Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

"Davuluri replied with a classic " we hear you," admitting there was work to be done on those points, but rather curiously claimed that there had to be a balance between what user feedback said and what his team heard through "other channels." Nicely imprecise, but capable of a precise parsing in one respect at least: reliability, usability, and stability aren't coming first. If they were, he'd say so. He doesn't. They're not."

"Microsoft is in the business of engineering, and engineering has its rules. All design is compromise, and innovation means doing the unexpected. Prioritization of the fundamentals is not incompatible with either, rather, it's the foundation for both. Without that, something else is going on. That something else is summed up in a two-word phrase - agentic OS. Because whatever an agentic OS is, it's not good engineering."

"An operating system has a very clear job to do, one that has evolved over time and will evolve into the future, but one that remains absolutely clear. It controls the resources, virtual or physical, of a computer, presenting them as a set of standard abstract services to the applications and environment that the user interacts with. Otherwise, it should get out of the way. True for MS-DOS 1.0, true for Windows 11."

Pavan Davuluri promoted Windows becoming an 'agentic OS' and encountered strong user backlash demanding reliability, usability, and stability. He acknowledged those concerns but said prioritization must balance user feedback with input from 'other channels.' The response implies that fundamentals may not be prioritized. Microsoft engineering requires tradeoffs, and solid foundational reliability enables meaningful innovation. An operating system's core role is to control hardware and virtual resources and present standard abstract services to applications, then get out of the way. Departing from that role in favor of agentic features risks undermining engineering principles and the OS's essential function.

Read at Theregister