Sunday, 11 January 2026

Microslop

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

In recent days, there has been an eruption in the tech world. It is unlike anything I have seen in my more than half a century as a software developer, consultant and project manager. Microsoft, its Windows 11 operating system in particular, and artificial intelligence (AI), are in trouble. Big trouble.

The pressures leading to this eruption have been building for a year or so. Right now, the effects are confined mostly to tech blogs and tech people in the USA. But they are spreading. And fast.

Slop

In the last couple of years, AI-generated content has become ubiquitous on the Internet. It may consist of text, images or videos. Some of it is dangerous – for example, erroneous medical information. Most of it is of low to very low quality. And some of it is just bizarre. Such as the infamous “shrimp Jesus” I used as the featured image for this post.

In tech circles, the stuff has become known as “slop.” When you do a Google search, you may see more links to slop than to human-produced material. It looks as if “sloppers” have been using AI to generate large amounts of clickbait, not to mention content that may be misleading or downright dangerous.

In February 2025, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, pleaded in an interview for people to stop using the term “slop.” Saying “people are getting too precious about this.” The response could not have been further from what he asked for. The word “slop” went viral.

So much so, that last month Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publishers, declared “slop” to be their “word of the year.” Nadella responded huffily to this, saying: “we need to get beyond the arguments of slop versus sophistication.” The Internet tech community disagreed. And they took their revenge [[i]] by re-naming the phenomenon “Microslop.”

Windows 10 and Windows 11

All tied up with this is Microsoft’s botched transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

Windows 11 was launched in October 2021. Due to higher hardware requirements, it would not run on around 60% of the PCs then running Windows 10. Including mine. That was already a time-bomb.

Support for Windows 10 was withdrawn for general customers on October 14th, 2025. Although Extended Security Updates (ESUs) remained available for corporate customers who wanted to keep Windows 10 running.

At no point has Windows 11 been popular with users. It had only about half the take-up Microsoft had expected. And by February 2025, many companies who had “upgraded” their staff’s PCs to Windows 11 had started returning them to Windows 10. It’s estimated that 400 million computers world-wide are still running Windows 10 without any Microsoft software support, simply because the users cannot, or do not wish to, “upgrade” to Windows 11.

Worse, some of Microsoft’s biggest corporate clients, with hundreds of thousands of users each, are switching to Apple Mac. And tech-savvy customers, including gamers and many smaller professional firms, are moving towards platforms like Linux.

My own experience of Windows

I bought my first PC in 1991. It had DOS 3.3 as its operating system (OS). As a tech professional, I was comfortable with that. I told it what to do, and it did it. (Usually).

There was also something called “Windows 3.1” installed. I tried it, and it was rubbish. Slow, and what’s the point? The previous year, while working in the US, I had been using OS/2, IBM’s answer to Windows. OS/2 was a proper operating system, with some new and interesting possibilities built in. By comparison, Windows felt like a kludge.

It is part of my character that, whatever product I am looking for, I like to buy the very best I can possibly afford, then run it into the ground. My car history bears this out; in 56 years of driving, I have had only seven cars. My attitude to PCs has been the same. In 35 years, I have had only five computers – two desktops and three laptops. I have gone from DOS 3.3 to Windows 95, Windows Vista, and since 2018 Windows 10.

My computer hardware (along with 25% of all Windows 10 PCs!) is insufficient to run Windows 11, even if I wanted to. So, when support for Windows 10 was withdrawn on October 14th, I just shrugged and said, “at least that’s the end of those pesky updates.” (Which, by the way, it isn’t…)

Besides which, in my view, it shouldn’t be Microsoft’s job to secure computer systems. That would be better left to security specialists like ESET. Microsoft’s part of the job should be to provide an OS that works, performs well, and doesn’t give trouble. An operating system that does these things shouldn’t need any support at all, once its users are familiar with it.

But even Windows 10 hasn’t lived up to anywhere near that standard. At one stage, I found Windows updates taking hours to download (though this turned out, eventually, to be due to a dicky hard disk). There was an occasion on which, after an update one Saturday morning, both the touchpad and my USB mouse stopped working. The keyboard was my only way to communicate with the machine! It was obvious that someone was working on the problem, as the touchpad came back relatively quickly. But it was 36 hours before the mouse worked again. And then, there are printer drivers… don’t get me worked up.

More generally, I feel that Microsoft has violated, again and again, one of the most fundamental rules of software design. What you could do yesterday, you must still be able to do today (if maybe using a different method). Microsoft has all but destroyed the concept of backwards compatibility. We have lost the DOS box, 32-bit compatibility, and much more.

