Workflow. Productivity. Enablement. These are the holy words by which software companies sanctify their ever more plunder-hungry Viking raids on enterprise IT coffers. If only they were true. At least Vikings didn’t pretend to be offering monastery renovations and smart haircuts when they turned up.
Microsoft, sad to say, is at it like gangbusters. So desperate is Redmond for your attention as a path to monetization, it has made the Windows 11 environment an ADHD horror show, full of distractions, promotions and snares. You can, with some work, rewire things behind the scenes to get rid of a lot of these, at least until things get quietly restored or re-enabled.
Then there’s the heavy artillery of AI, a relentless barrage of features and functions that just want to be your friend. You know, the sort of friend who wants to constantly video what you’re doing and send it back to Mother. But not in a creepy way, you understand. Promise.
There is a word for intrusive, unwanted software that intervenes in your work to advertise or engage you in unwanted interaction. The same word describes software that constantly monitors and exfiltrates what’s going on between you and your data. That word is malware, and by now it’s clear that for Windows it isn’t a class of third-party nasties, it’s an edition name. The attacks are coming from inside the code.
This provides refreshing clarity. The industry as a whole hasn’t done a great job at closing down malware, but it’s a known enemy that’s been with us since the 1980s. We know how to deal with it, at least in theory. We know that to be effective, anti-malware software has to be trustworthy, adaptive to a changing threat landscape, unintrusive, and capable of being successfully used by people with a wide range of technical skills.
What we have at the moment falls far short of this. There are numerous Windows de-bloaters and clean-up tools, but there are also plenty of pop-ups and other dodgy productions that fly that false flag to slip in a payload. The most trustworthy mechanism to get the good stuff is GitHub. That’s great if you’re in the tech priesthood, intimidatingly weird if you’re not.
Doing things manually by recipe is also less than optimal. If it involves tweaking the registry, you don’t want Arnold from Accounts chancing their arm. Plus, how-to guides suffer from the same accelerated obsolescence as any other specific technical advice online. The text is static, the target changes.
The ideal, therefore, is an automated Windows detoxifier with a solid chain of trust; one that’s rapidly updated to track new outbreaks of unwholesomeness; one that’s constructed to be usable by anyone, and to be configurable so that the user can dial in what they want to go.
The reason for this level of slick presentation is because the ultimate goal is to make Windows a place for workflow, productivity and enablement – again, not just because of the software, but permanently. There has to be a war of attrition, and it’s one we must win. Effort spent by Microsoft to annoy, patronize and distract us must be wasted, and seen by Microsoft to be wasted.
Thus, the software must be fit for consumers and enterprise. It has to be open source, and it has to look professional. It can and obviously should bring together existing examples of good Windows detox tools as there’s a lot of work and expertise there, making them seamless parts of the package.
While this is within the capabilities of many open source package developers, and there are plausible paths to making money through tiered enterprise licensing through support customization and automation, the whole thing would fit best under an existing and trusted open source name, a distro, application or utility package that is already in widespread use.
It seems perverse for someone like Ubuntu to offer a package that seemingly negates one of the biggest advantages of the Linux desktop, that it doesn’t try to steal your soul. Why waste time and effort helping the opposition? But think of it more in terms of getting FOSS into the very center of the unassailable fortress of Windows enterprise IT dominance. Think of it as a live, ongoing demonstration of FOSS principles of user-centered computing. Think how much it would annoy Redmond.
Windows has long been suffering from auto-malware-ification, and we need a cure. That cure will only come for good when Microsoft itself decides to change tack, and that will only happen when community adoption of actual alternatives reaches a commercially painful tipping point. That’s how FOSS overcame industry resistance in general and Microsoft’s in particular, by conspicuously solving problems that the old guard could not and would not address.
Besides, being nice to your enemy is a strategy known since at least the Iron Age. Biblical scribes noted in the book of Proverbs that by doing so, you heap coals of fire upon their head, and you will be rewarded. It is well past time to be nice to Microsoft. Don’t forget the coal. ®
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