If I remember correctly, the trend of anti-consumer features was already well underway with windows XP. Integrated DRM was there. The limited activation count was there. Creating themes without signing was not possible, and the 'fisherprice' theme was rolled out even if a lot of users hated it.

Things were still overridable, but XP started the trend where the end user was not an allmighty sysadmin responsible for its own deeds good or wrong, but a consumer that should follow the vision of Microsoft and not touch the holy internals.

I can partially defend microsoft here. Everybody and their dog was messing around in the registry, was installing all kinds of system-breaking software, etc... But it also signifies a point where Microsoft realised it got powerfull enough to ignore the wishes of its own clients.

To me there is a step difference between things like DRM it activation count limit vs disowning the user from his PC. One is creating a channel for bona fide purchases of licenses (you don’t need to buy music with DRM, it’s fair enough if vendors want to limit distribution of a product to the original buyer). The other builds spyware into everything you do with your computer and takes away control of it from you.

The analogy would hold if, dunno, buying some DRM Music also made you relinquish the ownership of your speakers to the vendor. It’s not quite as bad.

I can't agree with you here, and in fact, I think this comment is proof of a shifted overton window. You are correct that things are not as blatant as now, of course

DRM is, for example, a way to kill the second hand market or lending. I can sell my table without approval from its manufacturer, or drag it to my neighbours for a day. I can't sell my songs.

In the same spirit, if I as a computer enthousiast want to upgrade my computer hardware or reinstall windows, I should not depend on microsoft's goodwill.

I see your point, but I still think a difference remains. “Do you want to buy this non essential thing from me, that you can also buy elsewhere, with some restrictive conditions on license and reuse” is, in my eyes, a valid and honest proposal (potentially unattractive but that’s a different story). Take it or leave it. Exploiting a monopoly to force people, largely unknowingly, to surrender huge amounts of data and control over their computer, when there isn’t a practical choice (for most people it’s not really an option to switch to Linux or Mac, they are not fungible products) is a different cup of tea.

Virtually every third party theme came with instructions on how to patch uxtheme.dll to disable the signature check. It was not a big problem in practice, and I don't remember ever having to do the procedure more than once on a single XP install (unlike Windows 10).

Windows 10 has become much less open for non enterprise customers. It't incredibly hard to change settings or disable features such as Onedrive, Cortana, and others.

Agreed. I think MS has decided (for better or for worse) that the average user is not a good system admin, and/or a consumer OS shouldn't require one. Our IT maintains W10 pretty well. I have a test box in my office and I regularly get months of uptime without any nags of updates and other nonsense. I work in biotech and you don't want your cleanroom computers rebooting in the middle of an expensive batch. =)

Or maybe Microsoft just uses consumers, who pay less per license, as field testers for new features before those get rolled out to enterprise customers later?

Aside from other stuff others already mentioned, I would also want to add:

Windows Vista and onwards, MS, while claiming it was for technical and stability reasons, nixed a lot of features that were annoying to movie studios, basically they changed how driver stack worked in a way to make DRM easier and make harder to pirate movies.

But as consequence of that, a lot of cool stuff outright stopped working:

* Some interesting video modes

* Some obscure ways to output data

* And the one that annoyed me the most: Soundcards became useless.

Before that, Soundcards could do a LOT, they could have their own processor and do a lot of fancy stuff, most famously they could do "3D Audio", and it was super cool, Thief for example is a game that uses it well, it would use its own processor to do same thing GPUs do for graphics, and do it for audio, it would even raytrace sound (ie: suppose a character is on the other side of the wall, but there is a door on that wall, the card would calculate the sound of that character footsteps reflecting on the walls and reach you, then if you were using headphone or 4+ speakers it would make you hear the sound coming from the reflections, thus a person with good hearing could deduce where an enemy was, on the other side of a wall).

That stunt basically killed off the soundcard market, people then were making cooler and cooler cards, after that the cards became little more than just output ports soldered on a tiny board.

Sound Cards pre-vista: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Cr...

Sound Cards post-vista: https://http2.mlstatic.com/D_NQ_NP_768672-MLB41729093507_052...

I guess Telemetry and Ads is what they're referring to? And maybe automatic updates that wipe your desktop.

A lot. Others have mentioned most of them already. Ads, telemetry, etc.

I'll just add—forced upgrades to Win10. Still hard to believe how much (some divisions of) MS despises its own customers. I call them the "Balmer camp" as a shorthand.

Despite parts of MS turning over a new leaf, the sociopath wing persist.