Respecting Choice, Star Wars, and Windows 11 (Premium)

Fans of this movie series have taken it upon themselves to "despecialize" them and release bootleg copies that come as close as possible to the original releases. One of the better examples of this work, called Project 4K, undertook expensive transfers of original 35 mm prints of the first movies, restoring them to what we experienced over 40 years ago. Without getting into the legalities of this and related work—there are almost too many projects like this to count—I appreciate the stance: It's OK that Lucasfilm has updated these movies repeatedly, and some of the improvements it made are notably good or even necessary. But not allowing fans to also watch the originals is tantamount to the theft of our childhood and our memories.

What this comes down to, of course, is respecting choice.

And if that sounds familiar, it may be because it's the same basic issue we face today in Windows 11. Each Windows version that preceded it introduced issues of its own. But the best versions of this product didn't just respect customer choice, they were literally designed to meet our needs and respond to our feedback. Windows 11 serves a different master, Microsoft's broader corporate strategies, which include tracking user activities and selling that information to data brokers as part of an effort to wring as much recurring revenue per user as possible.

Respect is a two-way street, of course. And to be clear, I respect Microsoft's need to monetize the Windows user base. This is a market in which most customers "buy" Windows as part of a new PC purchase only once every several years. And the upsell opportunities—the software giant offers subscriptions like Microsoft 365, OneDrive storage, Ad-free Outlook, Xbox Game Pass, and Copilot Pro—are a win-win in the sense that they can be desirable to customers while providing Microsoft with a much-needed bump to its monthly per-user revenues.

Put another way, these upsells respect the traditional supplier/customer dynamic. They represent choices in which you explicitly decide to spend money to receive some service. Or not. Microsoft is right to offer these choices, just as we are right to accept or ignore them.

Unfortunately, Microsoft also crosses that line and engages in behaviors that do not respect our choices. In addition to the forced telemetry tracking and preinstalled, sponsored crapware, Windows 11 attempts to guide customers into configurations that are detrimental to them, albeit under the guise of being pro-customer. These behaviors include dark patterns, misleadin...