“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server | Hacker News Reader

“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server

windowslatest.com

1,182 pointsrobtherobber551 comments

I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.

Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.

That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

It is until it isn't, but I think this is the same trap as not training up junior engineers. The consumer market is often where future engineers and professionals first interact with technology, being exposed to Windows early and being able to use it at school and at home have always been major drivers of adoption at work.

Linux is another perfect example - devs who wanted a unix-ish system landed on it early in their own work and education (partly due to the BSD licensing stuff too) - and over time it became one of the most commonly used server operating systems.

I think this is Microsoft optimizing for predictable growth, just like everyone else is doing right now, but this is shortsighted and ultimately a defensive posture, not one suited for the future.

What choice do they really have though? More and more consumers completely forgo owning a regular computer and only use a phone or a tablet now a days. And among the ones who do own a computer there's still a strong trend towards not paying for software, presumably a behavior taught to them by the overwhelming success of strictly ad-financed apps.

It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.

I'm always astounded by the tendency to bet it all on core competencies and wind down every other effort that's profitable but not profitable _enough _ As if times don't change, innovation never happens, and your accessory plays of today are never the overtaking market of tomorrow.

Kodak comes to mind. They invented digital photography, but their film people deliberately kneecapped their digital people. Killed the company.

I worked for a camera company that made boatloads of cash from point-and-shoot cameras. That entire business was pretty much turned into chum by smartphones. I remember them refusing to even take the iPhone seriously, when it was announced. They took a serious hit, but seem to be recovering.

It’s basically management 101. But I’ve gone through that phase and come out the other end believing that outsourcing any of the functions that aren’t commodified enough to switch at a moment’s notice is a terrible idea.

That's been obvious for years. It feels like they're extracting whatever remaining money they can get from the home PC market while it lasts but won't much miss it when it's gone.

I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.

Their new appointment of leader for their Xbox group suggests that they intend to wind down that business unit in time. The founder of the Xbox team has commented that he believes it’s the beginning of the end for Xbox, for the exact reasons of this thread.

> home PC market while it lasts

Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.

It's not fully clear yet but they definitely gave up on the current Xbox strategy, after firing both the CEO and the next-in-line and replacing them with people previously working on integrating AI around the entire product line. Sure they said they won't fill up Xbox with soulless AI slop, not sure I believe them.

Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!

That's been obvious for decades. Everyone who worked in the 90's or 00's has stories about coming in one day to find that the VP has been conned into a $1m contract for MS office or development software everyone hates and now we all have to use it because if we don't then he made a huge mistake and VPs don't make huge mistakes.

So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.

Nadella has been the best thing to happen to MS since Gates. He came from Azure.

I’m pretty sure that Amazon now makes most of their money from AWS.

I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.

What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.

At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.

As an enterprise admin of Microsoft services I think they're pretty mediocre. Their stuff is always behind the state of the art. It's just good enough to not go for a third party option that isn't included in their bundle pricing. But it never really satisfies, it's always got this 'make do' feeling about it.

The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.

It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.

It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.

> During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products.

Nowadays phones, tablets and game boxes are the consumer products. Currently they outnumber consumer windows desktops by about 6 or 7 to 1 [0]. 5 years ago, it was about 3.5 to 1.

Microsoft doesn't seem to have much control over this. They are executing a pivot in response.

[0] https://learn.g2.com/operating-system-statistics#:~:text=Mic...

> Mac OS X's market share in the US climbed from 12.17% in December 2022 to 22.08% in May 2023. The market share was consistent for the next few months until it dropped to 14.03% in December 2023.

What. MacOS doubled from December to the next may, then cut in half by the next December? I’m skeptical. It also talks about approval ratings for OS X Lion, from 14 years ago. I think that site is powered by a set of dice.

I think your overall point is correct, but I’m doubting that reference as an accurate data source.

Foolish since a world where no one uses Windows at home will ve damaging for enterprise long term.

I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks. Kids are growing up using them.

