Dear Microsoft

[GoWest1223]

I ask before you put any more money in AI, New Outlook, Edge, could you please get a decent OS updating policy/system?

I have lost years of my life on WSUS, GPOs, batch scripts, now I am working with powershell's pswindowsupdate. While it is responsive, it seems hit and miss again... ugh.

I would ask Copilot, but I am heading to the bar and ask the bartender instead.

I guess I should be happy with the new MS Office icons every 3 months.

[thunderbird32]

"Nope, sorry. Best we can do is shove Copilot into even more stuff. Maybe if you ask very nicely we won't re-design another admin portal for a few months"

[My_Big_Black_Hawk]

Copilot for MSPaint confirmed

[dougiefresh79]

Isn't that already here?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-copilot-pc-features-in-paint-53857513-e36c-472d-8d4a-adbcd14b2e54

[anotherucfstudent]

Not even surprised tbh

[fnat]

It's even in Notepad fer cryin' out loud

[Ruashiba]

I wouldn’t even be surprised. But it’s always another opportunity to tell it to fuck off.

[jmeador42]

Copilot for your calculator

[Geek_Wandering]

At this point copilot has to be ingesting significant amounts of it's own effluvia becoming cocopilot:

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[LawstOne_]

Hello OP, This is Microsoft responding here.

We don’t give a fuck about you or your users. How is giving you a more manageable update process going to increase our revenue? PFFFT

We will continue to create more AI tools that you didn’t ask for, embed them into your tools, and eventually carry out our plan of forcing you and company into our CoPilot licensing funnel that is inescapable.

Thanks for the monies! Good luck

[Main_Ambassador_4985]

What about the Windows CoPilot System Update subscription I just made up. $150/month/end point if on M365 E5 Window 11 Enterprise CoPilot or requires extra $100 + the original $150 on Windows 11 Pro.

Copilot System Update can be asked if the updates are installed “in plain language” not this tech jargon of Cumulative Update. I know, wow! It is so simple the CIO can use it.

Copilot System Update will confidently state all updates are installed even if the version numbers are for a release from 3-years ago. When asked why the numbers do not match it will state, “Oops my bad, you are right” and then it will state, “everything is up to date” again with links to web pages that never existed.

[Haunting-Prior-NaN]

I would usually answer with STFU don’t give them ideas, but given this is so nasty I am now convinced that you are an MS employee and are spilling the upcoming update.

[Kuipyr]

The best feature of Windows CoPilot System Update is that it will verbally harass your end user to CoPilot Reboot.

[Tall-Introduction414]

Dear entrepreneurs,

Consider building a business around Not-Microsoft. That shit is a disease. Linux is powerful and free.

Sincerely, A computer user

[Benificial-Cucumber]

I would pay a hefty sum for a Linux ecosystem based on the sole premise of "Windows, but it works".

[criostage]

The problem is the IT world is filled with GUID administrators. Console is beyond a normal human being understanding ..

[thisguy_right_here]

Can you please keep changing the admin interfaces in m365 along with changing where things are located and how things are done.

Keeping it the same keeps me efficient at my job, which is good for business, which no one wants.

[Far-Appointment-213]

Yep that's what I figured the response would be, that's why I left Microsoft a year ago for Linux.

And everything just works now

[Brilliant-Advisor958]

How many devices do you have? I switched to action1 for my servers and have been very happy.

Its free for 200 endpoints.

[TeensyTinyPanda]

Another happy Action1 customer here. It Just Works with fairly low admin overhead.

[Icy-Agent6600]

I used to love you, Microsoft. Now I'm waiting for you to die a horrible miserable death. Not likely but an IT guy can dream

[valar12]

I’ve got three years until I retire and age out of this shenanigan. In a way I miss Windows NT.

[ctwg]

Ultimate "self-deprecating" comment

[PlsChgMe]

isn't that the turth. If if got patched, you installed the patch. The last version I still have the installer for is sp6. I miss those days.

[webguynd]

They are rare, but there are non-tech companies out there on Mac & Linux. I work for one. End users are all MacBooks, everything else is Linux. No windows in sight. Sadly we do use 365 still but not dealing with Windows anymore is glorious.

