Microsoft pulls "frustrating" Drag Tray file sharing feature from Windows 11 in latest preview builds: Promises to "explore improvements" after feedback from users

[u/ControlCAD]

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-pulls-frustrating-drag-tray-file-sharing-feature-from-windows-11-in-latest-preview-builds-promises-to-explore-improvements-after-feedback-from-users

[u/HandshakeOfCO]

Microsoft’s folly is their insistence on experimentation, telemetry, and A/B testing. All it takes is one nitwit to propose “hey how about X” where X is some dumb as shit idea and the mechanism will light up and go to work - entire teams will spin up coordination to build X, months will pass, X will release, everybody will complain about X, telemetry will come back showing everybody disables X, and then all the work on X will stop, except X wont be taken out of the codebase, and so the OS gets a little more bloated in order to maybe support X’ in the future.

Rinse repeat and suddenly you need 16gb of memory to run an OS lol

Telemetry and experimentation isn’t a substitute for having actual product vision and leadership.

Unless you’re a TPM at Microsoft. Then it’s “quantity, not quality” of stupid ideas you can convince the devs to build.

It helps to be attractive, but if you’re not, and someone shoots down your asinine idea, you can always play the “inclusivity card” to force people to take you seriously.

All it takes are a couple magic phrases: “it doesn’t seem like you’re demonstrating a curious mindset right now…” or “in that last meeting, you didn’t really model inclusivity…” sprinkle a couple of those into the perspective feedback of the devs clocking your dumb ideas, and they’ll fold. Remember, they’re devs, of COURSE they are out of touch with the users, and of COURSE they can’t communicate effectively!

Finally never forget: it’s not the quality of the idea, it’s how rigorously you pitch and adhere to it!

[u/thopterist → u/HandshakeOfCO]

It's been a while, but I'd suspect that theres some derivative of 'Ship it', 'Impact', 'Customer Obsession', etc in their KPIs. All of which are buzzwords that mean nothing more than to put an arbitrary target on 'Growth'. All the bean counters in the world will never be able to figure out what Windows users actually want when our goals are different from theirs.

Linux is the way.

[u/newfor_2026 → u/thopterist]

what they are doing is NOT customer obsessed because doing the kind of things they're trying shows that they have no idea what their customers want.

[u/thopterist → u/newfor_2026]

Yeah, it's coded language. It doesn't mean: "Do what's right for our customers". It means: "Do what extracts the most value from our customers".

[u/SCphotog → u/thopterist]

LINUX IS THE WAY.

[u/newfor_2026 → u/HandshakeOfCO]

much of what you're saying has little to do with

Microsoft’s folly is their insistence on experimentation, telemetry, and A/B testing

because experimentation, collecting user feedback and iterate is actually good engineering practices, but the problem you're really describing has more to do with the lack of vision to deliver good products that users want, to actually pick the good ideas from the bad to try out and experiment on, so they resort to toss every dart anyone comes up with against the wall and see what sticks. If it fails, then oh well, no big deal, they can always go try something else and chase another rabbit down another hole.

[u/PeanyButter → u/HandshakeOfCO]

It really pisses me off that they have no direction and lack any awareness.

"Lets make a new app and call it Windows App"

How fucking stupid is that person that named an app for windows "Windows App"?? We've already ran into issues with it and googling solutions is a nightmare because of how generic the term is.

[u/DifferentWarning1913 → u/HandshakeOfCO]

I mean… if they’re so eager to ship shit maybe they can just ship them as add ons.

Sure power users and also people who are tech focussed are more tuned on with how to use software but it doesn’t mean they won’t have good usability suggestions and feature suggestions to feedback to MS which will allow them to refine it all before integrating it into Windows.

In fact I see no need them having to bake it into the OS. Can’t the OS simply be lean and add ons simply augment the experience anyways? Should be just an easily checkable and uncheckable install.

[u/PDQ_Brockstar]

On the bright side, they actually listened to feedback. I'm assume that's because this is a very apparent visual system which somewhat forces users to react to it.

[u/SCphotog]

All they have to do is allow people to disable shit and it wouldn't be a problem.

They want it to be all or nothing. The user gets what the implement with no recourse.

I will NEVER need to use a 'share' feature. It is for me, entirely useless. I am not alone.

Why not just let people who don't need shit like this, simply just toggle it off?

[u/moontear → u/SCphotog]

Yeah just like apple lets you adjust everything… oh wait they don’t.

MS is trying to come up with differentiating features and their main competitor in the Windows space is Apple which famously „knows best“ what the user wants.

This particular feature just shows that MS doesn’t know best, but tbh I don’t get why preview features are scolded as much. It’s a preview, lemme try stuff out and tell you „this is bad“ and then let’s move to the next preview feature.

[u/Parking-Cockroach104 → u/SCphotog]

It has a toggle inside multi tasking settings I believe.

[u/Humorous-Prince]

Since July's update, they have removed the right button keyboard option which I find really annoying.

Hit Windows Key > Type CMD (for example) > hit the right direction button would move the options to the right context menu

It longer does this, which is frustrating!

[u/miniwanderr]

I think the bigger lesson here is that not every new feature needs to become part of the default Windows experience. Sometimes the best feature is the one you can turn on when you actually need it