Windows 11 is powerful. It’s quick. It’s efficient. It’s everything a business wants in an OS. It protects your device; it verifies things before you download them; it seeks to make the annoying parts of computers as painless as possible. However – I don’t like how Windows 11 does settings. I don’t like how the modern web does settings. Especially in the applications I use a lot, like Outlook. Now, this is admittedly a tiny, tiny problem in the very well-built and well-protected OS that is Windows 11, but it’s a constant point of annoyance for me – I turn SmartSuggest off, because it derails my train of thought while typing, a couple of weeks later, it’s back on. It’s beyond just Windows 11, too – It’s the new ethos of everything. I uninstall CoPilot on my personal Windows 10 laptop because the computer is ancient and I have no need for it, and a couple of weeks later, it’s insisting I try it again. I close out the ‘tutorial’ popups on apps, and yet they have no recollection that I did that, insisting I should check out the tutorials again the next time I log on. I can’t uninstall Skype for Business on that same Windows 10 device because it’s not on the menu, or even in the Control Panel – for some reason, Skype for Business is a keystone to bootup, and I can’t remove it because despite never having an account with Skype, it’s world-endingly crucial that it launches the instant I log in. I could look up tutorials to uninstall this blight upon my neolithic computer’s processing power, but the point is that I shouldn’t have to do that for this one bizarre exception to the standard procedure. I shouldn’t have to keep going into settings to tell Outlook to stop guessing the ends of my sentences, I shouldn’t have to go into the file directories to shut down the web search feature and make it files-only. Windows was a convenience tool. What happened to the convenience? Why all the handholding, to the point it thinks I can’t even write a sentence without it’s help?
My fundamental thought process when it comes to devices is that they 1) should do what I tell them to do, and 2) shouldn’t do what I don’t tell them to do. This is the beautiful world I grew up in: disc players played discs, MP3 players would play MP3s (and sometimes MP4s if you had a nice enough one), the headphones had a jack so it could never simply refuse to connect to my phone, and the taskbar search only returned files on the device. Now, when I turn off a setting? After some update or another they’re back to the default. Windows 11 thinks you are savvy enough to identify the search results separate from your Taskbar’s file results, a constant pain point for people who may be disabled or otherwise unable to tell this is different from the old model, and yet thinks you are simply too bad at computers to know your own mind and set new defaults to stick forever. You are the standard user, Microsoft seems to insist, and the standard user likes the standard settings, and they don’t like having control. Control is for Linux users. Control was for Windows 7 users, and you’re not a Windows 7 user anymore.
The average person is growing increasingly computer illiterate as a result, too – children grow up on iPads, transition into ChromeBooks provided by their school, and then stay there. The idea of customizing their experience outside of the wallpaper is simply too far away for them to fathom. They need the handholding. They will need the handholding forever, because there’s no reason to teach what will be worked around.
If you’re looking for help managing your computer’s settings, or your users’ experience, book a call with us: https://outlook.office365.com/book/WebsiteBooking@elixistechnology.com/
