Windows needs a change in priorities
Except for some <i>details</i>, I really REALLY like Windows.  Really what I&#x27;m liking is computing, and Windows is a big part of that because I selected Windows instead of Linux.<p>Over the years there have been some changes:  So, we have new hardware, some HUGELY important new communications standards, a huge effort on computer security, etc., and it is crucial that Windows has kept up with the changes.  I like that.  And I like that I can still run my favorite old programs:  Since I do all I can with <i>plain text</i>, my most heavily used program is my favorite text editor KEDIT.  And I really like hierarchical file systems so really REALLY like Microsoft&#x27;s NTFS (new technology file system) and do a lot of tree walking, searching, copying, deleting, etc.<p>But Microsoft went for an unstated <i>philosophy</i> of a <i>graphical user interface</i> (GUI) where (a) there is a <i>metaphor</i> of <i>direct manipulation</i> of <i>desktop objects</i> and (b) commands and operations are to be learned by experimentation without documentation.  I can see some utility there, otherwise I still like command lines because the documentation tends to be better, it is more clear just what is going on, and I can <i>script, automate</i> some of the operations.<p>And I get to write software, e.g., in .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET for my Web site startup and whatever else seems worthwhile.  So far, I like .NET.  I do wish Microsoft had explained, just explained in simple text, just what the heck .NET CORE was.  By now I&#x27;ve come to a guess that .NET CORE is irrelevant to me and I should f&#x27;get about it -- would have been nice to have had some EXPLANATION.<p>For the future of GUIs, that seems to be just Web pages, i.e., HTML.<p>For me, the above is the view of Windows I find most important.  For the future, I hope that Microsoft does not mess up that view.  To have me a happier customer, Microsoft should concentrate on one word, DOCUMENTATION.<p>I can understand that Microsoft has some middle managers who want to add things to Windows or change Windows to <i>improve</i> it.  Now, for changes such as I mentioned above, SURE.  Otherwise, please sit down:  Each new version of Windows I find to be, in one word, a <i>pain</i>.  The changes are not <i>improvements</i> but PAINS.  E.g., with the old version of Windows, after hundreds of hours of work I finally learned and documented for myself how to get routine things done.  Then with the changes, I have to invest many more hours just to be able to continue to get routine things done and for no gains at all.  Sorry Microsoft middle manager:  To me you are like TV producers, what they try for, I don&#x27;t like; what I like, they don&#x27;t try for.<p>E.g., as far as I can tell from a command line window<p>Examples:<p>&gt; runas &#x2F;noprofile &#x2F;user:mymachine\administrator cmd<p>is wrong.  Just wrong.  It doesn&#x27;t work.  First, set aside that from this &quot;example&quot; can&#x27;t tell what is a constant and what is a variable.  So, try all possible combinations.  Second, still, nothing works.  Nothing.  Go for 1, 2, 3 hours trying everything.  Did I mention, nothing works?  This is grotesquely bad computing.  Just awful.  Want to make things better, fix things like that.<p>But it&#x27;s worse:  Go out on the Internet and can find lots of documentation of that command.  Some of the documentation has lots of double quote marks.  Nothing worked.  Hours; nothing worked.  We&#x27;re talking mud wrestling here.  Eventually I got the software to request my administrator password, but that was as far as it went.<p>This isn&#x27;t my work.  Yet my time, effort, energy are soaked up, repeatedly, over and over, by such system management mud wrestling documentation problems.<p>Eventually I guessed some of what was going on and found another path that did work.  It&#x27;s not fully clear just why that worked, but it did.<p>Documentation?  I took some good notes, and apparently they are better than anything from Microsoft or readily available on the Internet.<p>The main bottleneck in my startup is the bad documentation that leads to wasted effort in this mud wrestling.  What fraction of my effort goes to such stuff?  Essentially 100% -- I can&#x27;t get back to my real work due to a continuing list of such disasters.  They are taking up ALL my time, just mud wrestling from bad documentation.<p>For Windows, Firefox, Acrobat, etc., sure, important security updates and otherwise I&#x27;ll consider updates in functionality maybe twice a year, maybe once a year, or once each 2nd year.  Except for security, bluntly and quite broadly I don&#x27;t want your updates but will consider some, say, occasionally.  As you force updates on me, I get TORQUED, become a VERY unhappy customer.<p>E.g., Adobe went too far, essentially taking over my PC, at startup, with updates I don&#x27;t want, with popups, with &quot;Do you want to ...&quot;, and yesterday I deleted everything from Adobe now &quot;Dead to me.&quot;. Firefox will read a PDF (portable document format) file, at least the ones I want read, a little better than Acrobat.  Adobe, with me, you went too far and BLEW IT.<p>I have big hopes for the future of computing for myself, Microsoft, the computer industry, the economy, and civilization, but I want do to my part, get on with it, and there is no room in that work for me to click &quot;NO&quot; tens of thousands of times to popup windows stopping my work until I answer some &quot;Do you want to ...&quot;, and there is no excuse for the system management mud wrestling from bad documentation.<p>At one time Microsoft was very interested in &quot;developers, developers, developers!!!&quot;.  Well, I&#x27;m trying to be one.  Then I hope to be a good customer for Windows Server and SQL Server.  And on Windows XP and Windows 7 I got 100,000 lines of .NET code running apparently as intended.  But now I&#x27;ve lost YEARS of time in system management mud wrestling from bad documentation.<p>I can&#x27;t be a good customer of Windows Server if you have me stuck in a mud hole wasting time.