Microsoft is once again using a tried strategy of its “getting customers to upgrade” playbook. This time it is removing features from the classic app Windows Media Player in order to make the modern Windows Media Player look better on first glance.
The change was observed in the latest experimental builds of the Windows operating system. According to the report by Windows detective Xeno on X, Windows Media Player Legacy lost the ability to display subtitles, captions and lyrics.
Windows Media Player Legacy has been nerfed slightly in build 29648.
It is no longer possible to enable “Lyrics, captions, and subtitles”. Attempting to do so will tell you to go use the modern Media Player. The menu has also been nerfed
There are better media players out there in most cases, including the free VLC Media Player. It is unclear whether Microsoft will go ahead with the feature deprecation in the legacy Windows Media Player, but it is certainly not too far fetched that it will roll the change out in stable versions of Windows 11 in the future.
Microsoft pushing customers to migrate to certain products
Microsoft has a long history of employing aggressive tactics to move users from legacy applications to newer versions. Instead of simply letting the old app exist unsupported, they frequently implement forced redirects, server cutoffs, or feature stripping to make the “classic” app unusable.
Here are some examples:
Mail & Calendar / Classic Outlook > “New Outlook”
Microsoft is currently replacing the native Windows Mail & Calendar app and the classic Win32 Outlook desktop app with a web-wrapper called “New Outlook”.
How they degraded the classic experience: Microsoft added a persistent “Try the new Outlook” toggle to the classic apps. If a user clicks it, the classic app disappears. For users of the built-in Windows 10/11 Mail app, Microsoft eventually hard-coded the app to forcibly redirect to New Outlook upon launch. If users found workarounds to open the classic Mail app, Microsoft began disabling its ability to send and receive emails, rendering it entirely useless to force the transition
Classic Teams > New Teams
Microsoft rebuilt Teams from the ground up to improve performance, moving from an Electron framework to WebView2/React.
How they degraded the classic experience: Instead of letting the older version slowly phase out, Microsoft announced an “End of Availability” date. After July 2024 (and mid-2025 for certain enterprise environments), the classic Teams app completely stopped connecting to servers. If a user tried to launch it, they were met with a hard-blocking screen stating the app was no longer available, forcing an immediate download of the new version or a redirect to the web browser.
Skype Classic (v7) > Skype 8
When Microsoft redesigned Skype from a native peer-to-peer desktop app into a cloud-based application, the new version was widely criticized for missing features, a confusing mobile-first UI, and heavy resource usage.
How they degraded the classic experience: Because users refused to upgrade, Microsoft simply pulled the plug on the backend servers for Skype v7. Even if you had the classic program installed and it worked perfectly the day before, it abruptly refused to log in, displaying a mandatory upgrade prompt.
Internet Explorer 11 > Microsoft Edge
Microsoft wanted to kill off Internet Explorer in favor of their Chromium-based Edge browser.
How they degraded the classic experience: Before they officially removed IE11 from Windows, Microsoft installed a Browser Helper Object (BHO). If a user tried to navigate to a “modern” website (like YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram) using IE11, the browser would intentionally refuse to load the page. Instead, it would forcibly close the tab and automatically launch Microsoft Edge to open the URL. Eventually, Microsoft pushed a Windows Update that made clicking the iexplore.exe shortcut simply launch Edge.
Other examples:
- Classic Control Panel migration to Settings app (ongoing since 2015). Removing legacy apples, redirecting to Settings, sometimes with inferior options.
- Windows Live Messenger (MSN) to Skype. Microsoft shut down the Messenger protocol servers to force the migration. Messenger displayed a notification that a new version was available, which lead to the downloading of Skype and the removal of the classic app.
The only thing in support of Microsoft: Interget Explorer was always piece of crap software. It had to be killed.