If they aren't focused on consumer products they should stop shoving half baked features into them and let them coast. I can't imagine any enterprise solutions updating windows and being complacent that an LLMA was shoved into their OS overnight.

> According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.

> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.

This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.

Considering that

- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)

- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)

I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.

Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.

I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.

If Windows 2000 still had security updates and modern hardware support, I'd sure as heck still be using it. Every version since has been a regression.

After using agentic AI that can actually do things (like cursor or even GitHub Copilot) using the AI in Microsoft products feels like an absolute joke. People want it to do actual things like apply a template to their PowerPoint or fill out a spreadsheet etc. but it just copies the work and makes you a new file to download pulling you absolutely out of the workflow. I've seen users excited for it and then get a new file to download in the chat and just quit using it completely in disappointment.

Even the developer tools are clunky and slow to use (SSMS, Visual Studio, VSCode) or can't do simple things like make a new file and put code it generates in.

This is 100% true.

You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?

The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.

Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.

So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.

"So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop."

Micro-slop(tm).

> All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them.

This mentality is very US-American. The cynic in me says: "Simply move the development to a different country to get rid of this problem." ;-)

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

In some ways. Less so in others.

For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.

Yeah. It's telling that this story is about their discord channel, not Teams.

Not surprising, but it's sad to accept that the only major company building consumer-focused computing devices is Apple.

My hope is that LLMs allow linux to gain market share quickly. I know personally I've had a much smoother time moving to linux now that I can delegate a lot of the annoying troubleshooting/customization to claude.

Being able to say something like "I don't like the window colors make them more consistent with my terminal color scheme" and have it "just work" feels like a superpower. I've even gone as far as asking Claude to directly edit the icon pack svg files to whenever if I encounter something that feels out of place.

this is interesting because of how much it differs from my own hopes. I don't really have any personal need or want for the Linux desktop marketshare to increase. I like computers because I can program them to do something and it will do it. Ideally you have complete control over it. I've customized my desktop here and there in order to get some result, but while you care most about the _result_, for me the act of _making_ that result happen is as important if not more. I'm not looking to offload it to something else.

I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.

I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.

See where IBM is now though. Between some legacy hardware and random consulting services, they don't really have much of a strategy. They just exist because people still need them for old stuff and because older people trust their name. They used to lead the industry. Now they're not leading anything.

Of course their enterprise focus wasn't their only failure. But it was a factor in one of the biggest failures: their underestimation of the importance of the PC. They allowed Microsoft to market DOS to clones because they didn't see the potential.

So yeah I think their focus on enterprise was one of their biggest failures.

I am not sure if the average executive is dumb or just shortsighted. Imagine making decisions based solely on the optics of the Pareto principle when corporate history itself says that is fraught with risk.

I once worked for a retail computer repair shop that had an unbelievable amount of ethical concerns ( many things outright illegal). Among them was cracking Windows Vista or installing 7, cracking it and then rolling to Windows 10 get a license key from MS and then charging the customer for a license key.

I tried calling MS to report it and the guy on the other side said they didn't have a process for handling that and basically suggested I hang up.

> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

And all of the ERP vendors.

That said, most FOSS devs don't target those platforms for releases, so IMO the same approach should be taken with Microsoft products then.

MS is the new IBM

I would have been suspicious of this until I saw a quote for an E5 license

They’ve always been B2B driven. Solving their own internal problems easily lends itself to solving the problems of other comparably sized orgs.

I got the same info. Windows kernel is developed for B2B needs, if something might be useful to B2C, they might eventually get it, but they don’t affect the roadmap.

That's fine, they should still do a good job for moral reasons rather than economic ones, and they deserve to be dragged through the mud if they do not.

Is this a joke?

IBM market cap is 225B, Microsoft market cap is 2.9T. IBM literally lost its matket to Microsoft in 80s and 90s specifically because it was too focused on enterprise...

Microslop got a much bigger market capture before pivoting to B2B as its focus. It could shift because it feels its too entrenched in society, so not much is needed to maintain the safe revenue stream.

That sentiment is characteristic of the Gates to Ballmer leadership change.

I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.

Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.

For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...

