[HN Gopher] Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI p...
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Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
Author : mohi-kalantari
Score : 363 points
Date : 2025-12-08 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.windowscentral.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.windowscentral.com)
| jimbob45 wrote:
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ...
|
| Helpful chart to draw conclusions
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| That's 2 years old?
| glimshe wrote:
| Is Bing now called "Copilot" too?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Or "Watson". I lose track.
| stackghost wrote:
| Copilot .NET Core, not to be confused with Copilot Core, and
| Microsoft Core Copilot Plus.
| remirk wrote:
| I doubt it's useful to draw conclusions in today's world. The
| chart is almost two years old.
| PKop wrote:
| Not so helpful, it's too out of date
| jpmattia wrote:
| Maybe they could add a helpful paper clip to improve sales.
|
| Edit: Or better still, convince all of their customers to throw
| away perfectly good hardware and upgrade to one with a single
| extra chip, creating a hazardous waste epidemic for landfills as
| a nice side effect. It's especially important to do this in the
| middle of a RAM and HDD shortage.
|
| Really, I'll just never be half the great business strategist
| that these guys are. <sigh>
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Aw, that won't matter when management just forces you to use
| Copilot or else you're fired.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Unfortunately that is probably how it will end.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| That's how it already is in some companies.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent
| in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor
| the bottom 20% least expensive.
|
| But this also means they end up with average products. They don't
| have the talent to do something exceptional.
|
| This has worked well for them when they can just come in and copy
| something (say AWS in Azure) and not pay the innovation cost, but
| AI seems different for some reason, perhaps in the same way
| search was. You need the top 20% in order to really be
| successful.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The only time they copied something successfully and did not
| rely on major tie-ins with their existing monopoly was Xbox and
| that division lost money hand over fist for a long time.
| Hasz wrote:
| this is just not true. Building great products with average
| talent is a sign of great management, and it's been done before
| in both business and sports. moneyball is about this idea at
| some level.
|
| Plenty of SV is building below average products with
| exceptional talent.
| lateforwork wrote:
| > _Building great products_
|
| This is where they are failing.
|
| > _Plenty of SV is building below average products with
| exceptional talent._
|
| Yes, you can hire exceptional talent and give them poor
| directions, resulting in poor products.
|
| But to hire mediocre talent and still produce competitive
| products you must have an unfair advantage of some sort. The
| Windows and Office monopolies gave Microsoft that unfair
| advantage. But it is becoming clear that this unfair
| advantage does not extend to AI.
| lateforwork wrote:
| That's exactly what happened. For the past decade, the creme de
| la creme went to Google and Meta, which offered nearly double
| what Microsoft paid new graduates. Microsoft hired the next
| tier, after the top talent had already been skimmed off by
| Google and Meta.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Intel/AMD hired 2 tiers below MS. Intel's "great place to
| work" corporate propaganda was known as "Great place to
| leetcode" by engineers there.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of
| talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most
| expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive.
|
| That's only if you're only looking at the top 10% or w/e of the
| market in the first place. New grad software engineer salaries
| at MS are higher than the median software engineer salary in
| the US.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of
| talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most
| expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive.
|
| This is such a BS attitude. A person's ability doesn't map
| directly with their salary.
|
| The very best developers I've ever worked with? Small companies
| outside of major cities (for life style reasons). Not everyone
| is trying to max their income; some want a good job doing
| something they love.
|
| Small companies can offer more meaningful impact, if you're not
| the type who likes being a tiny cog or commanding armies.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Sure, but Microsoft isn't attracting those devs either.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You are coping. Overwhelmingly the quality of developers is
| reflected in their pay packages. Overwhelmingly most people
| are motivated by money/benefits/QOL/GPUs.
|
| This attitude is how you maximize your TC.
| this_user wrote:
| Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove
| shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have
| figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be
| used by anyone.
| janlukacs wrote:
| I find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap
| software.
| drcongo wrote:
| My theory is that they deliberately make Windows so shit to
| filter out anyone with taste. Once you have a userbase of
| people who don't know better, you can sell them any old crap.
| Like Teams.
| geodel wrote:
| Reminds of an research article from Microsoft!. It detailed
| on why scam emails about `Nigerian prince` are so obviously
| dumb. The reasoning being it specifically need to target
| only those who can fall for it. Anything more sophisticated
| and they would get people who wouldn't fall for scam in
| subsequent communication.
| drcongo wrote:
| That's exactly what I was thinking of!
