So…yeah. Seems MS, in their endless wisdom has decided to rename their virtual desktop software, called before as “Remote Desktop” (and good luck trying to find issues with that that are not related to the old RDP tool MTSC.exe) to… “Windows App”. Perfect. Now everything will look like everything, and there’s no way to ever try to search for help for it. Next in line, I guess they can call it just “App”. I’m sure that will help everyone.
This started a few months ago across the board. It’s the dumbest realignment of their application stack ever … With that being said, I think it’s clear that the future of Microsoft is going to be them attempting to move the entire OS experience into the cloud no matter how misguided or unwarranted that approach may be.
Mainframe for the home user, with all files on their servers and, thus, controlled by them. That’s always been their goal, but the tech just didn’t exist until recently.
I’m going to name a game I’m making “a game”
Impossible to pirate. Money printingachine
At this point i’m pretty sure most windows users have a degradation fetish they’re too ashamed to admit.
Are they doing this on purpose? Why would they even do something like that?
Having worked on products that are renamed to something equally ambiguous, I’d say they are trying to make it more difficult to find because they are trying to redirect customer attention to other places, and are deliberately making it difficult to talk about or search for. Unfortunately this is a very successful strategy. It’s also very user hostile, and product engineer hostile. My heart goes out to any engineers that work in this product.
So they dont want people using remote desktop? What would they even get out of that, just making windows even worse to use. I guess its one less thing to maintain. Well, windows becoming worse is good for linux userbase so this is kind of good news in a way.
Next in line, I guess they can call it just “App”.
Saw this yesterday which is relevant
It’s about time that someone cleaned up that stupid mess on the left.
Is that Steve Jobs with a Butthead mouth? Beautiful.
It definitely made me think of Jobs when I saw it. Not sure about the mouth part, but if thats what you see, its probably what was intended.
Probably another case of too many bean counters (and marketing majors), and not enough software developers. Windows hasn’t innovated in forever. Seems like they’re the Walmart of operating systems, just cheaper and easier for most people.
I don’t want my OS to innovate. I just want it to be reliable. I can say this for MS, I haven’t seen a blue or any other color screen of death for, God, a decade? I’m pretty happy with Windows these days.
I’ve had the opposite happen since switching to Windows 11. Multiple BSODs a week on both machines. Super frustrating.
If you have the Pro or Enterprise variant of Win11 you can delay feature releases for a year. Makes it way more stable. Here is a link. The anchoring might be off a bit(it was for me). I had to scroll down a bit further. You still get security releases, it’s just all the ‘features’ that get delayed so you can figure out how to work around them.
Awesome thanks for the info on that.
Ahh windows. How I don’t miss you.
Had been windows 10 user since 2015 (no pc before that), installed linux mint a month ago and was surprised how smooth everything was!
Sorry windows but Im never coming back.
Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
I remember Noam Chomsky talking about this a number of years ago. It’s true. We don’t want technocrats, but worthless dumbfucks are also quite scary.
Thank you so much for posting this. I already liked Ed’s work but this one was a cut above and it’s going to be marinating in my head for the foreseeable future.
zitron is godly
Yeah my dad’s boss had this issue a couple weeks ago. His remote desktop app disappeared from his phone and he had no idea where. Figured out after looking for a whole day that they renamed it to this stupid bullshit.
You’d think a company that runs a search engine would understand SEO…
They don’t want you searching it. They want you to pay them to fix it. With Ai presumably
AI still needs to be able to identify the thing you’re asking about. The AI still searches for things if it’s not already in its memory-it even tells you when it’s scanning different sources.
That all breaks with bad seo
It’s built into windows it’s a windows feature that’s broken. Once it crashes it will ask you to have Ai look at it for a fix.
Anti-SEO pushes you to use AI to get help instead
AI still uses SEO or it’s database equivalent to figure out what you’re talking about about. Or to scan for new info - which they currently do
Yeah, retrieval-augmented generation and AI web-search will still run into some trouble with this. But if it knows about it in its weights, then it will be fine.
This would probably matter more if every search for “windows 10 problem XY” wouldn’t turn up 100% garbage from their support forums anyway.
