For some Windows users, it\u2019s already all too much.<\/p>\n
Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the agentic OS plans in a post on X<\/a> last week, and there was an immediate backlash in the hundreds of replies. \u201cIt\u2019s evolving into a product that\u2019s driving people to Mac and Linux,\u201d said one person. \u201cStop this nonsense,\u201d said another, and one reply even asked for a return to the Windows 7 days of a \u201cclean UI, clean icon, a unified control panel, no bloat apps, no ads, just a pure performant OS.\u201d<\/p>\n There could have been hundreds of more comments, but replies to Davuluri\u2019s post were locked a couple of days later. He did eventually respond<\/a> to a post from well-known software engineer Gergely Orosz, who criticized Windows\u2019 \u201cweird direction\u201d and questioned Microsoft\u2019s commitment to developers. \u201cWe care deeply about developers,\u201d Davuluri said in response. \u201cWe know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences. When we meet as a team, we discuss these pain points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem for Microsoft is that care and attention to detail feels lacking in Windows these days. Microsoft has a challenge of building an operating system to fit the needs of more than a billion users, and it seems to be pissing off a lot of them right now by focusing on AI instead of improving the fundamentals.<\/p>\n Whenever I write about AI features in Windows, it\u2019s near-impossible to find comments praising the new additions. I\u2019ve tried Copilot Voice and Vision multiple times and most of the time I end up with results like my colleague Antonio found this week<\/a>. Copilot seems amazing when its magic trick works, but when it fails time and time again, you rapidly lose trust in it.<\/p>\n During my recent break I asked Copilot Vision to help me use a UV bottle sterilizer I had purchased recently. I didn\u2019t have the manual nearby, and the sterilizer has a confusing number of buttons. Copilot Vision recognized it was a sterilizer, but missed the key part that it was a UV model, so it asked me to fill it with water. If I had done that and turned it on, I would have ended up with a kitchen full of smoke and a broken device.<\/p>\n You could forgive this poor advice if this was a beta feature that was hidden away in Windows and years away from widely shipping, but it\u2019s not. Instead, Microsoft is using it as a key marketing tool for its operating system, employing TV ads to encourage people to talk to their PCs. It\u2019s even paying influencers<\/a> to promote Copilot, and it had to quietly delete an influencer video where the AI assistant embarrassingly incorrectly identified<\/a> Windows settings.<\/p>\n Microsoft\u2019s push to get people to talk to a PC or let a computer control itself also takes away from why Windows has existed for 40 years. App developers use it to build new platforms, surgeons and doctors rely on it in hospitals, and even ATMs use it to distribute cash around the world. You only need to look at the chaos from the CrowdStrike incident last year<\/a> to see how much critical infrastructure uses Windows.<\/p>\n It\u2019s this reliable tool that Microsoft seems to want to reshape into something autonomous, increasingly built for AI agents instead of humans. In a recent Dwarkesh Podcast interview<\/a>, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted that the company\u2019s entire business is moving in this direction. \u201cOur business, which today is an end user tools business, will become, essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work,\u201d Nadella said.<\/p>\n He likened this to how servers became virtualized, creating even more server availability for cloud infrastructure. Now there\u2019s an increased demand for cloud versions of Windows 365, so that agents can use a computer to get human work done. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have an end user computing infrastructure business that I think will keep growing,\u201d Nadella said. \u201cBecause guess what? It\u2019s going to grow faster than the number of users.\u201d<\/p>\n While Nadella is looking way ahead to a future where this stuff actually works, if indeed it ever does, Davuluri is left trying to shape Windows into a pizza with a billion toppings that please everyone, with a side of AI.<\/p>\n \u201dWe are on a journey of evolving what Windows is like for the future,\u201d Davuluri said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month. \u201cThese are new capabilities, very much like when we built the app ecosystem with Windows back in the day.\u201d<\/p>\n Microsoft doesn\u2019t appear to be building a dedicated AI operating system and is focused instead on putting AI into all the places that are widely used in Windows. Davuluri wants to \u201chave the new [AI] capabilities be available to [Windows users] in the constructs that we have today.