Slightly coherent rant about a menu
Microsoft has moved something again.
This morning I went to add a mail rule, a thing I have done a thousand times, and Exchange met me with a cheerful little banner. Learn about the new menu. Then I hovered over a section I didn’t recognise, called Roles, and got my explanation: The Permissions feature in the classic Exchange admin center has been renamed Roles here. They renamed Permissions to Roles.
Why? Nobody woke up this morning unable to find Permissions. Nobody filed a ticket saying they’re offended by the word “permissions”.
Exchange has done essentially the same job since the sun first sputtered into life 4.6 billion years ago. There is no new frontier in “add a rule to a mailbox.” So why rename the bits that already worked?
Oh. Right. To make room for Copilot, which the new menu serves up with the proud, thousand-yard stare of a cat depositing a dead bird at your feet.
I cannot be the only one. Somewhere out there has to be a silent army who opened their laptop this morning, found a setting had moved, some awful new interface had appeared, the thing they turned off was back… just sighed and contemplated sticking a fork in a socket.
Do people really live like this? Do they log in, notice their software has been reconfigured in the night like a possum got into the settings, and think:
ah well, this is the rent you pay for being alive in 2026
Not me.
I bought the thing. I did NOT sign up to have it quietly redecorated, week after week, for the rest of my seething existence.
Yes, fine, this is a rant. People who love me have said I do this far too often, but there’s a point somewhere in here I’m trying to get to.
The steaming pile of goodness
My first computer was actually a plastic, beige Compaq desktop the whole house shared, wheezing through Windows 98 on dial-up connection. It was a steaming pile.
Slow, ugly, never more than one click from a blue screen. But here’s the part nobody wants to admit. It worked. The menus were dead simple, the settings sat three clicks deep in plain English, and you could find anything in seconds.
This is how I learned to use computers. Sat in front of a CRT with a forgiving operating system that let me explore, but also let me get my homework done.
Eventually we got rid of that Compaq and moved onto an iMac G4, the one that looked like the sentient Pixar lamp.
And I could just use that too. It never once made me feel stupid. It got out of my way and let me do my homework.
Hold onto that, because it’s the whole argument: it got out of my way.
And the Mac I’m writing this on, two decades later, is recognisably that same machine. The menu bar still runs along the top. The Dock still bounces. The Apple menu sits exactly where it always sat. Apple changed it a little at a time, year on year, until it got better without ever once stopping being familiar. You could sit fourteen-year-old me down in front of it and he’d be at home in seconds.
I left Windows for good somewhere vaguely around 2010, and here’s the truly damning bit.
That ugly Windows 98 box, I could navigate blindfolded.
Windows 11 today? Unrecognisable. They didn’t refine it, they kept knocking it down and putting up something new in its place, and now I couldn’t find half those same settings with a gun to my head.
Hand me a bomb to defuse, tell me the off-switch is buried somewhere in Windows 11, and you’d best believe the blast will fire my legs clean up through my own arsehole.
Annoy, relent, repeat
Here’s how I think about software: people mostly don’t want to use it.
Get them in, let them do the one thing they came for, get them out.
Nobody fires up their email for the joy of it. Everything between a person and the thing they actually came to do is friction I have failed to remove.
Apple worked this out for the desktop decades ago. Plug something in and it’s just there. It updates while you sleep and in the morning everything is exactly where you left it.
Apple’s whole posture is:
here, we made this nicer for you.
Microsoft’s is:
look how much better than Apple we are.
One of them is looking at the person holding the device. The other is staring across the room at its competitor… and hasn’t made eye contact with a customer since about 2003.
Stand back and look at Microsoft over the past fifteen years and you’ll see a single behaviour on endless repeat.
They ship something nobody asked for.
People complain.
Microsoft digs in and defends it.
The complaints get deafening, or the EU turns up.
They grudgingly relent.
There’s a fortnight of peace.
Then they do it all again.
The Start menu is the whole company in miniature. In 2012 they tore it out entirely, because some halfwit in a product meeting decided your desktop should feel like a phone.
Open revolt. They put it back. Victory, for about two weeks, until they noticed the menu might make for a lovely billboard, and stuffed it with ads for Candy Crush.1
Recall ran the same lap, faster: a feature that silently screenshots everything you do, an instant privacy bonfire, a solemn glorious “pause,” and then they shipped it anyway.
And could they, just once, stop ruining things?
Remember Cortana? They welded a voice assistant into Windows, dared you to talk to your computer like a psychopath shouting at a kettle, and the moment she flopped they marched her out the back and shot her in front of her replacement.2
Meet Copilot: the same robot in a new suit, this one running on GPT, standing there nodding like it was taking notes.
Even Halo, the video game that “invented” Cortana, wrote her out and replaced her with a knock-off, deliberately designed to murder her.3 When the franchise that gave birth to your AI’s namesake decides the character isn’t worth keeping, that’s not a coincidence. That’s a review.
