JANUARY 31, 2026
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. – ANNEGRET HILSE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Key takeaways
- Consumer complaints about Windows 11 are loud and persistent.
- People are angry about buggy updates and unwanted features like AI.
- To repair trust, Microsoft needs to take consumers more seriously.
In Microsoft’s most recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella announced that the number of monthly active Windows 11 users has topped 1 billion. Ending support for Windows 10 last October clearly worked.
But that doesn’t mean those customers are happy, and Microsoft knows it. In a statement to Tom Warren at The Verge, Windows chief Pavan Davuluri said:
The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. … This year you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows.
I’ve been covering Microsoft for a long time, and one thing I have learned over those decades is that Windows users love to complain about Windows.
They criticized the “Fisher-Price” look of Windows XP. They considered Windows Vista “a world-class villain, an object of scorn and ridicule.” They found Windows 7 too expensive, with too many versions and a confusing interface. They were extremely annoyed with Windows 8, the most polarizing product Microsoft ever released.
Even Windows 10, widely considered the most popular version ever, had its share of skeptics in the early days.
So, it’s not surprising that people are complaining about Windows 11. It’s what people do!
But the tone and volume of those complaints feel markedly different lately. Windows 11 was released nearly five years ago, which means it’s halfway through the traditional 10-year support cycle for a Windows release. Five years in, Windows 11 should feel polished, mature, and stable; instead, it feels like a work in progress, increasingly filled with features its users don’t want.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been monitoring the increasingly angry feedback from Windows customers in official and unofficial channels, including my own inbox. Those complaints fall into five broad categories, and Microsoft is making a big mistake if it doesn’t pay close attention.
1. Windows Update is a ‘glitchy mess’
When it comes to Windows updates, Microsoft is on a roll lately, but not the good kind. The first Patch Tuesday update of 2026 was a glitchy mess, requiring two separate out-of-band updates — released outside of the normal cycle.
Is this bad? Well, the issues in question were not widespread. One bug involved “remote desktop connections using the Windows App on Windows client devices, on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365,” which is a rarefied enterprise scenario. Another bug affected machines running the two-year-old 23H2 version with Secure Launch (another enterprise feature) enabled.
Another reported issue affects a “limited number of machines” that booted up to a black screen. Microsoft is still investigating that one but notes that it appears to affect devices that had experienced a failure while installing the December 2025 updates; “no customers have reported observing these symptoms on home use devices,” they say. I couldn’t find any public reports from users affected by these issues.
Microsoft, to its credit, documents all these issues on its Windows release health dashboard, which makes it easy for tech reporters to write snarky posts about update problems.
And let’s get real here: Windows updates have been a mess for as long as I can remember. When I looked back at the first five years of Windows 10, I found some horrifying reports. The initial rollout of the 2016 Windows 10 Anniversary Update, for example, caused some PCs to freeze after completing the upgrade, resulted in reboot loops for others, and broke an important enterprise feature.
That was just the warmup. In October 2018, Microsoft released a feature update with a data-destroying bug. It was perhaps the worst Windows update ever:
An embarrassing drip-drip-drip of additional high-profile bug reports has continued all month long. Built-in support for Zip files is not working properly. A keyboard driver caused some HP devices to crash with a Blue Screen of Death. Some system fonts are broken. Intel pushed the wrong audio driver through Windows Update, rendering some systems suddenly silent. Your laptop’s display brightness might be arbitrarily reset.
I could find plenty of other examples, but you get the point.
Some of this is just inevitable in a universe that involves more than 1 billion Windows PCs, running on an inconceivably complex assortment of hardware configurations. My personal experience with Windows 11 updates has been generally uneventful. But that’s just one data point, and it’s little consolation to anyone who gets slammed by one of those bugs.
2. The push to add AI features to Windows is exhausting
Satya Nadella has made it clear that AI is not just a Windows add-on — a sprinkle of cilantro on top of the spicy Windows stew. It’s the main course. Those features, all lumped under the Copilot brand, are the future of the “agentic OS” that Windows will become someday soon.
In a rambling post titled “Looking ahead to 2026,” Nadella argued that “we need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication.” In response, the internet made “Microslop” the most popular meme of the new year. (It didn’t help that Nadella’s essay referred to AI as “a new concept that evolves ‘bicycles for the mind’ such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential…” Uh, what?)
