TBF windows has been going steadily downhill since XP, but yeah, the copilot shit certainly made a whole lot of people start looking for the exit. I think a bunch of people had been getting increasingly sick of the windows experience for years but kept using it because it was just there, and they couldn't be bothered to change. Actually, I was one of them. Copilot was just the final straw.

AI is just the NFT version of the GFR, again, in 2026 and much worse. No one will be hype farming it after this crash. All the larping "AI bro" channels will go. Influencers sitting on the beach with their laptops, shilling how it makes them $100,000 a month while they sleep. Those people will go... What I suspect will remain of the industry is a completely niche sector for specialised applications in schools, hospitals, higher education, and film & sound design; it can reduce some of the burden at work if implemented well. But most of the public will remain staunchly opposed to a subscription-based life where AI drives every IoT device in their home or vehicle and generates sloppy, hallucinated content that doesn't help them but harms them.

NOTE: In a survey, over 60% of Microsoft users say they actively seek ways to bypass online account processes for local accounts and encourage others to do the same. If you can't sell the idea of mandatory sign-in just for syncing desktops because everyone understands why a PC is exactly that "a Personal Machine", everything is supposed to stay & run locally if it is indeed "YOUR COMPUTER"... I don't see the big 5 generating the revenue through online subscriptions to get them out of that debt spiral; local open-source AI models and cheaper hardware are the only way I see plausible mass adoption happening.

I'm not saying they will fail I'm saying they will not maintain their rate of growth. Very, very different things but i guess you can pretend i said something else and argue against that or whatever idk dude lol