Hello my name is Ranjid, im a MSVP, but not associated with Microsoft. Have you tried reinstalling Windows or talking to your system administrator?
Can you run sfc /scannow? Post the entire contents of your event log. Okay, now that you have done this I will proceed to not reply to this thread anymore.
Here’s a random non-Microsoft article I found on the web, and which you’ve probably already seen
Have you tried SFC /scannow, dism repair, or factory reset?
These answers to a question why the task bar can’t be moved to the side anymore.
I HAD JUST FORGOTTEN I LIKE MY TASKBARS ON THE SIDE NOW I’M GONNA REMEMBER AGAIN AAAAAAAA
I saw a video recently they said the google search being bad is intentional. Because then you have to spend more time on google, thus seeing more ads.
That’s a bold move cotton. Let’s see how it plays out
But if you can’t google a solution to a problem there is no problem.
Yes, but I feel that’s strategic to make us feel we need AI to do the work for us.
Except the AI needs that info searchable for itself. L
So, no. It’s just dumb.
There’s a reason why I never use Bing
Oh, I can help remotely… I just need you to open Windows App.
Which app?
Windows App.
I get that, I’m running Windows, but which app?
Windows App.
Look, are you being smart? I’m in Windows, say I click on the Start button, which app do I click on?
Windows App.
Allright you, let’s say the app is already running…
Sure.
And I press CTRL-ALT-DEL and open Task Manager.
OK.
WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE APP I WOULD SEE IN TASK MANAGER??!???
Windows App.
I’M ASKING YOU, ‘WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE APP’???!??!??
I’m telling you, ‘Windows App.’
You did it so well, I started hearing it in their voices after a few lines. Well done.
What’s the original? Sounds as fun as ‘Front fell off’
Oh you’re in for a treat!
I would add… Slowly I Turned…
How Hi is a chinaman?
xkcd spotted <3
Good eye
Makes sense, the CEO was just saying the other day that 30% of their code was written by AI
recently, I need to remote desktop from Mac to Windows, and I was searching around for products, and I came across a blog post recommending Windows App, and I had no fucking idea what it was. I thought it may have been a windows 8 app that is discontinued. The geniuses at microsoft SUCK at naming. Xbox, Xbox 360, xbox One (which was actually the third iteration, for some reason), xbox series x/s. Like wtf.
Windows 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, 7???, 8, 8.1, 10???, 11, 11 21H2, 11 22H2, …
You forgot Windows 3.1. That one was a pretty significant update
AFAIK, Windows was discontinued after Vista. Windows 7 is actually the 7^th iteration of the Microsoft version of OS/2, which was rebranded as Windows NT with the release of the third version, and as Windows sine NT with the seventh version. Windows 9 had to be skipped because a sloppy version check for Windows 95/98 would have failed.
Kind of right. Windows ME was the final version of windows (you probably forgot about that one).
After that, XP, vista, windows 7, were all based on NT.
Ah, I got that wrong. Yes, Windows XP was the rebranded Windows NT 5. Thank you for the correction.
I have not forgotten Windows ME. It still haunts me in my dreams. Active Desktop crashing all the time was iconic af
Ah yes, who stood up in a meeting at Microsoft and said “What if the desktop background was a webpage! And what if the web engine behind it was just internet explorer 6 but worse.”
2000, XP, and Vista are NT too.
When windows 9 comes out it will all work again.
Bold of you to think the next one will not be called Windows365
that’s a strange name for an operating system i’d’ve called it Chazzwozzers
hey andy!
What’s the good word?
I like the cut of your jib
That already exists as their cloud virtual desktop service.
Edit: I could see them releasing a line of products and an ISO for Windows365Client that just makes the machine a thin client dedicated to rdping, or I guess Windows Apping now, to the Windows365 PC.
I thought they were supposed to do the whole “last version of Windows that will be updated forever” with Windows 10, and of course abandoned that some time ago.
My gut feeling is that their product management marketing folks came to the conclusion that Windows as a subscription was not going to work for the consumer market where the OS is something that’s just part of the device you buy. And in discussions with system OEMs they made the decision that consumers like it when the version number goes up, so increasing that windows number every several years will move systems.