>The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error.

Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.

Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.

>when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?

I'm sorry, what? I don't know if this is because of the developer-bubble mindset on HN (or the wealth gap that comes with that), but Windows adoption on the consumer level is around 70% and close to 90% on the business level. This actually falls short from what I see anecdotically (I don't live in any North-American / European country), which is close to 95% of Windows adoption, in general.

> with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure

Linux.

> AI

The slop people are complaining about.

> and enterprise solutions.

Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.

seems like

  microsoft = 1/apple

"We sell car tires, selling fruit is just a side business."

"The fact that our fruit is rotten and customers complain about that does not faze us as, again: we're primarily a car tire business and that's where our revenue comes from."

The 'reasoning' of the sociopath-level[1] of the corporate hierarchy never fails to entertain.

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Hmm

Hehe, this reminds me of 30 years ago when people used to stylise it as Micro$oft or creatively misspell it as Microshaft, etc. Even on the Amiga, there was the filesystem that could read PC format disks that was called MessyDos. It just seems like the next generation has discovered what an easy name it is to make puns from.

If you're German-speaking: "Klopilot" and "Vibrierkot" are some modern day personal favorites.

On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.

There are regions in Germany (Hessen) where "Azure" is pronounced the exact same way as "Ärger" (trouble). Makes you think...

Ok, Vibrierkot is something for the German shitpost communities with all my Zuhausis im Zwischennetz.

Maybe you can explain it for we non German speakers.

> Klopilot

funnily enough works just fine in Polish

> Klopilot

I like "Copy-lot".

You made me laugh, thanks.

As a Polish man I love Klopilot <3

Don’t forget Kleinweich

Winamp, by Nullsoft.

"Der Ätsch-Browser".

One of my favorites being Micros~1, in reference to how Windows had to mangle file names for DOS's 8+3 character limit.

That and PROGRA~1 brings back memories.

If I recall correctly, this was especially common around the time of the antitrust trial, with the possibility of Microsoft being split into a Micros~1 and Micros~2.

I remember it being used in speculative discussions around which units might end up where.

definitely the nerdiest one hahaha

I used M$ at work the other day by accident, I was like ooh wait this isn't turn of the century slashdot.

From my parent's home in Wyoming I stab at thee!

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m

there was an old humour piece on /. about how their name appeared so many times in their products that it took up a significant amount of space, so they were remaining themselves "moft" to save five bytes per instance. for some reason that stuck with me, I still find myself randomly thinking of them as moft every now and then.

Last week on a comedy show (the daily show) they made a joke about bill gates "micro and soft" which was old in the 90s already, so I can confirm this is the case.

I think this was 100% justifiable use. If the founder of the company is going to be hanging out with pedophiles and sex traffickers, then micro and soft jokes are open season. All of his philanthropic adventures will never wipe his stain clean.

I've always said it was in bad taste for Bill Gates to name the company after his johnson.

MS-DOS itself is derived from QDOS, which stands for "Quick and Dirty Operating System".

Things only went downhill from there.

Orgs have had sensitive skin like this for a long time. Gamespy was a service for launching and playing multiplayer games with lobbies before Steam, and if you “accidentally” typed “GaySpy” (it was the early 2000s) it would autocorrect to “GameSpy” by the time it appeared in your messages.

https://xkcd.com/2015/

“i'll spell it MICRO$LOTH WINBLOWS in a DELICIOUS TWIST” https://leisuretown.com/library/qac/25.jpg

In Brazil people used to say "Ruindows", which is a play with the portuguese word for bad.

Cocô-pilot would work here

Don't forget Windoze.

In french we have Windaube (pronunced Windob).

Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.

Don't forget Winblows

Internet exploder

In Polish we used to say "Winzgroza" (win terror)

I always like Wangblows

in Italy it was WinZozz (zozzo = dirty)

Been in this industry since I graduated college, I have never stopped using Micro$oft or Microshaft. Also a fan of M$, Winblows…

Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.

