I'm unconvinced Windows is something you can go work at Microsoft and like get assigned to.
these days it seems like windows updates are just found and pushed to prod automatically through CI/CD. no one knows where the builds come from, they're just there, every day at 8:17am PST.
it's why there's 8 levels of different eras of iconography in the control panel. it's why the say start bar keeps moving. it's why Edge cannot be killed or contained, only suppressed and avoided.
having just installed windows xp on a machine earlier this evening, i find myself thinking about how long it took for this to be the case. xp feels like the first geological layer where the concept of a cohesive operating system where each part of it was considered as part of a whole system started breaking apart.
i could be wrong about this, of course. i remember far less about the 3.x to 9x era, but something about xp just sticks out for me as the start of how we got here.
XP was kinda the point that MS really did lose the idea of providing software intending to support specific workloads or any kind of market targeting. Part of the problem is that was also the point at which enough stuff had built up because of Microsoft's (laudable!) commitment to backward compatibility that it was impossible for it to be a coherent single operating system. XP was supposed to handle server and workstation loads that NT/2000 were primarily aimed at, but also replace the 9x line as the end-user OS, and be a crossover console OS as the OS (in a mutant form) for the original Xbox. MS abandoned the idea of targeting specific workloads or specific markets; basically, with the complete disappearance of all competition in the desktop market, they got too high on their own supply, and Windows 11 is the downstream result of that: An absolute sack of shit that isn't so much "developed" as "metastasized", whose main goal is to suck a few more pennies out of a userbase that will never, ever grow again.
