Can a User-Hostile Leopard Change Its Spots? Or Will It Cheetah?

Microsoft just had what might be their biggest "we hear you" moment in years. On March 20th, Windows president Pavan Davuluri published a landmark blog post promising to fix Windows 11—for real this time. Faster File Explorer. Movable taskbar. Less Copilot everywhere. Fewer ads. The ability to pause updates for as long as you want. Even the forced Microsoft account requirement during setup is apparently under internal discussion, with VP Scott Hanselman responding to a user complaint on X with a simple "Ya I hate that. Working on it."

The response from the Windows community was cautiously optimistic. Which is understandable. The list of promises is genuinely solid.

Here's the problem: we've been here before. Many times.

A Brief and Painful History

Microsoft has been doing this for decades—aggressive moves that treat users as a resource to extract from, followed by retreats when the backlash gets loud enough. A few highlights:

The IE antitrust case — The DOJ spent years establishing that bundling a browser to kill competition was illegal. Microsoft paid enormously. Then they did it again with Edge, more thoroughly.
Windows Vista — Hardware requirements that made perfectly good machines feel like punishment. Promised the world, delivered years of driver chaos and performance complaints.
Windows 8 — Forced a touch-first interface onto keyboard and mouse users with no apology and no off-switch.
The forced Windows 10 upgrade — Literally installed itself on machines without clear consent. The "X" button on the upgrade dialog was reinterpreted as "yes" at one point. That actually happened.
Edge, soldered in — You can set Chrome or Firefox as your default browser. But then you have to manually hunt through a per-extension, per-protocol list and individually reassign PDF handling, .html files, http, https, and various other file types one by one. That's not an oversight. That's a friction maze designed to make you give up halfway through. The only reason there isn't antitrust action over it is that Google is currently king of the hill, making them a terrible victim to root for.
Ads in the Start menu — On an OS you paid for. Or that your OEM paid for—which in some cases you can actually see, because certain vendors let you configure your machine without Windows and show you the line item. You can see the receipt. Microsoft still showed you ads.
Copilot everywhere — Not just one setting to turn off. Multiple apps, multiple separate opt-outs, scattered across the OS like someone knocked over a bucket of AI and just left it.
Mandatory Microsoft account setup — Local accounts used to be the default. Then they took it away, buried the workarounds, and eventually removed bypassnro.cmd entirely. Because apparently your machine should need Microsoft's servers to become usable.

And through all of it, the telemetry. If you've ever run a Pi-hole or AdGuard Home and filtered traffic down to a single Windows machine, you already know what I'm talking about. I pulled 40 minutes of DNS logs from a dev machine — Teams closed, Visual Studio closed, SQL Server Management Studio closed. Basically just Windows sitting there locked. Here's what was hitting the network anyway:

Multiple Microsoft telemetry endpoints on rotation — mobile.events.data.microsoft.com, v20.events.data.microsoft.com, eu-v20.events.data.microsoft.com — blocked by community lists, trying again a few minutes later anyway. Activity tracking via activity.windows.com and assets.activity.windows.com hitting on a locked machine with no user activity to track. Settings data collection via settings-win.data.microsoft.com. Auth checks to login.microsoftonline.com and login.live.com repeatedly on a machine nobody is logged into or using. Delivery optimization and update infrastructure making its own rounds. And Nvidia doing its own background telemetry on top of all of it, blocked by a separate list entirely.

Five separate community-maintained blocklists doing active work the whole time — 1Hosts, HaGeZi's Windows/Office Tracker list, HaGeZi's Pro list, ShadowWhisperer's Tracking list, and the AdGuard DNS filter. The fact that five distinct lists exist and are all necessary to cover one idle machine tells you something about the scale of what they're containing.

That's not a privacy-nerd concern. That's documented, catalogued behavior that required a community effort to contain. And if I'm being honest — across different machines on the same network, some of this almost certainly gets through anyway. The endpoints tangle enough with legitimate infrastructure that blocking cleanly means risking breaking something. That complexity isn't accidental either.

To be clear about what I'm not doing here: I'm not running a nuclear block-everything Microsoft list, and I'm not cobbling together a dozen lists specifically to wage war on every endpoint they own. There are practical reasons for that. Teams needs to work — because otherwise my boss would have questions. Visual Studio needs its update checks. Some of this infrastructure is genuinely serving a purpose I want. The five lists I'm running represent a reasonable balance between privacy and having a functional work machine.

Most people aren't even making that tradeoff consciously. They don't have AdGuard Home. They don't have any blocklists. They're just running Windows and everything in that log goes through unfiltered, unexamined, every night. What I showed you is the good case.