\u201d<\/p>\n The big challenge here for Microsoft is making sure that people can turn this off if they don\u2019t want it. Recall, the Copilot Plus PC feature that automatically takes screenshots of your PC, already spooked Windows users when it was initially turned on by default. Microsoft had to rework Recall and make it opt in, but it has left plenty of people wary of what is being built into Windows 11.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have so many people that use Windows for so many different things,\u201d Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences, said in an interview with The Verge. \u201cWe are making this accessible so every user can use [AI agents] when they\u2019re ready. It\u2019s their choice, they decide.\u201d<\/p>\n Choice will be key, and you could argue \u201cjust don\u2019t use the AI features!\u201d but Microsoft already makes it really hard to avoid Edge and OneDrive in Windows 11, so I don\u2019t have much faith in anyone being able to avoid Copilot. I could also switch to Linux as everyone claims they\u2019re doing on X and Bluesky these days, but I don\u2019t want to be forced to switch OS.<\/p>\n I just want Microsoft to actually respect choice in Windows and listen to what users want. That\u2019s always been a challenge in Redmond, and often why every other release of the operating system is disliked by so many. Windows 11 hasn\u2019t been quite as bad as Vista or Windows 8, but with an agentic overhaul on the horizon, Microsoft could soon find itself needing to release a cleaned-up Windows 12 that makes things right again.<\/p>\n Nvidia has a fix for Windows 11 performance issues. If you\u2019ve experienced performance issues in games after installing the latest Windows 11 October 2025 update (KB5066835) then Nvidia now has a hotfix driver to address the problems. It\u2019s not clear what games have been impacted by Microsoft\u2019s latest update, but you can grab the latest hotfix driver<\/a> or wait until the next non-beta release.Another Windows 10 feature is coming to Windows 11. Microsoft is finally bringing back calendar appointments to the notification center in Windows 11. It was removed at the launch of Windows 11 in 2021, after Microsoft reworked the taskbar. The new \u201cAgenda view\u201d will be available in preview builds of Windows 11 next month<\/a>. One day we might even be able to move the taskbar to the top or side of a screen, just like Windows 10.Gemini 3 Pro is already available in GitHub Copilot. Google announced its Gemini 3 models this week, and Microsoft was quick to make them the Gemini 3 Pro version available on GitHub Copilot. A mix of models has been key to GitHub Copilot\u2019s success, and Google\u2019s latest model is doing well in benchmarks. I\u2019m hearing we\u2019ll likely get OpenAI\u2019s response in the form of GPT-5.2 in December.Microsoft announces a next-gen Cobalt CPU. Microsoft is previewing its Azure Cobalt 200 CPU<\/a> at its Ignite conference this week. It\u2019s the next generation of the cloud chip that was first announced two years ago, and Microsoft says it will have up to 50 percent higher performance than Cobalt 100. Built on TSMC\u2019s 3nm process node, it will also reduce energy consumption for cloud apps on Azure.Microsoft\u2019s Office apps are getting even more free AI features. You previously had to pay an extra $30 per user, per month for AI features inside Office, but Microsoft has been increasingly bringing more and more AI functionality to the base Microsoft 365 subscription. Agent Mode, which originally launched to paid Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers in September, is coming to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint<\/a> for all Microsoft 365 subscribers next year. Copilot Chat inside Outlook is also being improved to make it more useful across your entire inbox. Microsoft is also lowering the entry price for its full Microsoft 365 Copilot features for small businesses. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business launches next month, priced at $21 per month instead of $30 for businesses with fewer than 300 users.Microsoft Agent 365 lets businesses manage AI agents like they do people. Agent 365 is one of Microsoft\u2019s bigger announcements at Ignite this week. It\u2019s designed to help businesses deploy and organize AI agents securely, to ensure these new AI coworkers don\u2019t do anything unexpected. Agent 365 is effectively a framework<\/a> that has dashboards to show how AI agents are operating, with telemetry and alerts. It allows businesses to register AI agents with Microsoft Entra registry, limit what they have access to, ensure they can integrate with Microsoft 365 apps, and protect against external and internal security threats. This entire framework should allow AI agents to show up inside businesses just like a human coworker would, inside global address lists and more.Windows is getting hardware-accelerated BitLocker. The next iteration of BitLocker, Microsoft\u2019s encryption feature in Windows, will require next-generation Windows devices that are built on unannounced chips. \u201cHardware acceleration of BitLock requires the capability in the silicon platform,\u201d says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri<\/a>. \u201cAs and when those capabilities are available, the OS will be able to unlock them for users.