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Except it makes no sense because as a scammer your goal
| is to get as many people as possible in contact with you
| so that you can scam them. You can only score on the
| goals you attempt so cutting out any person, no matter
| the reason, is illogical.
| drcongo wrote:
| Keep following through the logic... You manage to hook
| someone who absolutely knows you're a scammer, and they
| keep responding to you taking up precious time you could
| be spending with someone who is actually likely to give
| you money. So, what is the upside to getting a response
| from someone who is never ever going to give you
| anything?
| transcriptase wrote:
| You're assuming that there's no cost involved in moving a
| potential victim through the pipeline. I'm sure AI has
| changed the game, but the general idea was that beyond
| the initial blast of spam you would have someone actually
| responding to those who fell for it. Putting in signals
| that it was a scam filtered out individuals who would
| waste scammer time because they would eventually figure
| it out before falling victim. By selecting for people who
| literally can't pick up on obvious signs of a scam, you
| save yourself a lot of time and energy.
| falcor84 wrote:
| It's the oldest trick in the IT book - focus on the buyer
| persona and ignore the user persona.
| esskay wrote:
| Ditto. The more interesting part is how many people will
| defend it. Presumably some mix of post-purchase
| rationalisation and inherited assumptions about what's
| "standard" even when those assumptions stopped being true
| ages ago.
| Draiken wrote:
| I find it infuriating, but that's how the system's supposed
| to work. It's the definition of a monopoly and they're in the
| extraction phase. When there's no competition (and eventually
| there's always going to be a winner) you don't need to make
| good products anymore.
|
| They've successfully indoctrinated whole generations to use
| Windows/Office. Here in Brazil using a computer was (probably
| still is) synonymous to using Windows/Office. Everyone had
| their pirated version of Windows and many don't even know
| that alternatives exist. When those people open companies
| they'll use what they know.
|
| Software companies have to build for the most popular OSes
| and most can't justify anything else. Which then means most
| software only works on Windows and people can't leave it even
| if there are better alternatives (see Adobe). Finally, any
| non-closed computer comes with Windows so the cycle continues
| forever.
| dugidugout wrote:
| I'm guessing the broader demographic of users simply don't
| think the software is crap. My buddy working in water
| transportation was just raving about Teams to me the other
| day. His praise basically boiled down to being integrated
| with his organization, providing him easy access to his
| department-resources. I suppose it does serve my buddy well.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Could be because I use a Mac, and I do most of my work
| chatting in Slack, but I don't hate Teams. It has my
| calendar, it has shitty/good enough during meetings chat
| (although finding which room you have unread messages in
| can be confusing), and it has video meetings with
| transcripts and great Exchange integration.
|
| Windows 11, on the other hand, offends me.
| afavour wrote:
| Microsoft's best pitch (and Google benefits from this too) is
| that contracts are annoying and take forever to execute. If you
| can sign a deal for Outlook _and_ Teams it's so much easier
| than separate contracts for Outlook and Slack. You'll get very
| far with that logic alone.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Most companies I've been at that use Teams over Slack is not
| "We can't get contract for Slack" but "We have Teams
| included, why would we pay for Slack?" - Accountant
| immibis wrote:
| I guess Microsoft lost this battle, at least at some
| companies, because I'm now at one that uses Slack and
| Google, with no dependency on Microsoft Office.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Thats the whole point. The only people using Teams are
| the ones who are already committed to Microsoft 365.
| Companies on GSuite mostly use Slack, I doubt there is a
| single one using Teams.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Microsoft won this battle if you check the numbers. Last
| I saw it was 85% Microsoft vs 15% Google which seems
| right with my experience. Current company is Google
| Worksapce while last 3 were Office365.
| thevillagechief wrote:
| Teams was clearly never meant to be used as a standalone
| product. It was a pretty effective defense play. Block
| other competitors from gaining a foothold.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too
|
| You say this like it was a mystery to start with. When you own
| 90+% of the user base, you can create trends with any changes
| implemented
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Microsoft's entire business model has been tying. Countless
| millions are forced to use Copilot because their IT department
| has contracts with Microsoft, and those same contracts are why
| they use Office, Teams, and so on. Their developers use Visual
| Studio, deploy to Azure, and run it all against SQL Server.
| Their email comes from Exchange.
|
| It has been an incredibly lucrative strategy. We all herald
| some CEO's prowess in growing revenue when they've been doing
| the same playbook for decades now, and have been running on the
| inertia of Windows dominance on the desktop. Every new entrant
| is pushed out through countless incredibly lazy IT departments
| that just adopt whatever Microsoft shits out.
