Microsoft settles centuries of religious debate by providing clearest definition of hell to date: Windows with a website-based shell running only Copilot
For how often people invoke it, the concept of hell" in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I'm glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements.
Microsoft is currently selling the idea of Windows and Copilot as two separate things: an OS and an assistant riding along on top of it. However, a leaked video shows Project Aion, an internal prototype where Copilot doesn't just sit inside Windows, it becomes Windows, swallowing the Start menu, the taskbar, and three decades of desktop conventions in the process. The footage is reportedly two years old, so Aion is most likely dead by now. But it's the clearest look yet at how far Microsoft was willing to take its agentic AI ambitions.
Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot
Everything about this is dreadful. Obviously replacing the entire shell with AI" nonsense is the main crime against usability here, but on top of that, this new shell is all just websites, all the way down, so everything is slow and stuttery. Since this runs on something called Win3", which appears to be a very minimal, stripped-down version of Windows intended to only run the Edge browser engine, you can't run Win32 applications. If you do try to run a Win32 application, it will load the application in a remote virtual machine running in the cloud, which I;m sure does wonder for performance, responsiveness, and latency.
We can all thank the lord this project is two years old and most likely cancelled by now, but we have no way of knowing if Microsoft is still intending for this to be the future direction of Windows. Since people don't want to use AI" of their own volition, it only makes sense in the technology industry's sick, twisted mind to force people into using AI" with efforts like this. Consent has never been Silicon Valley's strength, after all.
At the time of writing, Microsoft is 225 billion dollars in the red on AI", so I wouldn't be surprised if attempts to replace the regular Explorer shell with something AI"-based is still very much on the table in Redmond.