It feels like Microsoft is blindly racing toward another Windows 8 situation. Windows 8 was arguably the most divisive release of Windows in its 40-year history, as Microsoft attempted to overhaul the operating system for a touch-first future. Spooked by the iPad, the company shipped a radical overhaul that ditched the familiar Start menu and left users frustrated and confused. They weren’t quite ready for the future that Microsoft envisioned.
As I look at Windows 11 today, on the 40th anniversary of the operating system’s release, its ongoing AI overhaul is starting to feel similar to that controversial redesign.
Microsoft detailed its vision for Windows to become an “agentic OS” at its Ignite conference this week. The software maker is building AI capabilities directly into Windows to allow agents to control your PC for you, all while it continues to infuse AI features and Copilot buttons into all corners of the OS.
For some Windows users, it’s already all too much.
Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the agentic OS plans in a post on X last week, and there was an immediate backlash in the hundreds of replies. “It’s evolving into a product that’s driving people to Mac and Linux,” said one person. “Stop this nonsense,” said another, and one reply even asked for a return to the Windows 7 days of a “clean UI, clean icon, a unified control panel, no bloat apps, no ads, just a pure performant OS.”
There could have been hundreds of more comments, but replies to Davuluri’s post were locked a couple of days later. He did eventually respond to a post from well-known software engineer Gergely Orosz, who criticized Windows’ “weird direction” and questioned Microsoft’s commitment to developers. “We care deeply about developers,” Davuluri said in response. “We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences. When we meet as a team, we discuss these pain points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows.”
The problem for Microsoft is that care and attention to detail feels lacking in Windows these days. Microsoft has a challenge of building an operating system to fit the needs of more than a billion users, and it seems to be pissing off a lot of them right now by focusing on AI instead of improving the fundamentals.
Whenever I write about AI features in Windows, it’s near-impossible to find comments praising the new additions. I’ve tried Copilot Voice and Vision multiple times and most of the time I end up with results like my colleague Antonio found this week. Copilot seems amazing when its magic trick works, but when it fails time and time again, you rapidly lose trust in it.
During my recent break I asked Copilot Vision to help me use a UV bottle sterilizer I had purchased recently. I didn’t have the manual nearby, and the sterilizer has a confusing number of buttons. Copilot Vision recognized it was a sterilizer, but missed the key part that it was a UV model, so it asked me to fill it with water. If I had done that and turned it on, I would have ended up with a kitchen full of smoke and a broken device.
You could forgive this poor advice if this was a beta feature that was hidden away in Windows and years away from widely shipping, but it’s not. Instead, Microsoft is using it as a key marketing tool for its operating system, employing TV ads to encourage people to talk to their PCs. It’s even paying influencers to promote Copilot, and it had to quietly delete an influencer video where the AI assistant embarrassingly incorrectly identified Windows settings.
Microsoft’s push to get people to talk to a PC or let a computer control itself also takes away from why Windows has existed for 40 years. App developers use it to build new platforms, surgeons and doctors rely on it in hospitals, and even ATMs use it to distribute cash around the world. You only need to look at the chaos from the CrowdStrike incident last year to see how much critical infrastructure uses Windows.
It’s this reliable tool that Microsoft seems to want to reshape into something autonomous, increasingly built for AI agents instead of humans. In a recent Dwarkesh Podcast interview, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted that the company’s entire business is moving in this direction. “Our business, which today is an end user tools business, will become, essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work,” Nadella said.
He likened this to how servers became virtualized, creating even more server availability for cloud infrastructure. Now there’s an increased demand for cloud versions of Windows 365, so that agents can use a computer to get human work done. “We’re going to have an end user computing infrastructure business that I think will keep growing,” Nadella said. “Because guess what? It’s going to grow faster than the number of users.”
While Nadella is looking way ahead to a future where this stuff actually works, if indeed it ever does, Davuluri is left trying to shape Windows into a pizza with a billion toppings that please everyone, with a side of AI.
”We are on a journey of evolving what Windows is like for the future,” Davuluri said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month. “These are new capabilities, very much like when we built the app ecosystem with Windows back in the day.”
Microsoft doesn’t appear to be building a dedicated AI operating system and is focused instead on putting AI into all the places that are widely used in Windows. Davuluri wants to “have the new [AI] capabilities be available to [Windows users] in the constructs that we have today.”
The big challenge here for Microsoft is making sure that people can turn this off if they don’t want it. Recall, the Copilot Plus PC feature that automatically takes screenshots of your PC, already spooked Windows users when it was initially turned on by default. Microsoft had to rework Recall and make it opt in, but it has left plenty of people wary of what is being built into Windows 11.
“We have so many people that use Windows for so many different things,” Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences, said in an interview with The Verge. “We are making this accessible so every user can use [AI agents] when they’re ready. It’s their choice, they decide.”
Choice will be key, and you could argue “just don’t use the AI features!” but Microsoft already makes it really hard to avoid Edge and OneDrive in Windows 11, so I don’t have much faith in anyone being able to avoid Copilot. I could also switch to Linux as everyone claims they’re doing on X and Bluesky these days, but I don’t want to be forced to switch OS.
I just want Microsoft to actually respect choice in Windows and listen to what users want. That’s always been a challenge in Redmond, and often why every other release of the operating system is disliked by so many. Windows 11 hasn’t been quite as bad as Vista or Windows 8, but with an agentic overhaul on the horizon, Microsoft could soon find itself needing to release a cleaned-up Windows 12 that makes things right again.
- Nvidia has a fix for Windows 11 performance issues. If you’ve experienced performance issues in games after installing the latest Windows 11 October 2025 update (KB5066835) then Nvidia now has a hotfix driver to address the problems. It’s not clear what games have been impacted by Microsoft’s latest update, but you can grab the latest hotfix driver or wait until the next non-beta release.