What Windows 11 Actually Became

Windows 11 launched in 2021 promising a cleaner, more modern platform. What users actually got:

A mandatory Microsoft account requirement to complete basic setup on most editions
BitLocker enabled by default on new installs—which reduces SSD performance by up to 45% on modern NVMe drives under heavy workloads, like gaming or video editing
Copilot injected into Notepad, Photos, Snipping Tool, Widgets, and more, each requiring its own separate opt-out
Ads and "suggested apps" in the Start menu of an OS you paid for
Edge re-inserting itself into default handling even after you'd chosen something else
Updates that in early 2026 alone managed to trigger BitLocker recovery, tank game performance, cause boot failures, and produce a Black Screen of Death on some systems
A taskbar that couldn't be moved—a feature that had existed since Windows 95—for four years running

Meanwhile, Linux and macOS started looking increasingly reasonable to people who'd never seriously considered them before. SteamOS started looking particularly interesting to gamers, who historically were Microsoft's most captive audience precisely because games required Windows. That moat is eroding fast. Valve didn't set out to eat Microsoft's lunch—they just made a good handheld and gamers followed. Losing the gaming demographic to Linux is a specific kind of hurt because gamers are vocal, technically capable, and they bring others with them.

Then came Windows 10 End of Life. Microsoft expected users to shrug and upgrade. Instead a meaningful chunk started asking "upgrade to what, exactly?"—and the answer was an OS with mandatory accounts, Start menu ads, Copilot shoved into everything, TPM requirements that orphaned decent hardware, and a reputation for updates that broke things. They created the exact moment where switching costs felt worth paying.

The Xbox Problem Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Speaking of gaming—Microsoft didn't just hand SteamOS an opening. They've been methodically dismantling Xbox's reason to exist as a platform for years.

The "everything is an Xbox" strategy made Game Pass available on PC, cloud, and basically anything with a browser. Which sounds smart until you realize it removed the reason to stay in Microsoft's hardware ecosystem entirely. Why buy an Xbox if Game Pass works on your TV stick? Why stay on Windows for games if SteamOS runs your entire Steam library? They commoditized themselves out of both conversations simultaneously.

The numbers don't lie. Halo: Campaign Evolved is going to PS5—the first time in the franchise's history. Fable is day-and-date on PS5. The internal "four horsemen" lineup Microsoft is banking on this year—Fable, Halo, Gears of War: E-Day, and Forza Horizon 6—is largely multiplatform. Sony didn't give PlayStation games away like this. Nintendo absolutely didn't — Nintendo would sooner livestream burning the source code than let a franchise touch a competitor's platform. Both understood that exclusives are the entire reason someone buys your box. (Nintendo's methods deserve their own roast someday, but that's a separate post.)

New Xbox head Asha Sharma is at least asking the right questions, saying nothing is off the table and she needs to understand "what the data says about the Xbox strategy today." That's the right instinct from someone new. But she's also inheriting a platform that has spent years training its own audience to not need it. You can't easily undo that.

Could they turn it around? Sure. But it would require something like Master Chief leading an absolute must-play surprise charge of Xbox-only exclusives that aren't on anything else, full stop. Not timed exclusives. Not "coming to PS5 six months later." Games you can only play on Xbox hardware that are so good people buy the box for them. That's a very high bar that would require years of consistent execution from a platform that hasn't delivered that in a long time.

Saying the right things is a start. The clock is ticking.

What They're Promising Now

The March 20th announcement is genuinely comprehensive. Faster File Explorer with lower memory usage. Movable taskbar. Reduced Copilot footprint. Fewer ads and upsells—with VP Scott Hanselman calling for "a calmer and more chill OS with fewer upsells" in response to a user who described Microsoft's current approach as "borderline malware tactics." More control over updates including the ability to pause them indefinitely. The Start menu being rebuilt in native WinUI instead of React to reduce latency. Better hardware reliability. Monthly incremental improvements rolling out through Insider builds now and to regular users through 2026.

Good list. Solid commitments on paper.

And then, approximately two days later:

The NVMe Story Is Everything

Here's your microcosm of the whole situation in one story.

Windows 11 has been running NVMe SSDs through a legacy SCSI translation layer—treating modern drives like they're vintage hardware from another era. A faster native NVMe driver called nvmedisk.sys exists. It was built for Windows Server 2025 and delivers up to 80% higher IOPS and 45% lower CPU utilization under heavy loads. The driver binary already ships with Windows 11. It is sitting on your machine right now, disabled.

Late last year, enthusiasts found registry entries that activated it on consumer machines. Benchmarks showed up to 85% higher random write performance. People were genuinely excited.

This week, Microsoft quietly blocked the registry workaround—not through a Windows Update, not with a changelog entry, but silently through server-side feature flags. The same infrastructure they've used to close other community workarounds before, including local account setup bypasses. No announcement. Just gone.