And don’t even think about the hoops that third-party software vendors had to jump through to port their products from DOS to Windows. Some didn’t make it through at all.

My view of AI

AI seems to have a lot of hype around it. As one who finds that, generally, hype is inversely proportional to substance, I expected to be severely disappointed by AI. And I was right. I wrote about my first test of it here: [[ii]]. Google’s AI told me a blatant falsehood, that anyone who would think to ask my question would know was wrong.

Imagine you are interviewing someone for a job. And right at the beginning, they say something that you know, with absolute certainty, is untrue. Then, when you ask them the same question later, they give you a different answer that is also wrong. Are they going to get the job? Not from me. That’s the trap Google’s AI fell into.

A computer, to me, is a tool; as is the software that runs on it. One of the key things about a tool is that what it does must be reproducible. For example, the same Excel spreadsheet, run on the same data, must always produce the same results. Yet AI just makes stuff up as it goes along. And this is presented as “learning,” and as a virtue? You would not expect a power drill to drill holes one day, and just blow hot air the next. So, if your computer or software does anything like that, it’s time to take it to the repair shop.

I don’t see a need for AI. I don’t want AI. So, until AI starts provably and reliably solving real-world problems, I don’t want to touch it. Not even with the proverbial bargepole.

Problems with Windows 11

This video from Tech Report gives an account of some of the problems users are suffering with Windows 11: [[iii]].

In a law firm’s office, they have had, at least: Performance issues. Application crashes. A new taskbar positioning, that slows users down, and can’t be changed. Users forced to log in to a Microsoft account, which doesn’t work. Annoying ads popping up in low-level Windows facilities. And Copilot prompts interrupting work. Overall, productivity is well down.

Meanwhile, gamers are finding Windows 11 slower than Windows 10, even on the same hardware. And experts can’t speed it up again. Similar problems are affecting video editors, computer assisted design (CAD) users, and even – irony of ironies – AI researchers!

Other gripes include: People being forced to use features no-one asked for or wanted. Features they are accustomed to, like local accounts, being taken away. Ads are intrusive and hard to turn off. Copilot not only interrupts work, but gets things wrong, and doesn’t understand the context in which the user is working. And options the user doesn’t want, and has laboriously switched off, are automatically switched back on at every update.

More generally, users – and their bosses – have lost trust in an operating system that is, in almost every way, worse than its predecessor.

Microsoft ought to be developing their software to better meet the requirements of their users. But instead, they seem to be expecting the users to adapt themselves to whatever they decide to put out there. I regard that attitude as arrogant and irresponsible. Indeed, it is all but psychopathic.

Summing up

Towards the end of the video, the narrator sums up his views of what is wrong. Here is my paraphrase.

Microsoft have stopped serving users, and instead started serving shareholders, revenue targets, subscription metrics, and data collection goals. It’s all about the money. And users have become resources to be mined, not customers to be respected.

Forced hardware requirements are driving PC sales for Microsoft’s hardware partners. Mandatory accounts are driving adoption of cloud services for Microsoft’s cloud partners. AI features are there to “justify” the huge financial investment Microsoft has made in the company OpenAI. And large amounts of “telemetry” data are collected on users’ activity. Who knows where that data goes, or what it is used for?

When an OS spies on them, advertises to them, forces computer upgrades, includes AI that interrupts work, and performs worse than its predecessor, the users don’t like it. So, they’re leaving. This is the biggest user revolt in tech history. Caused by Microsoft’s greed, arrogance, and disrespect for the very users who helped make Windows successful.

My own conclusions

Judging by this video, even if my PC had the hardware to run Windows 11, I wouldn’t want it to. When I am working, whether paid or not, I screw myself up to a level of concentration few people are capable of. And I hate, hate, HATE being interrupted by anything outside my work. After just one interrupt, it can easily take me half an hour to get back to where I was. That is why I never answer the phone when I am working. It’s also one reason why I have never carried a mobile phone; I use a phone only to access WhatsApp from my laptop.

Moreover, I strongly resent ads of all kinds through any channel. I feel an urge to boycott companies that pollute my life with ads; I want to do my bit towards bankrupting them. Oh, and I don’t want to have to log in to any external account, or to store anything in the cloud. If my data isn’t physically on my PC, it isn’t under my control, and that’s a security risk. I don’t want to send anything I am working on outside my PC, until I’m satisfied it is as good as I can make it at the time.

