- Dave Plummer was a software engineer for Microsoft a few decades ago
- He argues that Microsoft needs to stabilize, improve and make Windows 11 more efficient instead of adding new features
- He suggests Microsoft should do it for a full release cycle until Windows 11 ‘doesn’t suck’
A former Microsoft engineer has made it clear what he thinks Microsoft needs to do with Windows 11, instead of piling on fancy AI features in the crowd, and it’s along the lines of what I’ve been arguing for a while now – getting back to basics.
This is Dave Plummer – who was a coder for Microsoft back in the nineties and early noughties, and the creative force behind Task Manager (as well as Space Cadet Pinball) – which (again) fails in a post on X (and a YouTube video) as flagged by The Register.
It’s time for Microsoft to have another XPSP2 moment. No more AI, no more features. Just corrections. When I was working on Windows XP, Blaster beat. It was a big enough deal that we put all feature work aside. For the next several months, all we did was improve security. We… pic.twitter.com/JcQgufcCUC25 November 2025
Says Plummer: “It’s time for Microsoft to have another XP SP2 moment.”
It refers to the second service pack (SP2) that Microsoft released for Windows XP, with such a package designed to fix bugs and smooth out the existing operating system to improve any performance or usability.
In 2003, the Blaster worm infected millions of Windows XP PCs – it was the WannaCry of its day, of sorts, and a huge disaster for Microsoft. When that happened, Plummer notes, “It was a big enough deal that we put all feature work aside. For the next several months, all we did was improve security. We didn’t add ‘security features’; we fixed bugs. Lots of bugs. Until there were no security bugs to fix anymore. Then we fixed the ones we didn’t know about yet.”
He adds, “simply put, we stopped trying to ‘add value’ to the product through features that PMs [Project Managers] thought users would like, and instead we focused on things that had been important for a long time but overlooked. Like performance and configurability today.”
Plummer draws a parallel between what Microsoft was doing then and what it’s doing now, in terms of deploying a flurry of new AI features to ‘add value’ rather than fixing what’s fundamentally wrong with Windows 11 – and that’s plenty, as I’ve been banging on about in the last month or two.
He concludes: “I argue that it’s time for Microsoft to stabilize, improve, and make the system more efficient. And more usable for power users. Just for one release. Just until it doesn’t suck.”
Analysis: nail meets head – but how realistic is this prospect?
As I’ve already made clear, I think Plummer has very much hit the nail on the head here, actually driving that metal point clean through the plank of wood that is Microsoft’s marketing department (which seems to have been rather lost in recent times).
At least in my opinion, it feels like a word has come from the marketing gurus at the top of Microsoft’s PR tree about how AI buzzwords need to be pushed and pushed hard (from ‘agents’ to ‘agentic platforms’ or ‘AI native’ and so on). We had a handful of high-level Microsoft executives talk about the future of Windows in these terms earlier this year, then the big reveal of how every Windows 11 PC will be an AI PC (another line straight from the company’s hymn sheet of buzz phrases).
This renewed focus on artificial intelligence has led to lots of negative reactions and bad feelings from many Windows 11 users out there. At least as far as us regular old consumers are concerned, who aren’t too keen on AI features coming at us left, right and centre, and would rather have Microsoft fix the operating system’s bugs, weaknesses and lack of basic features, as has been discussed at length in recent times.
Meanwhile, some Microsoft executives aren’t exactly helping the cause by pushing back against this grassroots rebellion.
The overall sentiment seems, at least to me, to run toward the perception of shareholders and the value of Microsoft stock being more important than the feelings and needs of everyday users. And that the marketing drive is more of a priority than the actual substance and nuts and bolts of Windows 11.
And yes, you need marketing to perform in a competitive software environment, but you also need to focus on the quality of the existing product and not just the shiny-new-things (TM) that are coming down the line.
So I wholeheartedly agree that Microsoft should slow down the push for new features and the incessant chatter about how the future is AI – and start talking about how it’s getting back to work on Windows 11, tinkering with the underlying code and fixing performance issues and bugs.
However, the question then becomes: is this even a realistic proposition for a company like Microsoft? Could the software giant pause an entire release cycle, as Plummer suggests, just to fix the guts of Windows 11 with the modern equivalent of a service pack?
No, honestly, I highly doubt this idea would fly (or even come close to taxiing) on the corporate side for obvious reasons. But we can hope that Microsoft can at least formulate some kind of new strategy to better deal with Windows 11’s various niggles, bugs and performance pitfalls – and start to make it clear that it’s taking action here.
In short, let’s get less talk about AI and more details about how Windows 11 will get some of its long-standing problems fixed in the future.
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