|
| It's actually surprising that the one and only area where this
| really failed was as they tried to lever tying to the mobile
| market. A couple of missteps along the way are the only reason
| every office drone isn't rocking their Lumia ExchangeLive!
| CoDevice.
| dboreham wrote:
| People here are mostly too young to remember but the original
| Microsoft business model was this:
|
| Find a software market currently addressed by high price
| products; create a reasonably good product for that market;
| sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much
| higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make
| much more profit. Repeat/rinse.
|
| The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after this. You
| can't lock in customers if they didn't already willingly buy
| your product.
| larkost wrote:
| No the original Microsoft business model was to get the
| incumbent (IBM) to bundle your product (DOS, bought from
| someone else) onto their product so that you had a near-
| monopoly, then use that to sell your other software onto
| that, occasionally making technical changes to make it
| difficult for your competitors.
| htrp wrote:
| >the original Microsoft business model
|
| From 1981
|
| >Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM
| Personal Computer,[9][10] hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and
| bought 86-DOS 1.10 for US$25,000 that July
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Its all about Excel. It really is the best spreadsheet, and
| everyone knows how to use it. But that comes in an Office
| bundle that includes Teams. And that is why we must suffer.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Was certainly the case in the early years of Google Sheets.
| For me, the gap is entirely closed. I'm willing to believe
| that Excel still has the better platform for extreme power
| users but I've done some pretty slick stuff with Google
| Sheets and that was four or five years ago. It must be even
| better today (though I'm not currenlty doing much with
| spreadsheets).
| knollimar wrote:
| Has google sheets filled out the lambda helper functions
| yet? If so that could narrow the gap.
|
| Passing around vba based xlsm is really awful, so if google
| sheets has lambdas they can probably get a lead with google
| sheets queey language over filter.
|
| Groupby and pivotby are the new excel alternative, but if
| they filled out lambdas, then does that keave VBA and power
| query as the only reasons for Excel?
| hahn-kev wrote:
| Not sure what lambda helpers are. But you can write
| Google AppScript which is just JS and do some pretty cool
| stuff, including define custom functions and fully
| integrate with Google APIs. I've used to to send emails,
| or create calendar events for example.
| knollimar wrote:
| Byrow, bycol, map, reduce, scan, makearray, and most
| recently groupby and pivotby.
|
| Basically functions that take a lambda argument and apply
| it over some range.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I agree with it, but it's a wild world we live in when the
| best spreadsheet has default behaviors which will fuck your
| data pasted into it when you're not paying attention.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to
| shove shoddy products down people's throats."
|
| I remember this one. In the 90s MS reps would come to our
| company and sing about how their Visual Basic was superior to
| Delphi. When pointed to countless features that proved the
| opposite all they were able to say is that the MS has bigger
| dick.
|
| Their recommendation was to have 2 developers instead of one we
| had. One would code GUI / front end in Visual Basic and the
| other write DLLs that would do all the meat.
| neilalexander wrote:
| I would think that if they actually spent the time and money
| fixing the core functionality of their core products (like
| Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time
| promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users
| wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start
| menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or
| into Windows Search that regularly fails to find installed
| programs or local files.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because they _so_ much want to be a service business than a
| software business. Microsoft execs are losing sleep over
| becoming the next IBM, not realizing they are already there and
| have been for a long time.
|
| Their main problem is that they never really learned how to
| compete on merit, just on first-to-market and all kinds of
| legal (and illegal) tricks.
| morkalork wrote:
| To be pedantic, IBM is a service company
| benterix wrote:
| This follows from the parents statement.
| John23832 wrote:
| That's the point.
| MrMorden wrote:
| And IBM could have been AWS a decade earlier had they so
| chose.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I'm actually somewhat stoked about generative AI from a "good
| enough" perspective, because at this inflection point where a
| lot of countries and organizations are looking for Microsoft
| alternatives (digital sovereignty, etc), this is the best
| time to be able to build and deploy alternatives with the
| productivity advantages (if any) AI might provide.
|
| Big Tech thinks they have a moat, when it's really diffuse
| power being made available via genAI to build software good
| enough to replace them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Big tech's moat is mostly built up around perceived
| security (not actual security) and abuse of monopoly
| positions, AI is going to make it easier for them to
| maintain this because it serves as an addictive component
| for the users, or so they hope. In practice it only appeals
| to the lowest common denominator, which is exactly how they
| built their empires in the first place. AI allows non-
| experts to pretend they are experts with confidence, and to
| produce output they claim as their own to which they have
| no real title. As a democratizing principle that's great,
| but as a quality-of-service-provided item it could easily
| become a disaster and I think MS et-al are betting that
| they will be able to 'fake it until they make it' on the
| quality front to avert that disaster.
