I hope that we can all agree here that no matter what us little people in tax-paying land know (or don't know) about business revenue, the "folks" making decisions about the future of the TurboTax product line are NOT using that product to do their own taxes! Paying taxes is a little people problem. Those "folks" pay their "people" (accountants, CPAs, and tax attorneys) to do that for them.
I'll add my own on-topic rant here on the subject of Windows 11 being a POS: Those of us who have used Windows for decades see all the still-remaining cracks under each coat of fresh paint that Microsoft has applied to each major release of Windows. It's this pile of unfinished design work that belies M$' real motive for each release: "brand new shiny" sells more units! They don't give a bug's arse about beautiful underlying design (and therefore there's no way they could create beautifully functional code, hence a never-ending stream of security updates).
Here's a great article from the developer of tiny11, a set of PowerShell scripts that aim to trim most of the bloat out of Windows 11. His article digs deep into the underbelly of the latest Windows 11 GUI to reveal a mish-mash of design elements that stretch all the way back to Windows 3.1:
https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies...
Most of us old-timers notice this cobblework, some of us get truly annoyed by Microsoft's lack of effort, and a few of us wistfully ponder questions like "how many more major releases will it take for Microsoft to finally move all the legacy Control Panel functionality into the consolidated Settings app?" I think the answer is that M$ will never get "it" done, as the priority is not beautiful design, but cornering the desktop computing OS market.
I know that for myself, "I'll give up my Windows 10 when they pry it from my cold dead hands" is a conscious reaction to not having any control over Microsoft's ugly design decisions. But eventually the whole application world will just move on (thanks Intuit!), and like @baldietax has mentioned here many times, it will become impossible to resist the force of nature that Microsoft has made itself out to be. The 800 pound gorilla always gets its way in the end. 🦍
Yes, we can move to macOS or Linux for a more consistent design experience (and of course to avoid the rampant spyware in Windows). But both platforms are dwarfed by Windows' market share on desktop and laptop PCs, and as a consequence most commercial software development for that market starts (and typically ends) with Windows. (I think it's a miracle that Intuit ever released a Mac-specific version of desktop Turbo Tax, but they probably did that for their "people" who actually do their taxes...)
Desktop virtualization products have come a long way from the original Connectix Virtual PC for System 7.5 on Macintosh. I would encourage anyone with a bit of spare time to come up to speed on this topic. Oracle VirtualBox is free open-source software and does the job for me. I will continue to run all of Intuit's products in a Windows 11 (ugh!) virtual machine, only when I need to, and from the comfort of the "real" operating system running on the bare metal of my PC. For now I will keep Windows 10 as the underlying host operating system, but I can move to Linux or macOS whenever I finally get fed up with Microsoft's antics. Virtual machines are entirely portable and can be moved to a new filesystem or new hardware as simply as copying files in Explorer or Finder.
Cheers everyone! 🍻
