2024-07-12

Enshittification

What a "juicy" word! ;-) I encountered it for the first time this week while looking for an ultimate solution to one worsening technical issue on Windows. I immediately understood its meaning and felt no other word could describe my growing frustration with Windows and its intrusive disservice more accurately.

Of all the online artiles I've found the one by Paul Thurrott, whom I remember as an amazing Windows maven, entitled Microsoft is Silently Reversing Some OneDrive Enshittification in Windows 11 eloquently described the same frustration I've been feeling. In this article he used the word nshittification.

I also found a Wikipedia entry called Enshittification, through which I also found two articles by the person who coined this juicy word - Social Quitting and My McLuhan Lecture on Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.

I've understood that there seem to be many other people who have been experiencing the same frustration with enshittification of not only Windows but also a growing number of software programs and online services, especially once they have become very popular.

I bought my first personal laptop computer in late 1994. The bundled OS back them was still Windows 3.1. I had - and still have - a rather unusual combination of multilingual requirements for my computing. It was with the long-awaited release of Windows 2000 that these requirements of mine were finally met fully. Ironically and unfortunately, Windows has become more and more intrusive and less and less flexible, forcing its users to use it in the way Microsoft deemed fit. I've experienced less and less freedom to customize it and more and more difficulties in doing so if at all.

My frustration with post-2000 Widows reached its all-time high when my two-year-old Asus laptop computer suddenly stopped working physically, and had to order a new one (but not by Asus!) and configure the preinstalled Windows 11, which showed visible signs of further enshittification.

This newly discovered word has helped me reevaluate the frustration I've been feeling with other software programs as well as some popular online services. I have no choice but to continue using Windows as I like macOS and Linux even less. But I have zero patience with any other Microsoft products, including Office, especially Word, whose users I admire in a sense for their patience. For the same reason I've stopped using any product by, for example, Adobe, Norton, McAfee, to mention just a few, because of their "ingenious" intrusiveness. They are good at making bloatware, which is fundamentaly opposed to my principle of minimalism.

PS: My favorite environment in multilingual computing