\u201d These devices are launching at some point in 2026, and I suspect we might hear more about them at CES in January.Microsoft is adding Sysmon into Windows. Sysmon was first released in 2014 as a utility for security analysis into the Windows Event Log. Built by Microsoft technical fellow Mark Russinovich with assistance from Thomas Garnier, Sysmon is now making its way directly into Windows 11<\/a> in early 2026. It\u2019s a great addition to the base operating system, as it will make it easier for security teams and IT admins to detect and respond to threats.Microsoft\u2019s new Anthropic partnership brings Claude AI models to Azure. Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic<\/a> this week that brings the AI startup\u2019s models to Microsoft Foundry for the first time. As part of the deal, Anthropic is also committing to purchasing $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and \u201cto contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt.\u201d Microsoft Foundry customers can now access Anthropic\u2019s frontier Claude models including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. As part of these partnerships, Nvidia is investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic, with Microsoft also investing $5 billion. I see this deal as more of a hedge against OpenAI, particularly because Microsoft has been impressed with some of the Claude AI models and is prioritizing them over similar alternatives from OpenAI in Office and GitHub Copilot.Talking to Windows\u2019 Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent. My colleague Antonio Di Benedetto<\/a> has been testing Copilot Vision and Voice, and the results aren\u2019t great<\/a>. Microsoft has been advertising a bunch of different Copilot features in its TV ads, but when you actually try to re-create them, it goes horribly wrong. I\u2019m stunned Microsoft is using its Windows advertising budget on Copilot Vision and Voice when they\u2019re both far from being the slick \u201cfluent conversation\u201d that Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman claims Copilot is. He\u2019s mindblown by critics of Copilot<\/a>, but I\u2019m mindblown that Microsoft executives can\u2019t understand that it just doesn\u2019t work properly a lot of the time.Windows on Arm is now ready for gaming thanks to some big changes. It\u2019s been a while since I tested PC games on Qualcomm chips, but it looks like things are finally starting to improve. Qualcomm has released a Snapdragon Control Panel<\/a> this week that automatically detects and optimizes games in a similar way to Nvidia\u2019s app. It also improves anti-cheat compatibility in games like Fortnite. Coupled with AVX and AVX 2 support in Microsoft\u2019s Prism emulator, it looks like things are heading in the right direction just in time for new Snapdragon X2 chips.Microsoft expects more games to require Secure Boot, TPM, and VBS. Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 are two of the biggest games to require both Secure Boot and TPM on Windows machines. It\u2019s part of an anti-cheat effort in multiplayer games, and Microsoft now expects<\/a> \u201cmore titles requiring features like TPM, Secure Boot, and advanced protections such as VBS.\u201d Virtualization-based Security has been enabled by default in Windows 11 and it does include a performance hit on a variety of CPUs. I\u2019d expect this trio of technologies will help further secure Windows for anti-cheat, but it won\u2019t stop developers from needing access to the Windows kernel anytime soon.<\/p>\n I\u2019m always keen to hear from readers, so please drop a comment here, or you can reach me at notepad@theverge.com<\/a> if you want to discuss anything else. If you\u2019ve heard about any of Microsoft\u2019s secret projects, you can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com<\/a> or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I\u2019m tomwarren.01<\/a>. I\u2019m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you\u2019d prefer to chat there.<\/p>\n Thanks for subscribing to Notepad.<\/p>\n Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Tom WarrenClose Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All by Tom Warren<\/a><\/p>\n MicrosoftCloseMicrosoft<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All Microsoft<\/a><\/p>\n NotepadCloseNotepad<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n![\"Tom](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Tom_BLURPLE.jpg\"\/)
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