A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back
It's a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows. The feature that we never asked and never wanted it.
Microsoft, has done a lot to degrade the Windows user experience over the last few years. Everything from obtrusive advertisements to full-screen popups, ignoring app defaults, forcing a Microsoft Account, and more have eroded the trust relationship between Windows users and Microsoft.
It's no surprise that users are already assuming that Microsoft will eventually end up collecting that data and using it to shape advertisements for you. That really would be a huge invasion of privacy, and people fully expect Microsoft to do it, and it's those bad Windows practices that have led people to this conclusion.
File search is really awful on windows for no reason at all. Your complaints about commandline utilities is not accurate though. Windows has native powershell equivalents to both
grepandtail. You useSelect-Stringinstead ofgrepandGet-Content -Waitinstead oftail.IME
Get-Contentdoesn't work for multiple files. Unless maybe I put it in a foreach loop or something. But that's way more keystrokes thentail -f *Nobody ever accused powershell of being concise. Its uses a completely different philosophy, object oriented rather than string based. This makes powershell nicer to write scripts in but also makes it worse at bash style one-liner commands.