I actually still have one of these shirts in a box somewhere: https://www.kmfms.com

My favorite nickname for MS-DOS is "Domestos" (pronounced /də ˈmɛs ˌtɒs/) which is a brand of bathroom cleanee from the UK.

Keep the windows open when using Vim on a Domes-Tos system.

[Domestos is a brand name for bleach, and Vim is a scouring powder that was popular decades ago]

I'm starting to use Micro$lop now

I remember one meme image that contained a bar chart where the X axis had Gahnoo Linux and Migrosoft Wendys and the Y axis was just labeled "good". Gahnoo Linux maxed out the good while Migrosoft Wendys bottomed out.

It amazes me that 2026 corporations still choose MS Windows as their base for operations.. together with the Mordor 365 as the mail platform.

As an italian, I like Winzoz, a fusion between Windows and "zozzeria", filth.

In a world without walls or fences, who needs Windows or Gates?

I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.

Every dominant tech company eventually gets the nickname treatment

I usually upgrade that to Micro$hit

Microscope Winblows

I was partial to Micro$haft.

What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot? Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server? What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server? What are we doing here?

The Discord server for Midjourney is said to be one its biggest use point, the source of its largest audience, and one of its biggest sales funnels. Even as other image models have grown more powerful/capable, Discord has been suggested (or blamed, depending on perspective) for keeping Midjourney one of the most popular ones.

I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).

I mean it was the only way to use MidJourney when it released, which is why it's so popular and part of the midjourney community

I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.

Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.

Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.

They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.

That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.

Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.

And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.

There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").

The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".

An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.

I have been in similar groups, and trust me, there are a lot of very enthusiastic users sharing their tools, success stories etc.

I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.

How do you do, fellow kids?

It's for this audience: https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/14/verity_stob_abigails_...

(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)

I have Copilot through work.

I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.

It needs a Discord Server because MS Teams is just that good X_X

It reminds me of the US army and their fabulous idea to open a Twitch channel. Went as well as you expect.

For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.

Someone wanted to get paid to be a Discord mod.

Maybe all the users are OpenClaw instances?

It’s just another checkbox in someone’s performance review, no need to think too hard about it.

Sir, this is an Arby’s

Don’t they have better things to do? Maybe vibecode a taskbar that moves when you try to move away the mouse over it or perhaps a windows 12 installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan?

> installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan

Do you work for Microsoft or something? Please do do not give them ideas.

> moves when you try to move away the mouse over it

They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.

Combine fingerprint biometric with fecal samples for a convenient "fecalprint" button. The user doesn't even have to go into the bathroom! It can be microslops version of Apple's TouchID.

We should start this process early and all start sending our fecal samples to MS headquarters.

> requires a fecal sample So requires the user to log in?

Error: Timeout. Please submit iris scan less than 60 seconds after fecal sample.

I’m at the point to tell people (friends, neighbors, fellow parents, family, ie, not HN readers) to prolong the life of their existing computers and install what I think is the easiest windows equivalent on their computers: kubuntu.

Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.

The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.

Anal folds are as unique as fingerprints. Please submit a high quality hole pic to Microsoft for identity verification

The next Windows should run entirely in the cloud and the user's computer should simply show a video feed of the UX that the cloud generates.

The next step is mandatory id verification for the age check on login.

To protect the children.

I’d like some vibe coding be done such that I can move the task bar to the left vertically, similar to how MacOS lets me move the dock. It gets in the way of games when you mouse over the taskbar as you try to scroll down in many games.

Windows 11 was built without agentic slop. That's a deduction from the timing of its gestation.

Windows 10 was released in January of 2015.

Windows 11 was released in October of 2021.

So this software disaster is entirely human-made. It's human slop.

Just wait, it will get worse, when the team that built the fantastic Windows 11 builds Windows 12, this time with the power of AI amplifying their amazing system design skills, allowing them create even more slop, with an unprecedented developer and team velocity.

Will the oral and anal probe be clearly marked, or will you only get a warning of "swap the probes" after pushing them into wrong holes?