|
| So far, I'm not seeing it. All I see is a massive leap
| forward in the first two years that still had some
| fundamental problems and a lot of fancy packaging of the
| same broken stuff since then. We're looking at band-aids
| here, not actual progress.
| mrweasel wrote:
| As long as companies, and consumers, still pick Windows and
| Office, then why spend the resources. Making Windows better
| won't move the sales number significantly, but removing the ads
| and the potential AI upsell is a direct hit to revenue.
|
| The sad reality seems to be that Microsoft do not care about
| the majority of their products anymore. Only Azure, Microsoft
| 365 CoPilot, CoPilot and maybe CoPilot.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I'm not familiar with many "consumers" who still pick a
| Windows and Office, and in this generation, there are very
| few consumers picking xbox. Outside of enterprises, they seem
| to be losing market share everywhere, and at this rate
| they'll be akin to IBM or Oracle in a few years.
| airstrike wrote:
| Office is part of the "Productivity and Business Processes"
| at Microsoft. That business unit had $120B of revenue in
| 2025.
|
| Microsoft 365, which I believe includes Office, makes up
| $95B of that amount, which is split between Commercial
| (92%) and Consumer (8%)
|
| From there you can see why they're focused on Enterprise.
|
| Source:
| https://www.bamsec.com/filing/95017025100235?cik=789019
| (page 39)
| Spivak wrote:
| I will say that with enough group policy and sysinternals
| turning absolutely everything off, turning all of the settings
| to maximum performance lowest flashiness, no web results,
| killing Cortana with reckless abandon my Windows installation
| is actually what I would consider to be snappy. I was
| surprised.
|
| It doesn't make it any better that Microsoft does this, but as
| a piece of practical advice, it seems like it can be done.
| There does still exist a core of Windows under all that garbage
| that is fast.
| samrus wrote:
| All that tinkering is getting you dangerously close to daily
| driving linux. And the advantage there is that the maker isnt
| actively trying to get in your way
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I've got two laptop in my new job. They sent me a windows
| one, when I asked for a linux one. Had to set up the laptop
| to begin working.
|
| Honestly, I had to do a lot of workarounds to get comfy.
| There's annoying stuff I cannot uninstall.
| coldpie wrote:
| Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product
| is not products or services, it's their stock. Selling products
| & services can be an advertisement for their stock, but there
| are other methods of convincing people to buy their stock, too.
| Currently the stock market only wants stocks that have "AI"
| associated with them. It doesn't matter whether users like it
| or not, because having a viable business is not what the stock
| market is currently focused on. So, Microsoft is doing what
| they need to do to sell their primary product: shove AI into
| everything.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Maybe the stock market is not a good system to organize ones
| economy around then?
| cezart wrote:
| I've been thinking about this recently. The centrality of
| the stock market, while historically a great tool to
| allocate resources efficiently, might actually be a big
| weakness for the USA today. A capable adversary, like
| China, can kill entire strategic sectors in the US using
| the stock market. If they undercut the US companies and are
| willing to accept low returns on their investments, then
| the respective USA competition will be driven out of
| business by their investors, because there will be other
| sectors to invest in, with higher RoI. Do this at various
| points in strategic value chains, and over a decade or so
| it might kill entire verticals in strategic sectors,
| leaving the US economy vulnerable to any kinds of shocks.
| qweiopqweiop wrote:
| Do you need the stock market to undercut industries
| though? I'm not sure it's necessary
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| While not strictly necessary, it is a great power
| multiplier.
|
| It helps as it is both a gauge of the success of the
| strategy, and also a lever where the process can be fine
| tuned, eg. slowly buying stock then strategically dumping
| in the right time, correlated with other external shocks
| can have wider effect to whole industries through
| controlling the public opinion on specific industries.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| We're already there when it comes to having the
| industrial base necessary to fight a protracted
| conventional war with china. Which leaves a large ? over
| the US dominance over the pacific.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| As someone who is essentially financially illiterate,
| what does this mean, "allocate resources efficiently?"
| Nobody's investing in companies that promise to cure
| world hunger or alleviate childhood suffering. They're
| investing in technologies that can extract the most
| wealth from the population, regardless of externalities.
| Is that desirable?
|
| Then again, I can't fathom what people would be doing
| with their money if the stock market weren't there. I
| imagine they might naturally wind up with some sort
| of...stock market.
