There’s tons of software that used to actually work as a service or product but now are just.. sucky. Basically, I’m going to be going over some prime examples of those software and OSes in this blog post.
Windows
Windows just really isn’t good now. You already know what I think about Windows 7 if you read my previous blog post, but I can argue that Windows XP and even Vista after driver updates were similar in usability to 7, once everything is fully updated and you’ve got the service packs for both OSes.
Windows 8, the OS that came right after Windows 7 in 2012, was quite the mess and we all know it. Windows 8.1 tried to fix up some of the major issues of 8 but by then the grave was already dug. Windows 10 wasn’t necessarily that terrible but it still had tons of bloat such as Candy Crush Saga, TikTok, and.. Edge. Windows 11 deserves almost all the hate it gets nowadays, with it nearly doubling the bloat, shoving tons of more ads in your face, and adding artificial barriers like a TPM 2.0 requirement just to (officially) install it.
Discord
Discord is still okay, but it has definitely faced some enshittification. Nitro, an overly expensive subscription service just to get slightly more than the bare minimum, is shoved in your face daily. It’s also faced a lot of UI changes that I wouldn’t necessarily label as bad but not good, either.
The Electron (boo!) app on Desktop is also insanely buggy and slow on older hardware, like what I use, which is why I prefer clients like Aerochat instead that were built from the ground up. The mobile app is slightly better with these kinds of things, but still.
Skype
Didn’t this get shut down? Whatever. When it still existed, it faced a major redesign or two that really messed things up. It used to just look like your average calling and chatting app on desktop that basically everyone used before Discord, but Microsoft decided to shoot themselves in the foot and redesign the entire UI, making it look like some sort of ripoff business version of itself.
Later in this thing’s life, Microsoft really just wanted to kill this thing without actually killing it. Classic Microsoft. Eventually they made Microsoft Teams as a replacement (who even uses that?) while it was still alive but basically on life support, and then they killed it. Imagine that you’re a king and then you see your replacement also take the spot as king, and now you’re gonna get executed at a later date. That’s essentially what happened.
Everyone uses Discord instead of Microsoft Teams, now, so really executing it on the spot was just plain pointless…
Hotmail/Outlook/Windows Live Mail
What even happened here? The naming scheme basically had an identity crisis. Anyways, I can fill you in on what happened here.
At first, Outlook was called Hotmail, and it didn’t have a thing to do with Microsoft. I can’t really tell you what it was like to use it because I wasn’t born in the 90s. Anyways, sometime in the later 90s, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for some large sum of money. It was still called Hotmail, just with the Microsoft name slapped on and some changes.
Later, it decided to walk on the fence between being called Outlook and being called Windows Live Mail. There are references to Outlook as far back as Windows 98 (in Outlook Express), but also references to Windows Live Mail in Vista, 7, and the free Windows Live Essentials pack back in 2012 and 2009. For now, I’m gonna refer to it as WLM for 2006-2012, and Outlook for any time past that.
The introduction of WLM was when Microsoft really started changing things, making a whole new client and making major branding changes. The last version of WLM, WLM2012, was my personal favorite but most feature-filled version of WLM. It would integrate with your Windows Live (now yucky Microsoft) account optionally and also any of your email accounts to, well, email. There wasn’t really anything bad about it; it looked clean, had a ton of features, and most things tying to accounts or always-online were optional, asides from adding your email account. The newest version still works to this day, with workarounds, of course.
Outlook, though, was really the downfall of this emailing service/product. It began to have forced Microsoft accounts to even use it, and it was an earlier sign of everything becoming always-online and requiring accounts. They then, of course, killed off the last good Outlook email client officially for Windows 10 and 11 earlier in 2024, that is unless you PAY for the email client to get a slightly better one that still really sucks. The newer email clients are just Electron and a cluttered web page interface that you could literally just go to on your typical web browser if you wanted to. At this point, in 2025, it is one of the worse mainstream email client/providers to use. just use Gmail or Yahoo as an email provider and Thunderbird, or yet again, Gmail as a client if you want to not do any complicated workarounds like you need to do to use WLM2012 as a client.
Conclusion
A lot of software and OSes, especially when free, just.. suck, unless they’re open source. Not to sound like some nostalgic nerd, but sometimes old is genuinely gold, depending on where you go. And also, not to sound like an ending sequence I use in almost every blog post, but tune in to the CheeseBlog for more cool tech stuff and insights on modern software. Cya!
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