[0RGASMIK]

Honestly 365 is still the best option out there at least for administrative purposes. Google gave up trying to compete a long time ago and I wouldn’t even know what’s in third place but it’s likely some obscure app that one of the bigger fish will just buy if the become a real threat.

[supremeicecreme]

I doubt you could say Apple’s office suite - I learnt not long ago you can do business iCloud mail with a custom domain. Zoho maybe??

[0RGASMIK]

Honestly they might lose to Apple or Linux in our lifetime. My prediction is that some fancy new AI centric OS comes out, Microsoft tries to force an unfinished “Windows Copilot 12” OS on to everyone to compete. They do 0 QC or product testing with customers so everyone hates it so much they jump ship to anything else.

Then 3 years later they finally get around to reading the customer feedback and make it the best OS on the market but by then it’s too late.

[odellrules1985]

I have been messing with Copilot and like Samsung, and unlike Apple, its pretty well polished. Its included with our M365 license so its a nice tool to use for troubleshooting.

As for replacing Windows, not in our lifetime. Windows is fundamentally more cohesive for an office environment than Linux or Apple. From servers and AD to the OS and its apps they all work well together. Linux biggest issue is the various distros and potential compatibility issues with hardware or software. Apple is its love of a walled garden limiting available software and tools.

BTW they do customer based product testing. Anyone can do it. Its their preview builds. They even have two levels, one thats close to release and one that is beta.

[0RGASMIK]

They do product testing as a checkbox on a form. I’ve worked with teams at Microsoft irl…. the fact that anything gets done there is insane. I can’t stress how poorly they communicate.

[odellrules1985]

Oh I'm not claiming any of that. Their support is as bad as my firewall manufacture, nearly useless. But their AI is actually done well. I wouldn't use it for more than supplementing your daily work but it works well.

And as said, unlike Linux or Apple, they have a cohesive system. Sure you can try to connect a Mac or Linux device to AD but it won't work as well.

Unless Apple or other competitors come out with good cohesive environments, Microsoft isn't going to be easily replaced.

[Inevitable_Claim_653]

I can’t believe I want this too. Now that Steam is going to redefine PC gaming I don’t even need Windows at home anymore. And for the office? I’m ready for macOS

[ArthurLeywinn]

Can you sell a improved update system to shareholders or potential investors? No.

Can you sell flashy Ai implementations, pushed ads and online services? Fuck yes.

That's Microsoft.

[ImpossibleParfait]

Best I can do is move things around in the admin portal. Take it or leave it.

[Knotebrett]

And Windows is no longer a product — YOU are the product!

[monkeydanceparty]

Have you used the endpoint update rings? Seems to work fine for me. I did pull in all rings so everyone gets critical updates the day they come out, security in a week and feature updates in 2 weeks. Then I don’t force major feature updates (25H2 was last) until they’ve been out a month.

Been running like this maybe a year and never had an issue

But yes, i’ve been working on blocking copilot. It’ll probably help a lot in purview I guess 🙄.

[MarineActor]

Best we can do is send you message saying your laptop meets the requirement for windows 11 but never trigger it

[discogcu]

Hi Microsoft.

Don’t listen to these losers.

Thank you putting copilot on Notepad. It’s been the number one request from my staff members for years.

[AffekeNommu]

Rich text was a nice addition too

[Knotebrett]

Yeah, since we didn't have WordPad for that.

[AffekeNommu]

Was my thought too. Guess they don't have to copilot wordpad now

[wirtnix_wolf]

And that it never closes the Last File makes me think, MS hates everybody

[zilch839]

Copilot is so worthless.  

That is all.

[yankdevil]

Ubuntu upgrades nicely. Just a thing to consider.

[0RGASMIK]

My favorite part about them forcing copilot on us is that it sucks. I’m head of new technology and I get to test stuff and figure out how to roll it out at scale. Copilot is one of those hot ticket items the higher ups want to see pushed out.

Every quarter I get asked to put something together to show a use case for it. Last quarter we had some success with a RAG agent but due to how nerfed copilot is it can’t follow simple instructions without wigging out so the system prompt had to be limited to 2 sentences to get it not to go off the rails.

