Windows 11 still doesn’t understand our complex lives – and it hurts • The Register

Column I have been a Linux user for decades. Last week I bought a Windows computer.

It’s not that I haven’t used Windows – I do, as little as possible, in a VM – but recent issues with Teams have convinced me that repotting it in its own native soil would reduce the pain. And on top of that, I wanted to give Windows 11 a fair chance.

Ho, as they say, ho.

The problems Teams had with Linux devices – blind webcam, weird audio behavior – are gone, I dared to dream. And then a Teams participant sent me a file through what Teams calls their sub-Slack group chat system. (I tried to find out if it had a name by clicking Help, About… which told me it was the help system. Ah, Microsoft.)

The file download stalled, citing “No permission”. The teams first told me to ask for permission, which I did. Oops. There is a problem. Please forward this long stream of wibble to your system administrator. It’s me, by the way.

I was not much help. Yet in that post was the real problem – the download bit was using a completely different Microsoft ID than the one I was signed in with.

I’m still not sure how he knew about this other ID, which I only use for another customer’s Office 365 web access. There was no reason my local Windows, where I was running the Teams app under my personal ID, should know.

I asked around me: teams, it seems, are really bad for this. This affects families whose children need to use school credentials for distance learning on shared computers, people like me who work for multiple clients who may have security policies enforcing an identifier they issue, and people like all of us who have a professional life online and a personal life online. Try adding Active Directory for real fun, one thousand-meter veteran advised me.

In all fairness, the simultaneous use of multiple credentials is rarely well handled by modern UI offices and remote services. All systems assume you have a single login, and if you have the temerity to want more then you have to log out and back in, an idea that hasn’t changed since mainframes stalked the earth.

Technically all modern operating systems are multi-ID, they just don’t have an easy path to put it to good use. But Windows … ah, Windows adds extra layers of mystery and bewilderment.

I can think of five good ways to handle multiple simultaneous IDs, of which I use two and bail out a third. In order of increasing subtlety, these are separate hardware platforms dedicated to each ID, separate virtual machines ditto, separate containers, separate workspaces and separate browser tabs.

Hardware platforms are easy, but you end up sending yourself emails. A lot. In 2021. It’s crazy. Virtual machines take up less actual space and can talk to each other a bit easier, but they are large and you still have full operating systems for email access. Containerized browser instances can work. I spent half a day with Docker before realizing that, by god, Outlook had again tricked me into ruining my life (your mileage may vary). And I don’t know of any system that allows different simultaneous workspaces with their own credentials, nor of a browser that allows the same with tabs. In some ways, especially when it comes to the direct benefits of user experience, virtualization has fallen short of its promises.

Part of this lack is architectural; I don’t know the details of how Windows maps processes, accounts (local and Microsoft), shared and isolated resources, and associated security issues, but I know it wasn’t designed for the case use of a person who wants to use two Microsoft IDs at the same time. It would be easier, you might expect, for Google to implement multi-ID support in Chrome, instead of the global logout / login switch it applies. Easier, but still not easy.

But Google has less responsibility here than Microsoft. Google is not the default architecture for corporate and government IT. In education, Google has no infrastructure – and where it does impact via Chromebooks, they are dedicated to the student as the student, not the pipe dreams of home / life. I have lived a long time with multiple Google IDs and everything has gone well. It took the teams about half an hour to kick in the boot.

Windows 11, even more than Windows 10, relies heavily on the “work / personal life” duality. With Windows 11, Microsoft had the opportunity to stick to this premise. It would have been a godsend all around. It would have eased the pain for anyone with multiple identities – which is almost anyone in education or work. It would have been a big plus for everyone. This would have reduced the workload for IT support staff, especially in the education sector, who need all the help they can get. It might even have helped elevate the reputation of the teams, although there are limits to even the best idea.

We won’t get any of that. We will get a Teams button on the taskbar. As Teams itself ordered me when it finished updating its app – “Enjoy”.

Yes. You too, the teams. You too. ®