When did “user-friendly” stop being a priority? Is your new version of Outlook for programmers or every-day users?

Yes microsoft has been going down the drain for the last 15 years. Just to write this comment I had to agree to the privacy statement which also gives them permission to send me spam. I can't choose to accept the privacy statement without also accepting the spam. To log in I now have to jump through several hoops instead of just username+password. Just to access the hotmail web mail you have to jump through several hoops and security measures. There are so many security measures and its all set up in such a clunky manner that the user experience is gone.

If you told me they are intentionally killing off their userbase so that they can slowly get rid of them for some reason then I would have no issue believing you. It is amazing how much harder to find and more clunky they make each iteration of hotmail, windows, outlook and basically all microsoft apps across the board. Take Windows Movie Maker for example. Used to be easy to work with. Same for paint. They screwed up paint, how can you screw up paint? Basically instead of just being able to draw lines they are now each objects with a dot at the beginning and end. So if you want to draw fast and accidentally touch those dots then you constantly accidentally move lines you dont want to have moved.

And then there's Windows itself.

Remember when you could right-click something and immediately get the options you needed? Now Windows 11 hides many of them behind an additional "Show more options" menu. So something that previously required two clicks now requires three. Multiply that by the hundreds of little actions people perform every day and you get an operating system that actively wastes your time.

Or take the Control Panel. Microsoft has spent years moving settings into the new Settings app without actually completing the job. So now you have two different places to configure your computer, and sometimes you have to go digging through both to find what you're looking for. Settings that were once easily accessible are buried several menus deep, renamed, relocated, or simply removed.

And Windows Search? You'd think searching for a file or application on your own computer would be a fairly straightforward task. But no, Microsoft decided it also needed to be a gateway to Bing and web results. I want to find a file on MY computer. I don't need a search engine trying to sell me something or tell me what's trending.

Then there's the never-ending obsession with Microsoft accounts. Why does everything need an account now? Why should I need an online account just to use my own computer? Why does Microsoft constantly push cloud integration, syncing, and online services when all I want is to use a program locally?

OneDrive is another perfect example. Instead of being an optional tool that you deliberately choose to use, it's increasingly pushed into the Windows experience. Users can end up confused about whether their files are stored locally or in the cloud, and why their Desktop or Documents folders are suddenly being synced. Something as basic as knowing where your own files are shouldn't require investigating Microsoft's cloud storage settings.

And don't even get me started on the constant pushing of Edge, Bing, Microsoft 365, and now Copilot. Every few years Microsoft develops a new obsession and proceeds to shoehorn it into everything, regardless of whether anyone actually asked for it.

Why does my operating system need to advertise products to me? I already paid for Windows. I shouldn't have to keep dismissing recommendations, promotions, and reminders to use Microsoft's other services.

Then there's Office. Word, Excel, and Outlook used to be straightforward productivity applications. Now everything revolves around Microsoft 365, subscriptions, cloud integration, account management, and an ever-changing interface. Features get moved around, menus get reorganized, and users have to relearn how to perform tasks they've been doing for 20 years. The applications haven't necessarily become more useful for ordinary users, just more complicated.

Outlook is particularly ridiculous. Microsoft had perfectly functional email interfaces and desktop applications, yet it keeps redesigning them, replacing familiar functionality, changing layouts, and making previously simple tasks harder to find. The new Outlook is a perfect example of Microsoft's obsession with replacing established desktop software with web-based experiences, even when that means losing functionality people actually used.

And then there are Windows updates. Instead of simply being able to decide when and how to update your own machine, you're constantly dealing with update prompts, restarts, changes to settings, and occasionally discovering that an update has changed something you specifically configured the way you wanted it.

Even the Start menu has become progressively less useful. What used to be a straightforward way to access installed programs has turned into a mixture of pinned apps, recommendations, search suggestions, and other things Microsoft wants to put in front of you.

The underlying pattern is always the same: take something simple that works, redesign it for no obvious reason, remove useful features, bury the remaining functionality behind extra menus, add account requirements, integrate a bunch of online services nobody asked for, and then market the whole thing as an improvement.

And whenever users finally get accustomed to the new interface, Microsoft changes it again.

It's almost as if the people designing these products don't actually use them for everyday work.

I wouldn't even mind new features if they were genuinely optional. But that's the problem. Microsoft doesn't seem satisfied with adding functionality. It constantly wants to change the way you work, push you into its ecosystem, and dictate how you're supposed to use your own computer.

I am sure Microsoft employs thousands of talented engineers, which makes the whole situation even more baffling. How can a company with that much money, expertise, and decades of experience consistently make such basic aspects of the user experience worse?

Microsoft seems to have forgotten a fundamental principle of good software design: the purpose of software is to make the user's life easier, not to make the user adapt to the software company's latest business strategy.

At some point you have to wonder whether anyone at Microsoft still measures success by how quickly and easily people can accomplish everyday tasks, or whether the only things that matter anymore are subscriptions, engagement, cloud adoption, account creation, and how many products they can push into an already bloated operating system.

The sad part is that Microsoft used to make some genuinely excellent, simple, practical software. And much of it didn't need replacing. It just needed maintaining and improving.

Not every piece of software needs to become a platform, not every feature needs to be connected to the cloud, not every application needs AI, and not every single interaction needs to be an opportunity to sell the user something.

Sometimes people just want to open a program, do what they need to do, save their work, and get on with their lives.

Apparently that's too much to ask.

Oh yeah and windows explorer constantly crashing? Search sucking so bad that the alternative third party app like Everything is 100x better? That windows explorer itself is so sluggish that almost ANY third party navigator for your PC is superior? How can you make the most important part of your operating system work like shit?

I could go on for days. Absolute horribly bloated design microsoft has become. The only reason I still use it is because its easiest to run games on it + develop games on. Thats all.