Microsoft cited compatibility issues—third-party SSD tools like Samsung Magician have problems with the new driver, and BitLocker can prompt for recovery keys after the swap. Those are real concerns. But here's the thing: those aren't hard problems. Detect the problematic software and warn the user or fall back gracefully. Handle the BitLocker transition cleanly during driver swap. These are solved-category problems. A couple of dedicated weeks of engineering work gets you to 93%+ compatibility for the average user. This isn't a fundamental technical barrier, it's a prioritization choice.

So why wasn't that the response? Why was the response to remotely disable the workaround on machines people own?

The promised fix—hardware-accelerated BitLocker to recover the performance penalty that BitLocker-by-default costs you—requires Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake." These are laptop-only chips that launched in January starting around $1,300, with no desktop variant yet. If you're on a desktop, bought a laptop last year, or are running AMD — you know, the architecture powering the Steam Deck that's been eating Windows gaming's lunch — the official answer is wait, and eventually buy new hardware. Make of that what you will.

Read that pattern clearly: they imposed a performance penalty by default, blocked you from fixing it yourself, and the official remedy excludes the majority of current hardware entirely. All announced in the same week as their public commitment to make Windows faster.

And before you chalk the hardware requirement up to pure technical necessity — think about what better hardware also does. It runs more AI more quietly. It makes the telemetry overhead less visible. It makes Copilot suggestions load fast enough that you stop noticing them as a burden. The performance problem and the monetization problem have the same convenient solution from Microsoft's perspective: get you on newer hardware where the bloat disappears beneath the headroom rather than actually reducing the bloat. If that sounds familiar it's because it's the same playbook — announce the solution to the problem you created, make sure the solution requires buying something new. Jensen Huang did it. Micron did it. Apparently it's just Tuesday in the hardware industry now.

The Local Account Prediction

Since we're making predictions: watch how the Microsoft account situation actually resolves.

Hanselman saying "working on it" on X is encouraging as a signal. As a commitment it's worth exactly nothing until something ships. But even if something does ship, the more interesting question is how it ships.

The EU's App Store situation on iOS is the template here. Apple was legally required to allow third-party app stores. Technically they complied. In practice the experience involves multiple warning dialogs, scary language about security risks, settings buried deep enough that most users never find them, and a general design language that communicates "you can do this but we really wish you wouldn't." Functionally compliant. Practically hostile.

Watch for the Windows local account option to arrive looking something like that. Multiple confirmation screens. "For the best experience, sign in with Microsoft." Warnings about features you'll lose. Possibly requiring an internet connection to reach the offline option. Maybe even requiring a Microsoft account just to decline the Microsoft account. If the business reason for the requirement hasn't changed—and it hasn't; that pipeline into Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and behavioral data is extremely valuable—then the compromise will be designed to minimize how many people actually use it.

The Cage Is Still a Cage

Look, I want to give credit if Microsoft actually follows through. Moving the taskbar costs them nothing. Faster File Explorer costs them nothing. Pulling Copilot out of Notepad is easy. These are genuine wins that generate goodwill cheaply.

But here's the honest read on the incentives: Microsoft doesn't need to trap you with a bad OS anymore. They need you comfortable enough to stay so you keep paying for Microsoft 365, Copilot Pro, OneDrive storage, and Azure-adjacent services. A less annoying Windows is actually more profitable long-term if it stops driving people to Mac or Linux. The retreat and the monetization aren't in conflict. A calmer cage is still a cage.

The ads in the Start menu are your canary. If those come back quietly in six months—and Microsoft has a long history of quiet reversals after goodwill tours—that tells you everything about whether this was a genuine shift or a PR reset before the next move.

Time Will Tell

So can the leopard change its spots?

Sometimes. When competitive pressure is real enough—and right now between macOS, Linux, SteamOS eating into gaming, Windows 10 EOL driving real defections, and a reputation that hit rock bottom after a year of updates that broke things—the pressure is real enough to matter.

But the pattern is decades long. The incentives that created it haven't changed. Microsoft has always known what a better experience looks like. They sell it to enterprise customers. The consumer retreat right now isn't them discovering user needs. It's them finally feeling cornered enough that the consumer market started mattering to the calculus again.

I'll be watching the Insider builds. I'll be watching whether the ads stay gone. I'll be watching whether the local account option turns into something real or something that works like EU iOS third-party app stores—technically there, practically designed to be ignored. And I'll be watching whether that faster NVMe driver makes it to your machine before you're expected to buy new hardware to benefit from it.

April is going to be telling. And if history is any guide—it might cheetah.

Following this story or have your own Windows 11 frustrations? Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social.

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series.