We have to make sure each button loads sequentially on the screen in the "Accept" position, starting with the "Cancel" button before moving it to its eventual home. This ensures you never develop quick navigation habits by constantly moving your targets around from underneath your cursor.

Psst, they already managed to turn the start menu into something that won’t load under one second if you don’t have 3 GB/s NVME drive, and for a while even didn’t respect Fitts law.

In different canton (equivalent to US states) in Switzerland, you take the sample at home, and go to the post office to send it.

So why not to create a M365 account? International dispatch to the US :D

That's a great idea the task bar could just shift to expose a link to sign up for azure/office/OneDrive/CoPilot subscription that the user misclicks on.

"Your privacy and feces are very important for us. " "CoproExperience service helps you and your coworkers have a great time together"

I think Microsoft underestimated how sensitive people are right now to anything that feels like control

If it means I can install it without internet access then I'm willing to accept the trade offs

Great! I can't wait for Clippy to tell me I need to eat more fiber. The future is awesome!

Or maybe vibe code a bug fix for said taskbar so that random icons don’t disappear after sleep.

I can really see them ship the first, that's at the same time very funny, and quite sad.

Notarized document asserting that you've bullied a child. With witnesses.

>Drink verification can

they should have made it a auto editing script

s/Microslob/Macroslob/gi

that would be honest as there isn't anything micro about that slob anymore

> a fecal sample

a micro shit (tm)

Someone misheard iris for anus? lol

“Your sample was insufficient. Please try again later.”

I don't take this lightly. These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government. They simply cannot take criticism and this seems to be a pattern moving forward.

So in other words they'll fit right in

> These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government.

Not really. They want real power

Yeah ban the use of a catchy catch-phrase as you continue to shove AI down your user-base - that'll work. Streisand would be proud.

Most HN readers would now, but in the case somebody new reads it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.

Thank you Microsoft for the The Streisand effect - I've added the "Microslop" to my vocabulary.

Microslop doing Microslop things

Probably the AI blocked it

That is actually hilarious. Microsoft does not understand the Barbara Streisand effect. I did use microslop before, simply because it makes sense, irrespective of Microsoft - but now I'll actually help the Barbara Streisand effect, because clearly Microsoft WANTS everyone to learn the new word!

Censorship gets counter-banned, Microsoft, company known to have turned Win11 into Win-microslop.

Classic Streisand effect - I had never, and probably would have never encountered this term, and now I have, and I am incorporating it into my vocabulary.

Why listen to user feedback when you can do stuff like this? Way too funny.

Not a company well known for listening to user feedback.

I too will incorporate Microslop into my vocabulary.

Not even a week ago I was posting here on HN about Microslop's new calculator which somehow takes 17 seconds to fully open on my work machine while the old notepad program opens instantly. How is it even possible to produce slop this bad? Best part of it is the fact it's open source: if you complain about it some 200kUSD/year Microslop employee will come and tell you to open a pull request.

Why is Microsoft using Discord and not Teams?

So non-employees join and provide free support to other users without having to pay them.

Why would anyone use Teams?

Dogfooding only works when the dog food is edible.

Same reason MS used a Perforce fork instead of Source Safe. Because the dogfood tastes terrible.

One of the executives at the late, great, Sun Microsystems once dunked hard on Microsoft by saying, "At Sun we don't make dogfood. We prefer to refer to it as, 'flying our own airplanes.'"

Microsoft employees largely use Macs, so no surprise.

Discord is owned by Microsoft IIRC.

Oh no, how will people signal that some functionality or product in general is what they'd previously been referring as Mircolosp? er, Microsolps. wait, that's not it either, Macroslop. Micro$lop. Microsplo. Sorry, so many typos! but you know what I mean.

This just means I'm going to say microslop in random places - documents, slides, emails and Teams chats. "Copilot 365" is welcome to give me a red squigly all it wants.

Feel free to say microslop as much as possible, but it should be noted that many people will automatically dismiss your opinion when you do. I don't know if I agree with doing so or not, but it is more common than you'd think. And no, they aren't just microsoft shills.