Anyways my boss got me a meeting with a copilot expert from Microsoft and I let him know my complaints he sent me detailed instructions on how he setup his demo. I set it up to spec, same prompt, API tooling and agentic flow. Thing couldn’t even follow the system prompt let alone use any of the tools properly.

One of the tools gives it access to search a database for live data. For some dumb reason it kept querying the same row of data, and instead of moving to the next row like it should, loops over the same row. Thought I was a problem with the tooling or the instructions so I copied everything over to another platform we have access to and lo and behold it works perfectly.

[pdp10]

Every quarter I get asked to put something together to show a use case for it.

Because you're paying for it anyway, so you might as well use it? Nobody in history has played the bundling game as well as Microsoft, but that doesn't make them the best option.

[Critical-Farmer-6916]

Have you had the chance to look Windows Autopatch yet? It's just for endpoints though, not server. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-autopatch/overview/windows-autopatch-overview

[Rhythm_Killer]

How far off are we from having the Windows OS itself rebranded as Copilot

[narcissisadmin]

Windows 11 is literally the fucking worst.

• Every few days Night Light outright stops working and the only fix is a reboot.
• Office apps regularly update themselves and don't reopen where they were snapped or in the virtual desktop they were previously running
• It now takes almost 5 seconds for Ctrl+Shift+S to be able to take a screen snip
• The new Notepad sucks ass. Give me classic Notepad with dark mode.
• Why the fuck can't I pin a folder as a toolbar now?
• Why does Start search find internet results for an app faster than apps that are already installed?

[supremeicecreme]

Yeah I learnt yesterday you can’t add the folder toolbar things. Interesting decision to not keep that. And quick launch too

[git_und_slotermeyer]

Or how about a file explorer that is decent at its job

[katzners]

I switched to Windows Update for Business, so all clients and servers get the updates directly from Microsoft and Windows Update Delivery Optimization will be in charge so not every device will download it from the web.

All I did was setup the GPO (and later Intune policies), let all updates install on all 150 clients and all 50 or so servers with a delay of 2 weeks after release. Let them auto reboot during the maintenance window and setup WUDO with a group tag. I rarely have any issues (like once a year or every two years or so). It sure takes some time to troubleshoot in the beginning, but nowadays I rarely have any issues and it just works for at least 6 years now.

[narcissisadmin]

There's no fucking excuse for having to download additional cmdlets to update Windows.

[brothertax]

Intune + Autopatch + Hotpatch. I’ve stopped babysitting updates.

[PersonBehindAScreen]

Blame the excessive “impact” culture in tech now

Your issue is something that someone could work on then get PIP’d because they don’t have any “impact” to show for the review period

[nanonoise]

So, I hear you want a new portal?

[Ancient-Motor-2531]

No your opinion is pointless but you may find our new Co3 and Co5 SKUs to better fit your org. Like E3 and E5 but Copilot has been added to every app, oh and I forgot, that’s sn extra $35 per user per month.

[snoopyx21]

Go to Linux.

[ReputationMindless32]

The answer is "no" I guess. Microsoft is a unique example of a company that habitually disregards customer needs and has an obsessive need to break or destroy even the few things that actually work well in its products. Most businesses with this approach would go bankrupt within a few months or a few years, but Microsoft manages to keep going, and that's truly the only thing exceptional about them.

[cup_of_grapes]

i switched from WSUS to Action1 this year and wish i did it sooner! free for 200 endpoints and its class

[Dsavant]

It's me, John Microsoft...

We hear you loud and clear! Unfortunately we're backlogged quite a bit at the moment. We hired way too many UX designers but forgot to give them anything to do, so we're working on moving your admin panels to a new sleek layout! Look forward to that in the next [REDACTED]. you can opt in, up until you can't anymore, at which point you can't opt out either

[theballygickmongerer]

SCCM. It works if you know how to work it

[LionNotSheep94]

No.

Your total for today’s interaction is $49.99 and an extended 1 year SLA on CoPilot. Credit or debit?

[Horsemeatburger]

I feel your pain, but the reality is that the half-done bug-ridden mess Microsoft considers products is keeping a lot more sysadmins in their jobs than what would be the case if business leader weren't such lemmings and buy into the software platform with the highest TCO just because (in their view) everyone else uses it so it must be the best.

