I was trying to be nice... I suppose that Microsoft was hoping to beat Apple to a trillion dollars in market valuation. (Too late as of this afternoon.) Under Satya Narayana Nadella’s leadership Microsoft's stock price has more than doubled in the last few years, but all this nickel and diming with annoyances such as popups, and other “notifications” trying to get you to buy stuff has caused the experience to be degraded somewhat.
The thing that amazes me the most is that the first XP clone that I put together decades ago was a very efficient tool with its 8088 processor running at 4.77 MHz, 640KBs of RAM, ultra-deluxe EGA monitor, and hooked up to a dot matrix printer. I used DOS, and a shareware menu system to run Lotus 123, Word Perfect and other programs on two 5 1/4” floppys with no hard drive. It was a much less frustrating experience than computing today and I was in general more productive than I am these days. I still have it in a closet.
btw: My XP still lets me run a spread sheet program ... who members Quattro Pro ? still great since ‘93
The CPUs are 1000's of times faster, we have 1000x the RAM, 1000x the disk speed and capacity.
And yet, despite the fancier graphics and drop shadows and animated menus, other than raw number-crunching, we are not much more productive, overall.
Last weekend I spent 2 hours fighting with a stupid problem, that kept me from doing 5 minutes work, that in the past would have taken me 15 minutes but wouldn't have cost me the 2 hours. Where's the improvement?
Nadella is keeping Microsoft alive, and for that we are thankful -- we all need Microsoft to stay active in the marketplace, to some extent or another. And he's steering the company in a useful direction, for the sake of the stockholders (that's his primary responsibility), and he's doing a good job.
Microsoft's relevance, however, is increasingly debatable. They lost their way with Windows 8, and they have yet to find their place in the rapidly-evolving modern techno-cultural landscape.
Windows 10, for all its good points, is a solution in search of a problem. It's faster and more secure, but in terms of the user, it doesn't do anything useful or good that Windows 7 didn't already do. Visually, it's just embarrassing. The tech world today moves faster than Microsoft's focus groups can grasp, much less respond to.
Nearly all the Windows users I know, at work and privately, on this forum and others, were perfectly content with Windows 7 (and many with XP). They hated Windows 8, for good reason. Microsoft could have produced Windows 10 with a Classic Windows theme, and people would have been thrilled. Instead they stuck with the Windows 8 theme (slightly improved).
Nadella will take Windows into "the cloud", and it will just be another cloud-app "platform" like ChromeOS, and perhaps that's Microsoft's destiny.
But I remember the Good Ol' Days...