Don't they allow you to "Add to Dictionary" anymore :)

AI valuation is based on vibes not fundamentals. If the vibes are bad it could tank valuations. That's why theyre so sensitive.

but they make the vibes much worse by doing stuff like this

https://microslop.com/

The header takes half the page. It's very annoying, and as such not really funny.

Someone needs to edit this title to change the first word to MicroSlop

I've never called them MircoSlop before, I haven't even written the word. But it's now my exclusive word for the company.

All I can hear is, it's working.

So this is the company pushing to be an integral part of everyone's lives, forcing it down everyone's throat without consent.

And they're already moderation a light hearted joke about their low quality products.

Doesn't really bode well for the future product Vision.

It's a monopoly. Unless you are a wealthy hipster with money to burn on Apple products. (They also spy on you.)

Was hitting too close to home it seems...

But to be fair, corporate discords have to be like that. Why not create your own channel with your colleagues instead? This discussion would be "private" and corporate can just ignore it.

> create your own channel with your colleagues instead

Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.

Like, why have a public discussion if we can have a private one? Public discussions are important, especially as AI is largely a political project

If I were to bet on what would get a Microsoft Discord server shut down, I would have put money on discussions of the ties between Microsoft executives and Epstein. They should be happy if the worst thing that's happening is a mildly deragatory nickname.

The default of making a public discord for your project/company always seemed like a bad idea anyway. It’ll always devolve into some drama or distracting overhead to moderate it

I think we've found the 2026 word of the year already!

Let's get it out there and make this happen!

They are back in their villain arc. For a while now.

Were they ever out of it? A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... Microsoft has been incredibly anti-consumer for the duration of their existence (even before Steve Ballmer made it blatent)

Our vocabulary is so stunted. Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?

Villain? More like geriatric.

Microsoft, can you please let me remove recommendations from the start menu? Not just less recommendations. I want the category to not be displayed and taking up space.

That's hilarious, I didn't realize you couldn't turn it off. I just tried disabling all the recommendation options and it still shows the category, except now instead of recommended items, it says "to show your recent files and apps, turn them on in Settings."

This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.

It can be ripped out using regedit, I'm sure.

It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.

If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.

What I heard is you would like some highly relevant ads to be at the top of your start menu for your convenience every time you want to start a program.

Oh, and have you heard about OneDrive?

KDE Plasma community likes to recreate Windows environment and W11 application launchers instead of "recommendations" section have a more useful plain recently opened files. Which what Windows had not so long ago.

Micro$lop then.

Macroslop

After that. Microshlong

This is why 2026 will be The Year of the Linux Desktop

Lets go further, year of the Hurd desktop!

My big issue with Microsoft's AI push is that its solutions are just bad. I tried using Copilot a couple of times, and when it worked, the results were low quality (not even mediocre).

And the problem is not that the AI models can't do any better. The models themselves are far more capable. I assume that their integrations are just horrible. They probably pushed to be the first and then forgot about optimizing.

And instead of fixing their stuff, they think it is a good idea to use moderation tools...

It kindof sucks waking up every day, checking HN or YouTube to see one or several new posts bashing on your employer. Not that many of them aren't warranted, and that a multi-trillion market cap company isn't fair game for criticism.

I've surveyed the market pretty heavily, and given my specific credentials, experience, and risk tolerance, unless I got really lucky, I don't know if I could find a better place to work. I live near Redmond and have a small family to support.

Microsoft have been bashed on the daily since forever. There's no way you joined the company without knowing it was happening prior to you joining, at the time of you joining, and after you joining.

I propose let's break up a bunch of these monopolies to give you and your colleagues more options, more competition for your resume.

For what it's worth, my take is Microsoft is the one Big Tech most aligned with us and the rest of the world, though HN is too Slashdot-pilled to accept it.

The primary reason being their business model relies mostly on making people productive, rather than getting people to click on ads or buy stuff, which as we're seeing, is much more damaging to the social fabric.

People don't like your company.

But they'd probably like you.

There can be quite a big difference on the reception of a product and the working conditions. I think that's nothing too out of the ordinary in a lot of cases.