The supporting cast all sings the same note.
It was a proper fight to switch off the Copilot they’d crammed into my email. Same with Microsoft Teams, which I will continue to call “Purple SharePoint”, which is exactly what it felt like when it first oozed onto my Mac years ago: a swamp monster I couldn’t work out how to kill.
And Bing, sitting there on roughly 5% of all search,4 all completely accidental.
Nobody wakes up and chooses Bing.
They get beaten into it down a dark alley by a default that grabbed them by the collar and mugged them for change.
People have more choice now
I know, I know: vibes, feelings, a man shouting about his email. I sound like a lunatic.
But we have been here for decades and they’re just not getting it.
IBM let staff pick their own machines and they overwhelmingly chose Mac, and the ones who did barely ever rang the help desk.5
Even the competition knows. I once visited Google’s offices. This is the company behind Android and that god-awful Chromebook, and practically every desk had a shiny Apple logo on it.
And you converted the unconvertible - my Dad. Accountant by trade, lifelong Windows man, the exact customer Microsoft has had by the balls for thirty years.
And even he finally cracked the shits, surrendered, and bought a Mac. He just got sick of having to re-learn the operating system.
When you start losing the accountants, you don’t have a customer problem. You are the problem.
It’s not just Microsoft
Here’s the uncomfortable part, because it would be far too easy to make this a Microsoft pile-on: the disease isn’t Microsoft. The disease is looking at your rival instead of your user. Microsoft is simply the most advanced case in the product manager’s psych ward.
Apple is wandering straight into the same trap.
Genmoji: AI-generated emoji, for the screaming throng of people who looked at the several thousand emoji we already have and thought, “no, what I need is a bespoke, faintly cursed cartoon of a cat in a tuxedo.” Writing Tools, which sand every last trace of personality off an email and hand back a smooth grey paste of corporate porridge. And fucking Siri, which now palms your request off to ChatGPT, or just spits out the famous “I found some web results.” What are we even doing here?
I seriously asked how long to cook 350g of chicken and physically aged while the little orb throbbed. Little wonder most owners say the whole AI bundle adds little or nothing.6
None of this makes a Mac nicer to use. It’s just Apple shipping things nobody asked for so it has something to wave at in the AI race. Eyes on the rival, not on the user. Same disease, posher hospital.
Google has the opposite problem, which is almost even more tragic, because the pieces are right there.
They own Android and they own ChromeOS, and for years they’ve kept them in separate rooms, not speaking.
This from the company that reboots its messaging app every eighteen months and tends a graveyard of dead chat clients, forever sprinting after whatever the other lot shipped last.
So here’s the rallying cry, for all three of them: stop looking at each other and start looking at yourselves.
Point the camera across the room at your rival, and the one person who actually matters, the user, ends up permanently behind you and out of shot.
What good software is
Every product has one thing it does genuinely well.
Find it. Protect it. Don’t bury it under a pile of additive features nobody asked for, or years-old bugs quietly left to fester while the team is busy shipping the next AI assistant nobody ordered either.
Polish the thing people actually came for until it shines, and leave the rest in the bin.
I never want to build software that a user hates to use, or that fights for their screen time. The attention machine is a business model I refuse to touch. I want you to open my thing, do the task you need to do, and then leave.
I want you to have a life.
Go outside.
Throw a frisbee.
Get a dog. Visit Australia.
The highest compliment software can earn is that you forgot it was there at all.
You got in, did the one thing, and got back to the room with actual humans in it… with a head still full of hair.
And before this reads as a love letter to Apple, let me stop you. Apple’s software is not all rainbows and fairytales either. It has its own long list of bugs nobody seems in a hurry to fix, and, as we’ve already seen, a product team losing its mind to the very same hype machine. Nobody in this game is innocent.
So this isn’t really about Microsoft. Or Apple, or Google. It’s for anyone shipping software to other human beings.
Before you build the next thing, stop and think. Honestly. Is this what the people using it are actually asking for? Will it genuinely make the product better? Or are you just jumping on the bandwagon because the rest of the industry did?
You only get so much time. Don’t spend it building crap nobody wants.
If it ain’t broke, leave it alone. Hand people back their afternoon. Don’t sell it.
Footnotes
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The Register, Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to ‘make the Start menu great again’, 2024. Link ↩
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Den of Geek, Halo Infinite: Who Is the New Cortana-Like AI?, 2021. Link ↩
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StatCounter, Search Engine Market Share Worldwide, 2026. Link ↩
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Jamf, Total Cost of Ownership: Mac vs PC in the Enterprise, 2016. IBM’s data: staff overwhelmingly chose Mac, and Mac users generated far fewer help-desk calls. Link ↩
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9to5Mac (SellCell survey), Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far, 2024. Link ↩