am I going to do, swap to Linux? I’m not doing that. Work devices which need much more protection are absolutely not doing that.
Customers can’t leave even if they’re annoyed. Essentially, Microsoft is getting this label because the service has just been getting gradually worse to use, and yet remains number one for sheer market domination.
The latest example, and what actually landed them the ‘-Slop’ title is their use of their AI, CoPilot. I say ‘their use’ because I’m generally not using it even though it continuously shows up in new places in their catalogue. I have intentionally used CoPilot a few times since they pushed it into their Suite products, and yeah, it was useful, but a successful Google search would have been equally useful, so it’s not really CoPilot’s victory so much as Google’s failure. It didn’t even work in Excel for me, and I really don’t know why it didn’t because it’s supposed to be optimized for that. Other people aren’t having that issue? Is my device just too old? Hello?? I wanted a Pivot Table!
It’s also always somewhere I don’t feel like I need it, too. It offers to re-write things (incorrectly) all the time for me in Word, for example. Most of the grammatical checks in my edition of Word have been turned off because when CoPilot wasn’t offering to insert a grammatical mistake or misreading the sentence I typed, CoPilot was attempting to sand all of the personality and flavor of authorship out of the document, ideal for professional copy, not ideal for describing things like cultural trends around technology or the ways scammers target certain groups of people. If it sounds like an accusation, CoPilot suggests toning it down and swapping to passive voice. It will then suggest swapping words with other words that don’t make sense if you’re a sentient being capable of gleaning context, and not an LLM.
Other people seem to be having much the same experience – the people who enjoy CoPilot are doing great, and the people who don’t enjoy it are having to continuously alter their behaviors to avoid it popping up and briefly yoinking control from them. Pages I had bookmarked now no longer go where I want them to, they go to CoPilot instead, and the routes I used to get around in the Administrative panel have been changed heavily for the sake of getting me to CoPilot in the shortest amount of steps possible whether that’s what I was planning to do or not. Pages that used to be hubs take longer to load because there’s a new UI, so CoPilot can be there too.
It’s not so much that CoPilot is totally useless. It’s more that it keeps getting in the way of basically everything else because Microsoft seems to think putting it square in the middle of everything will somehow make it more desirable and convert nonbelievers into users. And, hey, maybe! Maybe they got some people early on like that. But for everyone else, it just looks like Microsoft is messing up bookmarks, and spellcheck, and the Admin panel, and etc. etc. etc. to make CoPilot the star of the show, forcing users who don’t want CoPilot to rebuild their SOPs and turn off spellcheck every handful of updates just to get things the way they were familiar with.
CoPilot’s not the only reason, it’s just the most recent. For a long time now, there have been complaints about the number of seemingly useless ‘tweak’ updates Microsoft puts out. The title of products change, the products themselves change, the menus change, soon you can’t find anything and have to Google what Y product was renamed and whether it’s still possible to build a Powershell script doing Z. Microsoft is actively making their products harder and harder to use, because they’re stripping away familiarity with their products trying to make them easier to use.