Why is it so important though? Your employer is not you. I regularly bash on my own employer too :) Which is not Microsoft but also big.

I don't care about them or their goals, I'm just there for the money. And trying to not show it too much while I'm rolleyeing through corporate PR crap :) All that fake cardboard feelgood propaganda. It's just theatre to hide the reality: they will do anything to make more money.

I used to be more aligned with the company but with a recent internal leadership change and more sucking up to Trump I've lost a lot of my respect for it. But it's not really an impediment for working there. I just go through the motions. Corporations love their employees chanting how much they care (for us it's even mandatory to make a show of it for our performance review) but in reality most of us just fake it. As a result I don't take any criticism personally, even on my direct work.

Don't forget there is no team play, not really. They will dump you as soon as they see fit. All big publicly traded companies do. They care a lot more about their shareholders than they do allot you. The only goals that matter are your own, like supporting your family.

Several hours worth of anal probe jokes on an article that could likely warrant an actual discussion? That was disappointing to read here.

Tech feels more filled with hipsters every day. If the story is about any major company or product it's just dunked on for social credits. But anything that is outside that is considered interesting and worth further investigation. It's frustrating me to no end.

this is personal anecdote, but I've noticed that the overall quality of comments has plummeted quite drastically within the last few months. It's a little disappointing since its why I left reddit. Thankfully, the insightful comments are typically still there- just typically buried further down the thread.

I would be angry too. Its definitely not that micro.

Microslop.

Has a nice ring to it.

Thank you Streisand effect!

I wonder what is Apple equivalent for this term

Crapple, probably.

Slopple

Siri

Long term, the real fix isn't moderation rules, it's trust

There is only one problem with the term "microslop" coming out of Microsoft.

It should be called "macroslop", just after the amount that company is putting out there.

I propose we refer to them as Microslop from now on.

MS has some snowflake (not Snowflake) execs... Poor little management, they need their safe space from a mean old word.

Let's use Slopilot in the meantime.

Microstreisand?

365Slop all day every day all around

Is Micro$lop also banned?

Ok, Microslop

Microslop? Hmm... Never heard that before! Meanwhile, I just randomly remembered that I haven't opened a couple of dozen social media accounts in ages. BRB!

Ah yes another company disregarding the Streisand effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect.

No one in my circles said this, now I've heard it twice now through headlines of Microsoft trying to punish or block it.

Now I've started saying it too.

I want to be constructive here, but I just cant. So I'm saying the one word in my head:

> Macroplop

Why are they using Discord instead of Teams? Is this an internal Microsoft group? They don't dogfood?

I'm sad that "Klopilot" only works in German.

"Hello, copilot, do you create slop? -> Skibidi slop slop slop aiiiiiii"

they sincerely think that the primary problem they're facing is one of PR, don't they?

Windows 11 is definitely failing in weird ways for me, I don't know if it's due to slop. The latest example is that I can't launch Notepad via the start menu... I can launch other apps though.

I have this problem with calc.exe. Sometimes it'll launch from the start menu, but often won't. I pinned it to the taskbar, but muscle memory is a powerful force, so I usually try to launch it from the start menu first.

Enshitification doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way. You have 10,000 systems all each interacting at a 90% success rate when it needs to be 99.999%.

They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.

Microsoft ban any % speedrun soon.

Is this what the employees do nowadays while their AI is generating code?

It's more and more baffling that people use M$FT for anything besides video games.

These days games run better on Linux, in case anyone didn't know.

I thought they were named Microsloth. Making products like Windoze and Winblows.

So... what's a good Linux distro comparison site? Just asking for a friend.

The way people react to criticism tells you a lot about how deep your remark cut. Clearly Microsoft people know their stuff is slop and are having a hard time coping with that.

remember when they sued a HS student Mike Rowe for his microrowesoft website?

I guess I'll have to go out of my way to refer to their shitty product as "Microslop Copilot" then.

What are they going to do? Ban me from using their operating system?

Microslop Coprolite.

Sloppy.