With every new update, Windows 11 gets some new AI-powered, Copilot-branded feature. There’s a Copilot app that hosts OpenAI and Anthropic chatbots; semantic search is embedded in File Explorer, with AI-fueled search also taking up residence in the Settings app. Still more AI-enhanced features are in the Photos app, and there’s even AI in the enterprise security features. On Copilot PCs, the controversial Recall feature is waiting for you to give it the go-ahead to start snapping screenshots every few seconds.
They even added AI features to Notepad. Is nothing sacred?
Even the boss admits these features are unfinished. “We are still in the opening miles of a marathon,” Nadella says. “Much remains unpredictable.” And yet those features are being shoveled into Windows at breakneck speed.
You want to turn off AI in Windows? Good luck. You can uninstall the Copilot app, but the underlying components are there to stay, and the supported tools to disable them via Group Policy and registry settings are now deprecated.
Ironically, the core features of Windows work better than ever, for the most part. New Windows PCs start up quickly, and the latest generation of CPUs from Qualcomm and Intel finally live up to the promise of all-day battery life. Alas, all of that progress is being overwhelmed by the drumbeat of new, half-baked AI features.
3. Upsells are everywhere
Nearly three years ago, I wrote Here’s why Windows PCs are only going to get more annoying. I regret to inform you that every prediction in that article has come true, with this sentence summarizing the whole sorry situation:
Increasingly, Microsoft is treating Windows as a giant billboard where it can promote and cross-sell other products.
The result is what critics call “bloatware.” People have been calling Windows bloated for as long as I can remember. (I wrote about it 20 years ago, in one of my first posts for ZDNET!) But Microsoft’s need for revenue is making the problem more obvious than ever.
Redmond collects a few measly bucks when it sells a copy of Windows 11 Home edition to a PC maker, which then sells that PC to you. To keep the revenue stream flowing, an army of MBAs is working nonstop to monetize your Windows experience.
Which is why you see repeated offers to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft 365, and OneDrive on your new Windows 11 PC, and why you are urged at every turn to use Edge as your default browser and Copilot as your go-to search engine. You can say no, but the offers are relentless.
4. Forced migrations to OneDrive are infuriating
I will give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here and stipulate that the OneDrive Backup feature is a good thing for their customers. Giving people a free stash of cloud storage and automatically backing up their important files can prevent the nightmare of losing those files permanently because of a disk crash or a ransomware attack.
But the way that they’ve implemented that feature has been a complete mess. Want proof? Just go to Reddit and search for OneDrive deleted my files. The results go on and on and on and on.
I’ve already written extensively about this botched implementation, so I won’t repeat that here. (For details, see “OneDrive Backup just got a massive change for the better – how it works now.”) Microsoft has been experimenting with the feature in recent months, but it hasn’t solved the underlying problem: The OneDrive Backup feature gets turned on without informed consent from customers, and it’s way too difficult to undo those changes.
5. Consumers have to fend for themselves
The core problem here is simple: Nearly 60% of all Windows PCs are owned by consumers, but the overwhelming share of Windows revenue comes from corporate and enterprise customers. (That breakdown is from June 2022, but I don’t think the enterprise-consumer split has changed much in the past three-and-a-half years.)
In theory, that’s why Microsoft sells Windows in different editions: Home, Pro, Education, and Enterprise.
In practice, that Home edition isn’t really optimized for consumers. It’s the exact same set of bits that corporate customers get, with a few management features that are turned off by default. All of the development resources are going to serving the needs of those corporate customers, who pay big bucks every month for those licenses.
When consumers encounter problems with Windows, they need to consult the same resources and use the same tools that corporate IT professionals use, even though most of them don’t have the training or experience for those jobs.
Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft needs to shift some resources to supporting the baseline computing needs of those consumers instead of simply treating them like faceless serfs to be monetized. No one running a so-called Home edition of Windows should be forced to manually edit the registry or run PowerShell scripts to manage updates or turn off features they don’t want to use. Those users shouldn’t have their files moved to OneDrive without their informed consent. If they choose an alternative browser or search engine, that choice should be respected.
To make that happen, someone has to own the Windows consumer experience and commit to making it useful for people who aren’t IT pros. That doesn’t mean simply removing enterprise features and giving home users a stripped-down set of beginner tools. Rather, it means thinking about how to serve the core computing needs of people who don’t have a technical background but know what they want in a personal computer.
Honestly, I don’t think Microsoft will take this advice. After all, it means spending money on something other than AI features, and it offers only expenses, with little opportunity to balance that with revenue. But, if those lofty words about “addressing pain points” aren’t met, Microsoft can expect its reputation and its market share to continue to erode as customers look for alternatives from the company’s many competitors.
Courtesy/Source: ZDNet
