Microsoft has released a new Windows Insider preview build, and it contains a significant chance we’re all going to be happy about.
Going forward, we’ll be decoupling Search and Cortana in the taskbar. This will enable each experience to innovate independently to best serve their target audiences and use cases. Some Insiders have had this update for a few weeks now, and we appreciate all the feedback we’ve received about it so far! For those new to this update, when it rolls out to you, you’ll find clicking the search box in the taskbar now launches our experience focused on giving you the best in house search experience and clicking the Cortana icon will launch you straight into our voice-first digital assistant experience.
Cortana is useless, and any steps Microsoft takes to get it out of my way is welcome to me.
“… any steps Microsoft takes to get it out of my way is welcome to me.”
Now, if only microsoft would do the same with the rest of the stuff in windows that’s been grabbing attention like Tjolk Hekking …
Cortana in Dutch is really useless.
Cortana in English helps me with simple reminders, changing some settings quickly and “timeline related activities”
Not useless, but if it would be removed/disabled I wouldn’t miss it
The same is valid for the tiles (in non-tablet mode. In tablet mode I like them) and mostly for the notification area and “My People”. All of these things belong on a mobile phone/tablet, but simply aren’t useful on a laptop/pc
Sounds like a good move, but please Microsoft just let me disable Cortana completely and change the search on the Start menu to only search programs primarily and secondarily documents on my own PC.
Doesn’t search already work pretty much like that now? Of course there is no “primary and secondary” search, but the default tab of search results is “all” with best match always being the firefox-app if you search for “fire” or “fox” (just an example). Of course you can just click/keyboard-shortcut the 2nd tab which is “apps” or use a few registry settings to configure searching to be “less modern”:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search]
“BingSearchEnabled”=dword:00000000
“AllowSearchToUseLocation”=dword:00000000
“CortanaConsent”=dword:00000000
I want to uninstall it properly. Never going to happen.
How ‘useful’ Cortana is really depends on what type of device you’re using, and what language your’e using it in.
In terms of devices, Cortana is essentially useless for most people on desktops and workstations, and completely useless on servers (but it’s still there because of the current unified state of Cortana and Windows Search).. On tablets, I can see it being a bit more useful, especially for people who aren’t tech savvy. Where stuff like Cortana really shines though is phones, but of course Windows Phone is dead (and both Siri and Google are better in this area anyway).
For the language side of things, Cortana in English or Spanish is not too bad. I suspect that it’s decent in Mandarin and Hindi too (the other two out of the top four most spoken languages in the world), and would be kind of surprised if it isn’t at least passable in German, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, or Korean (all also pretty widely spoken). Cortana in Swedish though is painful (I know from limited experience), and I suspect it is pretty bad in many other languages that either have less than 100 million people worldwide speaking them or are predominantly spoken in locales that aren’t exactly highly profitable for Microsoft.
Mandarin is not a spoken language unless you believe the communist dictatorship. It is written only.
I really would like to know why Microsoft keep demoting the LTSC version. To me it seems like the version that should be offered by default to business but this is not, somehow, what MS want all us to adopt, they want us to be their beta testers for things they themselves are testing poorly. Really, I have yet to see a new offering of them that is needed by my clients so, why bother? Why not just give us a super stable and maintained version?
The computers I set:
– Need MS Office (does not depend on the latest new things);
– Don’t need Cortana (they are used for specific tasks, Cortana does not add anything of value);
– Don’t need Windows Store (the most used app is MS Office and then something related to business that is not from Microsoft);
– Don’t need Windows Defender. It is not on the same league of other anti-virus offering (when needed);
– Edge is done.
Still, they keep undermining LTSC by not providing features that could be easily transported.
They are opening a door to their competitors to the point that I’m again seeing people ask about Linux. If Wine ever get to the point of running MS Office stably the number of migrations will be huge.
Well, as for the store, the store is becoming the way they distribute many business focussed apps nowadays (Office is moving there, Skype, Onedrive etc all there) so you’re going to eventually need it in many business environments.
From what it looks like though, they’re positioning LTSC as being for “appliance” devices more than full desktops. They want corporates on the rolling release model too. Crazy as it sounds. Probably because that way they get more support calls, and that means more companies on SA or Microsoft 365. Monthly revenue is more attractive to MS than the old 3-year upgrade cycle. And once you’re in the 365 ecosystem bundling means you end up in the rest of the Azure/365 family of products too, and end up spending even more with MS.
They’re pushing people to their cloud offering, and making those who resist pay through the nose for it, basically.
If only they’d let us delete Cortana and all the rest of the bloat and nonsense but not likely, just gets worse and worse. I blame the Russians.