Windows will continue to degrade as Microsoft fires more of its professional staff and turns to “Vibes Coding” for increasingly delicate systems development. They’ll keep pushing out the OS as a vector for unwanted third-party advertisements. They’ll keep ratcheting user control of the OS away from the hardware owners. And they’ll keep injecting bloatware into their applications and services.

This isn’t the end of enshitification. It is a brief retreat and regrouping by a company that has invested tens of billions of dollars into the AI sunk cost.