- Another Windows 10 feature is coming to Windows 11. Microsoft is finally bringing back calendar appointments to the notification center in Windows 11. It was removed at the launch of Windows 11 in 2021, after Microsoft reworked the taskbar. The new “Agenda view” will be available in preview builds of Windows 11 next month. One day we might even be able to move the taskbar to the top or side of a screen, just like Windows 10.
- Gemini 3 Pro is already available in GitHub Copilot. Google announced its Gemini 3 models this week, and Microsoft was quick to make them the Gemini 3 Pro version available on GitHub Copilot. A mix of models has been key to GitHub Copilot’s success, and Google’s latest model is doing well in benchmarks. I’m hearing we’ll likely get OpenAI’s response in the form of GPT-5.2 in December.
- Microsoft announces a next-gen Cobalt CPU. Microsoft is previewing its Azure Cobalt 200 CPU at its Ignite conference this week. It’s the next generation of the cloud chip that was first announced two years ago, and Microsoft says it will have up to 50 percent higher performance than Cobalt 100. Built on TSMC’s 3nm process node, it will also reduce energy consumption for cloud apps on Azure.
- Microsoft’s Office apps are getting even more free AI features. You previously had to pay an extra $30 per user, per month for AI features inside Office, but Microsoft has been increasingly bringing more and more AI functionality to the base Microsoft 365 subscription. Agent Mode, which originally launched to paid Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers in September, is coming to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for all Microsoft 365 subscribers next year. Copilot Chat inside Outlook is also being improved to make it more useful across your entire inbox. Microsoft is also lowering the entry price for its full Microsoft 365 Copilot features for small businesses. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business launches next month, priced at $21 per month instead of $30 for businesses with fewer than 300 users.
- Microsoft Agent 365 lets businesses manage AI agents like they do people. Agent 365 is one of Microsoft’s bigger announcements at Ignite this week. It’s designed to help businesses deploy and organize AI agents securely, to ensure these new AI coworkers don’t do anything unexpected. Agent 365 is effectively a framework that has dashboards to show how AI agents are operating, with telemetry and alerts. It allows businesses to register AI agents with Microsoft Entra registry, limit what they have access to, ensure they can integrate with Microsoft 365 apps, and protect against external and internal security threats. This entire framework should allow AI agents to show up inside businesses just like a human coworker would, inside global address lists and more.
- Windows is getting hardware-accelerated BitLocker. The next iteration of BitLocker, Microsoft’s encryption feature in Windows, will require next-generation Windows devices that are built on unannounced chips. “Hardware acceleration of BitLock requires the capability in the silicon platform,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri. “As and when those capabilities are available, the OS will be able to unlock them for users.” These devices are launching at some point in 2026, and I suspect we might hear more about them at CES in January.
- Microsoft is adding Sysmon into Windows. Sysmon was first released in 2014 as a utility for security analysis into the Windows Event Log. Built by Microsoft technical fellow Mark Russinovich with assistance from Thomas Garnier, Sysmon is now making its way directly into Windows 11 in early 2026. It’s a great addition to the base operating system, as it will make it easier for security teams and IT admins to detect and respond to threats.
- Microsoft’s new Anthropic partnership brings Claude AI models to Azure. Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic this week that brings the AI startup’s models to Microsoft Foundry for the first time. As part of the deal, Anthropic is also committing to purchasing $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and “to contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt.” Microsoft Foundry customers can now access Anthropic’s frontier Claude models including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. As part of these partnerships, Nvidia is investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic, with Microsoft also investing $5 billion. I see this deal as more of a hedge against OpenAI, particularly because Microsoft has been impressed with some of the Claude AI models and is prioritizing them over similar alternatives from OpenAI in Office and GitHub Copilot.
- Talking to Windows’ Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent. My colleague Antonio Di Benedetto has been testing Copilot Vision and Voice, and the results aren’t great. Microsoft has been advertising a bunch of different Copilot features in its TV ads, but when you actually try to re-create them, it goes horribly wrong. I’m stunned Microsoft is using its Windows advertising budget on Copilot Vision and Voice when they’re both far from being the slick “fluent conversation” that Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman claims Copilot is. He’s mindblown by critics of Copilot, but I’m mindblown that Microsoft executives can’t understand that it just doesn’t work properly a lot of the time.
- Windows on Arm is now ready for gaming thanks to some big changes. It’s been a while since I tested PC games on Qualcomm chips, but it looks like things are finally starting to improve. Qualcomm has released a Snapdragon Control Panel this week that automatically detects and optimizes games in a similar way to Nvidia’s app. It also improves anti-cheat compatibility in games like Fortnite. Coupled with AVX and AVX 2 support in Microsoft’s Prism emulator, it looks like things are heading in the right direction just in time for new Snapdragon X2 chips.
- Microsoft expects more games to require Secure Boot, TPM, and VBS. Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 are two of the biggest games to require both Secure Boot and TPM on Windows machines. It’s part of an anti-cheat effort in multiplayer games, and Microsoft now expects “more titles requiring features like TPM, Secure Boot, and advanced protections such as VBS.” Virtualization-based Security has been enabled by default in Windows 11 and it does include a performance hit on a variety of CPUs. I’d expect this trio of technologies will help further secure Windows for anti-cheat, but it won’t stop developers from needing access to the Windows kernel anytime soon.
I’m always keen to hear from readers, so please drop a comment here, or you can reach me at [email protected] if you want to discuss anything else. If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s secret projects, you can reach me via email at [email protected] or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.
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