So, I’m never going to run Windows 11. I’ll soldier on with the PC I have until it dies. Then, I’ll decide what to replace it with. Might be Mac. Might be Linux. Might be – who knows?

But… there’s more

But there are more problems in Windows 11, beyond the ones which the video I linked to above focuses on.

“Windows Recall” is a function that takes periodic snapshots of your screen. It takes a screenshot every few seconds, analyzes what you are doing, and stores the results. Initially, it stored the results as plain text – including sensitive information like credit card numbers! And it was active by default – though since, it has been changed to require opt-in.

Windows 11 has been measured as running 2 to 3 times slower than Windows 10 on the same hardware. Even (perhaps, most of all) on high-end computers!

Updates install themselves without asking. Even in the middle of people’s work day! And they can fail, or go into fail-and-retry loops, or freeze for hours at a time. For anyone who has to work to deadlines measured in minutes, like journalists, Windows 11 is a no-no.

Some “power users” have had to resort to third-party software just to restore features they depended on in Windows 10.

The user interface changes in Windows 11 remind some pundits of the 2012 disaster of Windows 8, when Microsoft tried to force desktop and laptop users to use an interface that was only workable on a mobile phone.

In January 2025, what was billed as a routine security update caused many computers to crash. And in November 2025, Microsoft admitted that almost all the core features of Windows 11 are broken.

Subscription-based pricing

Another thing Microsoft has done in recent years, that angers users like me, is their move away from selling their software and towards a subscription-based approach.

When I bought my Windows 10 PC, I paid a couple of hundred pounds for a Microsoft Office 2016 licence. I have been using that software now for more than seven years; it’s mine! And it works for me. Why would I ever want to change it?

If I were to move to Windows 11, I would need to buy an Office 365 licence, which currently costs about £85 a year. I might well need several more licences beyond this, too. It’s a rip-off. And… how do I know Office 365 is bug-free? And still has all the functions I rely on?

Pushbacks from governments

The first sign of ructions against the way Windows was moving came in 2017: [[iv]]. A Dutch government department determined that Microsoft was violating Dutch data protection laws.

More recently, the Dutch parliament has been urging their government to stop using cloud services based in the US: [[v]]. A Danish government department, and the Schleswig-Holstein state government in Germany, are planning to end use of Microsoft software by their workers. And European governments, citing reasons like “digital sovereignty,” are now moving away from Microsoft’s proprietary platforms like Windows and Office 365: [[vi]].

The future? Or not?

And where do Microsoft, Windows and AI seem to be going in the future?

Microsoft’s sales patter includes buzz-phrases like: “Windows is now your canvas for AI and agents.” “Integrating AI and agents in your flow.” “Microsoft 365 Copilot where you need it.” “Enhanced capacities on Copilot+ PCs.” Microsoft executives have described Windows 11 as an “agentic operating system.” Meaning, its main function is to run AI agents.

AI agents are built on top of the “large language models” that most people think of as AI. They do things like running code, learning from feedback, and deciding what to do next. They are, in essence, applications with AI capabilities built in. An example is Windows Recall, which I mentioned above.

A key concern is that, though they are on your own computer, AI agents are not under your control. And they can have read and write access to your data files. What harm could such agents do, inadvertently or by design, to your data or to the computer itself? Indeed, Microsoft has already issued a warning that the new “agentic” features in Windows 11 may be vulnerable to malware.

It looks to me as if Microsoft are seeking to turn the PC, which ought to be a tool under the user’s control, into an instrument over which Microsoft and AI developers have more control than the user does.

Could AI agents even harm you? There is, for example, a worry among many office workers in the US that AI-generated detailed reports on what you do on the computer might be used to train an AI, that can then be sold to your bosses as a cheaper replacement for you.

Moreover, Microsoft’s approach of “Continuous Innovation” leads them to force new features on you whenever they feel like it. This is hardly a recipe for a stable working environment. One pundit described it as: “users have to make do with Microsoft constantly moving the deck chairs.” I am tempted to add to that: “on the Titanic.”

All this is leading to the beginnings of an anti-AI political movement. As the New York Times recently reported: [[vii]] (paywalled). One anti-AI website is here: [[viii]]. I confess that, from my admittedly limited experience with AI, it would not take much to push me into the anti-AI camp.

In my view, the prognosis is not good. Not good for Windows as a product. Not good for AI as a technology. And not good for Microsoft as a company. It looks as if the eruption, which is starting to build today, may well lead to Microsoft’s greed and arrogance coming back to haunt them.

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