My Wishlist for Windows 12

With the recent announcement of Windows 12 arriving next I thought it was a good time to provide a bit of honest feedback to Microsoft, allowing them some time to rearrange their Backlog and planning accordingly.

Having been one of the few developers that chose not to migrate to MacOS and while dabbling in Linux occasionally Windows is still my primary Operating System.

So, here is my wishlist for Windows 12...?

1. Dont steal focus - ever!?

There is absolutely no situation in the universe where I want any application, popup, notification or anything else to steal focus from where I'm currently inputting bits.

The times where you are suddenly writing to another field or accepting a popup that you didn't expect is too many to count and it never should have been a problem in the first place.

It is without a doubt the single most annoying thing about Windows and the fact that it hasn't been solved decades ago makes me seriously doubt that Microsoft is using their own OS internally.

2. Performance

You cannot - as a user - fight the feeling that this hog is getting more and more heavy at every release. Especially compared to Linux and MacOS you can't help feel that the focus from Microsoft is always to add new or redo existing, but never to really optimize on the fundamentals.

They seriously need a "Project Butter" like Google did with their Android OS in its day and reduce the startup time of applications and OS tasks. Despite being on the latest and greatest hardware you constantly feel the drag underneath your feet with this OS.

Not every sprint needs to be "Feature Sprint", Microsoft. Freeze the features and focus on speed and more speed.

3. UI consistency

With the many design languages and adaptations of?

It is quite clear that the massacre of your eyes that was Windows 8 has left a lot of scar tissue in the OS. The UI consistency left behind of a failed "Mobile-Enabled" redesign creeps in every where.

Microsoft has a great design system in Fluid, but the inconsistency of their OS is the real experience they share with their users.

4. Drop Crap- and Ad-ware completely and provide a page for download

Trust your users and stop trying to abuse your OS. You do not have the greatest browser and trying to force people into the latest incarnation of Internet Explorer in Edge leaves a terrible experience of your OS.

Not even considering anti-competitive behaviours, fines and all that horrible hisotyr of misuse this is about a poor user experience. Who ever in their right mind created a user story that claimed that an actual end user requests the pre-installation of Microsoft Office in 12 different languages?

Being forced to start your new OS-experience by "cleaning" up after Microsoft is never a good start.

Making it so difficult to remove it is an even bigger fail. Just make a page where you focus on making it easy to get and install these (or support via WinGet) and be done with it, while you start to offer a clearner OS.

They are not value-adding and you know it perfectly well.

5. Allow Hardware Partners to integrate their "specialized" controls for their hardware into the correct place in Windows

The UI inconsistency isn't just because of Microsoft. IF you happen to have an Intel Motherboard, NVidia GPU, Logitech Mouse, Razer Keyboard, Bose Headset, Wacom Digitizer or some other combinations, showcasing the hardware freedom of Windows, you also end up with several different "add-on" pieces of heavy, unoptimized software to "optimize" your hardware from the different vendors.

Why isn't there a consistent "hook-in" for making hardware tweaking and setup easier, that is supported directly by Microsoft and offered to the vendors wanted to be represented on Windows?

The accept of the certified Microsoft drivers certainly did its share for the stability of poor drivers, but why didn't this include the user experience?

Just look at a modern taskbar and see how many "driver"-applications clutter it up and every time you open one of these you find theming, styling and UI that is vastly different than that of Windows.

6. Clean up the Start Menu ... it is quite simply (still) a mess?

Who ever asked to get both the Weather and filtered News when trying to find the application to start? I really wanted to hear that user story and the value it was suppose to introduce!

The split between search, documents and applications have slowly started but the confusion over what should actually be in "Start" is something that is just a parody at this point.

Do I "Start a Document" or do I "Start the shutdown of the computer"? I definitely do not start the "Weather" or "News" I browse for those... If you want to serve me this clean up the mess that is Bing! first (and no, adding random probablalistic parrots like Generative AI is not what I'm looking for in my News or Weather. I want something with Facts)

7. Make it work properly when Offline

I understand how much you like Azure - and its rising revenue - but having an OS that barely works in an offline scenario is worse that most mobile OS.?

The massive integration of Cloud Services is fine, as long as you code in the alternative and ensure that it works equally well without connectivity.?

Even your precious "Start"-menu of confusion has issues and I bet the amount of unit tests that pre-requisite a non-connectivity are barely there anymore - if there are any Unit Tests left (seeing the amount of issues introduced over the last couple of versions this is an open question).

8. Clean up the most critical apps and make them easy to use

The basic experience when starting out with Windows is chaotic mess at best. A great example of the UX mess is Task Manager - a fairly central application.

Why is Task Manager cluttered with a mix of Services and Running Apps without any easy way of searching for something?

The ability to find something in your control panel during this transition to a more mobile-friendly alternative is horrible to say the least. The fact that you cannot keep two or more open at the same time, but reuse the window is something that I would have expected as a limitation in Windows 3.11 - not Windows 11.

9. Keep the Application Framework stable

I bet there were good ideas behind introducing UWP, but look at where we are now and where you left the End User?

The applications are now split between UWP, Classic Apps and whatever you come up with next... With vastly different UX, look and feel and interaction.

Even worse is the fact that most applications now exist across many of these with different feature sets and finding the right and best version never needed to be this complex - looking at you, OneNote!

Keeping them updated, secure and stable should be easy - you got the recipe from Debian on Linux long ago and have started with WinGet, but there is still a long way to go.

10. Windows Update

Yes, the experience of Windows Update is the still one of the biggest IT messes in the world. If you start to see how much productivity is lost every day around the world because of it there would have been an EU-action of getting it fixed decades ago.

The instability, the lack of completeness and timing information and just the frustration of looking at a counter towards 100% that never seems to move and when it does at the most odd of movements, inconstent at best and typically rather unstable.

I cannot imagine that it is cheap to support this mess from Microsoft' side and seeing that every other OS has this more or less solved more than 5 years ago is a testament to the lack of true drive behind the innovation of Windows.

So, there you have it... Brutally honest, but let's face it - Microsoft has a long way to go to get to a good experience, despite having been working on Windows for more than 40 years.