Windows 11 displays as Windows 10 in a large number of places internally. It’s just a later revision than any of the “actually” Windows 10 ones.
Interesting. Maybe that supports my guess.
It’s not without precedent though. I remember seeing NT references for a long time from win2k on.
Bold of you to think I have any expectations of Microsoft to not suck. I will wait until 9 comes out before I put another windows OS on my machines. Since why after all this, would anyone trust a software company to do anything well that can not count to 10?
Autopilot and Autopilot Device Preparation spring to mind. Two distinct products, and yet they’ve gone down the Wii U naming route
The geniuses at microsoft SUCK at naming
Apple is worse. Everything has the same name but gen 1, gen 2, gen 3 as a suffix.
At least the numbers are sequential there, though…
don’t worry, microsoft will surely make a discord where all their knowledge bases and information will be moved to, making it even easier to find info than it already is /s
But first they’ll buy Discord and force everyone to abandon their exiting usernames to use a Microsoft account with it instead.
I honestly would be down with that.
Mostly because I’d love to see discord go under and to have tech support and interaction go back to websites and forums, where they are indexed, searchable, and archivable so information can be easily searched for again, and not lost forever should a discord go under.
Same but - I was actually relieved Microsoft finally MADE an RDP client for Mac again. What was wrong with RDP for Mac? It was fine and they axed it. But them replacing RDP everywhere is just hilarious.
They didn’t even change anything except the ui. It’s still just old rdp with less features.
I don’t work for them, but I’d recommend Jump Desktop for that. Works very well and has been out for quite some time.
I didn’t believe it until i verified it. This shit is true. Wtf! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/windows-app-to-replace-remote-desktop-app-for-windows/4390893
Am I reading that wrong or is it just saying the Windows Store version (which was terrible) is going away. It tells you to use the normal remote desktop function that has existed in Windows until they put that new stupidly named app in the Store.
So if you run RDP (can’t tell if that’s actually mstsc.exe now) it should function as normal.
People should just be able to create their RDP shortcuts as normal and go on with their day by simply ignoring the Microsoft store like most enterprise users have been trying to do all along.
Though I could be wrong, I don’t have a windows computer around me to try it on at the moment. I moved my machines at home to different flavors of Linux when I didn’t want to figure out comparability work around for 11
I actually just deployed this out at my company and Windows App (or the non Windows Store Remote Desktop App) is required to access AVD and W365 devices. Windows RDP is still present and works for accessing domain joined Windows devices, and both Windows App and Remote Desktop have that functionality as well.
I wonder if that has to do with them trying to integrate access for zero client type setups. If 20 people are remoted into a VM setup but they all are coming from the same rack, the IP/Hostname would be the same in theory, so if you try to RDP to it, the protocol doesn’t work properly, it would want to kick all the other users off their instances to let them sign in. Been a bit since I’ve had tonl manage virtual instances though, so maybe I’m forgetting something.
Is this year of the Linux Desktop?
No
I’m morbidly curious where the line is for a global shift. So far it’s invisible.
I doubt it will even happen though. Microsoft’s forcing AI on everything already and yet it hasn’t moved the needle. Microsoft has to do some wilder shit to even move people to Linux. Influencers and awareness don’t really help that much as shown by PewDiePie’s video about him moving to Linux.
I’ve been on the brink for a while but learning a whole new OS is going to be hard with a dissociative disorder. though I did just find out game compatibility is way better than I thought, so that’s one roadblock down.
im usually the most tech savvy of my friends and no one I know is already using it. That’s kind of the situation I assume most people are in. no one they know is using Linux and for whatever reason they don’t have the ability or time to learn it themselves.
People aren’t in the habit of thinking of computing as an inherently a political choice, but it is.
Computing is a tool, not a thing you merely consume or use for consumption. Yet the tech industry is very motivated to get us thinking of it that way, while positioning themselves as the middlemen. That’s probably the real reason they’re so excited about AI, it’s a way to turn computing into something you rent.