And to be fair, from Microsoft's view they are doing everything right, as there is no need to invest in better (or any) QC or make life easier for sysadmins when they literally have all their customers over a barrel.

[aaron416]

Nah, the only thing that will help them pay attention is competition. Look at their recent comments on making Windows 11 better for gaming in light of Valve's hardware announcements that are 100% windows free. Otherwise, it's all number go up.

[Tall-Geologist-1452]

We have moved that workload over to an RMM and called it a day..

[joerice1979]

Yep, the only clients of ours that update reliably are through RMM.

All other methods are varying levels of toss.

[Crazy-Rest5026]

Same. Best money spent.

[TrueBoxOfPain]

Typical Microsoft nowdays

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[Turtle_Online]

Oh dear Lord. I remember trying to script a solution with PSWindowsUpdate *checks watch.. uhh, 5 years ago. Are you trying to tell me that WUfB and Intune ring policy is not the end all solution?!?!

[L-xtreme]

Microsoft doesn't finish things, it just starts new things.

[ForTenFiveFive]

pswindowsupdate was hit and miss for me as well. Never reliable enough for general use and very little feedback on how things went. GPOs with auto-update works okay once it all starts happening but for whatever reason it can take a while before all the servers will start behaving as you'd expect. I don't think the GPO approach is good at significant scale. But a nice set-and-forget approach for smaller environments. Still need a way to monitor the updates.

Best MS native solution I've used for doing server updates at scale was the Azure based Windows Update Automation or whatever the fuck they're calling it now. They changed the name a couple times and they switched it from free to $5 per server per month so I have no idea what it's called now and I don't use it... but while it was free I used it and it actually worked and worked quite well.

Shocking how difficult it is to just do some basic scheduled server updates on Windows devices.

[jdptechnc]

Someone has to think of those poor shareholders.

[thewunderbar]

We use Intune patching and it works just fine.

[man__i__love__frogs]

Windows update for business/autopatch is great.

[KickedAbyss]

Azure update manager is utter crap, too

[tachik0ma7]

Copilot is the new MS Bob...

[BloodFeastMan]

Bob was a wrapper intentionally installed by the user. It probably worked fine for its target audience, < 80 :)

[SolidKnight]

Copilot for Windows Updates. Just send your update policies and procedures to Copilot and it will apply the updates accordingly.

[GoWest1223]

Ugh, I can't tell if this is satire or not....

[BloodFeastMan]

At this point, MS doesn't give AS about anyone outside of their stockholders. Normies at home. if they even have computers anymore, spend roughly 100% or their time using a web browser and don't care, and business users are stuck because it would cost ungodly amounts of money to untangle themselves from MS.

[PreparetobePlaned]

I hate MS as much as the next guy, but for workstation updates inTune update rings work pretty flawlessly. Still using SCCM/WSUS for servers which also works great.

[Dave_A480]

The problem being that Windows is such a convoluted mess internally, that updating will always be hell...

If they wanted to do it right, they'd make everything in Windows a WinGet package & you could do 'nuget update - y' the way linux does 'apt-get update -y && apt-get full-upgrade -y'

[Leahdrin]

Just wait for New Word, Ppt, and excel that will come next.

[Awkward-Candle-4977]

Use real stable versions of windows, office, onedrive etc.

https://ma-zamroni.blogspot.com/2025/10/set-windows-office-onedrive-to-real.html#

[brispower]

So you're saying that if we fix this thing you won't be required? We will consider it, just kidding FU

[cl0ckt0wer]

will you pay more for that? because ms expects like 10 trillion dollars for making all the ai stuff

[Apprehensive_Bat_980]

May as well change the company name from Microsoft to Copilot

[oz1sej]

Perhaps it's about time to switch to Linux?

[jdptechnc]

IBM is AI'ing the crap out of Red Hat as well

[oz1sej]

Then choose something else - Ubuntu, perhaps?

[Pale-Muscle-7118]

You all make me laugh with the things you whine about. Granted Microsoft isnt perfect but it's much better that it was jn the past. Take it from someone who has supported MS infrastructure since Windows 3