That's a 'snatch defeat from the jaws of victory moment'

Microslop can't get one right. What is it with them these days..?

lmfao

> Microsoft's brand image may already be at an all-time low

and they decide to make it even worse. it's extremely obvious this would be an objectively terrible PR move. you always take banter on the chin and show that you're working on improving the product.

instead, they try to clamp down on the banter, which, without fail, achieves the exact opposite: banter increases tenfold and you get ridiculed for being overly sensitive to actual criticism

The irony is thick today. HN flagged a microslop post this morning.

Before this article I'd have thought that Microslop was used to designate small snippets of AI slop, like "Let that sync in" or "And to be honest" and "It's not X, it's Y" and "Deepdive" and "Delve".

But nice to see that MS is Streisanding their way to a nice new nickname!

What were the sloperators of that channel thinking?

In any case, it should be Micro$lop (may not be banned...yet).

Tells you a lot about where their focus is at as a company.

It's kind of interesting that Microsoft is deemphasizing if not exiting making products for individuals to decide to buy. Contrast that with Google, who have to actively cultivate individual customers in order to have a large and reliable audience for ad based monetization of search, maps, and other free at the point of use products.

There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.

Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.

Suppressing dissent? Par for the course for them and their WEFfer mates.

Microslop? Its more like they are taking a Macro-crap.

Good thing there's no Linuxslop in Linux...

IDK what's funnier/more pathetic, them doing this or an entire article getting written about it.

MicroslopSlop

> them doing this

Wouldn't any community that wants to encourage good quality conversations immediately ban everyone posting stupid slashdot-esque jokes like this?

...the AI agent sock-puppets pushing false positive narratives about MicroslopSlopSlop, and trolling anyone that disagrees =3

"Bad Bot Problem" (Computerphile)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg

May I coin the term "Slopware"?

Microsoft has a Discord? Why not Teams?

some might view it as an impossible goal, but if they enabled humor they would become more popular

Does M$ honestly expect a positive outcome from this? What do they hope to accomplish?

it will take years to fix their broken products, if they ever focus on that

They don't have to, because dispite how incredibly bad they are, people have shown that they don't care. According to the average user, Windows isn't bad, that's just how computers are. They don't care that there's any other way of doing things; the cheapest computer at Best Buy runs windows so that's what every computer must be.

Piggies love to eat slop.

Micro$oft

What will Elon's "Macrohard" company be called? "Macroheil"?

> the software giant can’t risk getting more hatred towards their expensive investment in Copilot, especially since Microsoft’s head start in AI is starting to be overshadowed by competitors like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and maybe even Apple in the near future

This sentence is from TFA, and I can't for the life of me understand it. "Head start"?? WTF?

Is Micro$$lop banned?

I would honestly be embarrassed to call myself "micro soft" in general.

Unless you're into that kind of thing.

Slopya Nutella

(is that banned?)

Personally I think 2000s Micro$oft would be disappointed that 2026 Microslop is hosting user communities on a 3rd party platform owned other another company rather than using their own competitor.

almost as good as shopifake

This good

Macroslop

so this exists:

microslop.com

I even registered microslop.ee (directs to .com) because of how much I dislike Microslop.

Well played

I am currently re-watching the HBO comedy show Silicon Valley, and oh man, is it hitting even harder this time than when it was originally released.

The butthurt level is high up in there

lmao

idiots

Most discord users are children, more news at 11

Discord/Reddit moderators living up to their obnoxious stereotype as usual.

I don't know for certain, but moderators (on a company Discord) are likely random people in a 3rd world country that are payed peanuts and that is their only income. If higher ups tell them "I don't want to see the Microslop word anywhere" they just do it.

You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.

Spamming "microslop" is obnoxious, filtering out childish behaviour is not obnoxious.

But if you don't want childish behaviour, Discord is an ... interesting choice.

Wow, so someone opened a discord server for a community and banned an insulting word for the community? This must be a first.

Is "Microslop" really insulting, though?

> someone

It's Microsoft's official Copilot Discord. Microsoft banned the word

They really showed him, didn't they?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com