If a feature is missing from Windows it’s a bad thing, it should be in the default installation because it’s not bloat, and users are viewed as helpless to remedy the issue.

If a feature is missing from MacOS or Linux it’s a good thing, it was rightly left out of the default installation to avoid bloat, and users are viewed as empowered to install software themselves.

Can’t win.

That argument falls flat on its face when you consider Cortana or Candy Crush. Windows including every last bell and whistle would be a reasonable design choice if those bells and whistles were actually useful.

It is not weird at all once you realise who Microsoft's management wants as its customers. The business people at MS really do not expect nor want customers to be fiddling around with technical stuff. They want customers to see MS as the one who can solve all problems. The business people at Microsoft prefer non-technical customers. Technically-minded customers are not the ideal customers for Microsoft. A great example is Mark Russinovich. They had to hire him to keep him quiet and under control. He had become a problem solver for too many technically-minded customers.

In the mind of the Microsoft business person

Clippy: "Yes."

PowerToys: "Why?"

In 1995 this might have been a true statement. In 2020 Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and realized that to stay at all relevant they need a seat at the table for cloud services. The only way to succeed at that is to win over the ultimate power user, developers.

WSL{1,2}, Windows Terminal, SQL Server on Linux, too many intiatives to count all focused on catching up to the reality that webservices and infrastructure are built on Linux. Whether you believe they'll succeed or not they are most definitely trying.

Microsoft feels very schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand I think there exists a faction that wants to move more into the open ecosystem. On the other though there appears to be an entrenched faction that's hell bent on retaining as much proprietary status quo as they feel they can get away with. Thus the command line is still incompatible with any Unix shell, the SQL syntax subtly different to make it a pain for those coming from other databases, proprietary sockets, threads API's and so on. It's possible to make a Windows ecosystem interact with the rest of the world, it's just a big pain in the butt caused by an endless stream of small pains.

MS is so large, one hand doesn't know what any other division is doing, and their community interaction is horrible because they make more money when people are ill informed and just go with the flow. So even if 10% of the company is "new blood" and was pushing open source out the back door for the past 5 years, the upper management is just now catching on that "hey maybe they were right".

That really depends on what you consider "rest of the world".

A lot of companies, big ones, have their IT setups primarily on Windows. These are customers who make up a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Linux is a small concern at best for them and is not the rest of the world.

What you call "schizophrenic" to me is the reality that Windows has massive user segments of consumers, developers, servers, and enterprise IT, and they all want different things, so Microsoft ends up making something for each group. Linux doesn't have that problem because, for better or worse, it doesn't have much of a footprint for consumers and enterprise IT.

From what I know of the company's history some of those pains were intentional to thwart interoperability, created at the direction of Gates himself.

You take for granted that it should be Windows conforming to Linux. Why shouldn't Linux implement Winsock and COM and have Linux-specific PowerShell cmdlets and so forth? Windows dominates the desktop market more than Linux dominates the server market, and one of those wants 'cross-platform software' more than the other.

Expecting a company as large and with as deep a history as Microsoft to change without looking schizophrenic while doing so is unrealistic. Microsoft is a supertanker. When it tries to do a 180 it makes really big circle and takes a really long time to do it.

Nonsense. Different products (from MS) are for different people.

If it was true what you are telling, doubt they woild provide loads of diagnostic tools for windows, debugging tools, kernel symbols, performance tools, etc.

Before they hired/silenced him, those tools were developed by Russinovich.

Comparing the most important product(s) at MS with any other MS product/project and arguing they are somehow "equal" in the eyes of MS (because press releases, marketing) is a losing game.

Kernel symbols are NOT published by Mark Russinovich. What would be the purpose to publish them other than aid debugging the kernel and making sense of what's happening under-the-hood?

Debugging stuff and analyzing performance stuff doesn't make me feel like MS would like to hide internals.

Agreed. My guess is that's an organizational issue. Some developers at MS would really like these features, but can't get them approved to be in the official Windows roadmap.

I’m not sure why it’s important for features to be in the base install (so not in a separate package). Having theM packaged separately makes it easier to push updates, and you only install the power tools if you care about them.

That’s quite nice IMHO.

Basic Features in separate packages means, many users will never use them, because they don't know they exist.

Bulk renaming files for example is not something only power users do, it is something only power users can do because it just does not exist and/or is not discoverable for a normal user.

And also as a power user, it is annoying to find a program for every basic thing the system should be able to do.

On the other hand, maybe we should hand it to MS that they so greatly embrace the Unix Philosophy on that point?

I can't be the only user who installs Cygwin just so that I can move files around, calculate hashes of files, and grep with regular expressions. Simple things Windows users don't get out of the box.

I want to challenge your last statement that these things aren't available to Windows users out of the box. Are you certain of that?

- Move files: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

- File hashes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

- Grep: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

> Simple things Windows users don't get out of the box.

Of course they do. It's called Powershell.

By what criteria? PS is installed on all Windows systems and does all of those things.

> Basic Features in separate packages means, many users will never use them, because they don't know they exist.

If people want/need to do something such as bulk renaming, they can online search for it, as they do for everything else, which will tell them they can install a package from the windows store.

Doesn’t seem that crazy to me as an expectation from end users.

Also, I don’t think that when Microsoft says “power users” they mean developers or equivalent, more like people who would feel “I want more from my system than just consuming content”.

Having a single package to install for those users is a quite flexible approach.

> If people want/need to do something such as bulk renaming, they can online search for it, as they do for everything else, which will tell them they can install a package from the windows store.

Or they'll find some sketchy exe file, and here comes the malware! Windows is really broken in terms of package distribution, and requiring people to go online and search for something so simple is hassle, dangerous, and decreases discoverability for software that really ought to be included in a vanilla install (unlike Cortana, which is a massively bloated feature that many people don't want, but can't get rid of, sort of like Bixby).

Cortana has been moved to a separate package available from Windows Store as of the May update of this year (the mainstream release is in two days IIRC). There are a lot of benefits for Microsoft to keep a base install and let users add what they want from the Windows Store.

In my experience, most normal users would just assume it is something computers can't do and either rename all files by hand or not bother and leave them be.

And even the few who would do a search would probably stop at the scary though of "installing" something.

As a technical person, these are regular observations from my parents or non-technical work colleagues.

It's obviously a deliberate decision to keep the basic windows experience "simple".

Yup it seems pretty easy these days to just have PowerToys and the Sysinternals suite included by default. They're small footprint but they're all very useful tools for power users.

I am guessing this is a project that separates out the power user part of customizations, into a separate package, and microsoft aims to continuously improve and add sub projects to it.

I can't find it now, but I've heard the PowerToys developers talk about how the long-term goal is to move some of these features into Windows.

Some of the Windows 95 PowerToys did graduate into being Windows features (or inspired more polished counterparts).

It's useful to have a laboratory to test things with less impact if the experiments fail.