| Alsedarna wrote:
| The operating principle here being that prices are units
| of information, which in aggregate reveal some
| combination of market demand, present supply, production
| costs, etc. All else being equal, an investor who's
| looking to put an investment into a new business will try
| to find the best rate of return. The existence of a
| relatively higher profit margin for an industry suggests
| an unmet market need, and then directs the flow of
| capital into it (if you expect that for every $1 you
| invest into a roofing nail plant will return $1.25 over
| the next year vs a $2 return from a new insulin plant,
| more new cash will flow into the insulin plant, more
| insulin gets made, and if the investor guessed right
| about the demand for it, they turn a profit). In a
| sentence, money flows towards trying to give people what
| we think they want more of.
|
| The theory posited above is that you could try to
| manipulate these signals as a sort of economic warfare.
| If you expect that every dollar you put into our
| aforementioned roofing nail factory will get you
| minuscule or negative return, nobody's going to want to
| invest in building/expanding nail factories, and they'll
| put their cash somewhere it can grow instead. This is all
| well and good so long as you've got happy trading
| relationships with people who can sell you nails, but if
| one day the nails stop coming--you've got a supply chain
| shock until you either open new factories or find someone
| else willing to sell nails to you. The theory here being
| that if you had a LOT of goods that became tied up in a
| single point of failure--someone forcing that failure
| could create a great deal of internal instability to be
| exploited for geopolitical ends.
| jfim wrote:
| That's what's meant by efficiency, it's allocating it to
| the place that has the highest return on investment.
|
| As you point out, in practice what's efficient is what
| can _capture_ the highest return, not necessarily the
| highest return per se. If say investing in education had
| high returns society wide but those returns couldn 't be
| captured, that's not an efficient use of private capital.
| saubeidl wrote:
| As somebody doesn't consider himself a capitalist,
| wouldn't it be fair to say it is "the most efficient" in
| precisely one thing: capital reproducing itself?
|
| And if so, why is that necessarily a good thing? Why
| should that be our goal as society as opposed to things
| like minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy
| rates, making sure we don't have a ton of our fellow
| humans living on the street in misery etc etc - things
| that make the lives of our fellow humans better? Why is
| capital growth the metric we have chosen to optimize for?
| Surely there's better things to optimize for?
|
| Excuse the polemic, but infinite growth with no regard
| for anything else is the ideology of a cancer cell - and
| to me that is increasingly what it feels like when we are
| wasting all these resources on a dying planet just to
| make numbers go up.
| jfim wrote:
| Optimizing for capital returns is a simplification of the
| real world, where it allows for comparing whether it
| makes more sense to put one's money into opportunity A or
| B.
|
| There's a lot that's not captured by solely looking at
| dollars, like the examples that you bring up, such as
| quality of life, human welfare, and so on.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Ultimately that money is made by people choosing to spend
| their money on something, because it helps them, because
| they like it, because they need it for whatever reason
| (real or imagined). That's what grounds the financial
| markets: eventually someone is buying a thing _because
| they want the thing_ , and all the rest of it is
| basically just figuring out who can make the thing, how
| many people want the thing and how badly, and whether the
| stuff used to make the thing could make a different thing
| that people want more. Financial markets can depart from
| that reality for a while, but mainly because of a
| collective belief in some falsehood about the above (
| _everyone_ really badly wants AI, right?).
|
| Number go up infinitely is due to inflation and that's
| basically just an incentive to not hoard cash
| indefinitely, and instead use it for something useful.
| But the only thing that uses up is numbers. Everything
| else is because people, on average, want more stuff and
| are willing and able to work hard to get it.
|
| (Of course, this generally means that the markets chase
| the desires of those who have something valuable enough.
| People who don't will be marginalised by this mechanism,
| for sure. And of course there's lots of opportunity for
| people to steal or abuse powerful positions in the market
| to the detriment of others. Which is why a free market is
| not the be all and end all of organising a society, and
| other organisational structures exist to regulate it and
| to allocate resources in a less transactional manner)
| saubeidl wrote:
| But isn't that counter to the very article we're
| commenting on? Everyone is shoving half baked AI junk
| into everything because that's what makes number go up on
| the stock market, but I'm pretty sure that's _not_
| actually what most people would want those resources to
| be used for.
|
| I'd posit that markets are completely detached from the
| real world and are more of a speculative/religious
| element than an indicator of any ground truths.
|
| Edit: I just realized I missed a sentence of yours where
| you kinda spoke to this. I still believe that this is
| more of a rule than an exception - there is nothing
| inherently tying markets and reality together - they're
| mostly about people making bets on what the next big hype
| is; not on what is actually useful to anyone.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Most people or most people with money? Ultimately it's
| the people making investment decisions you need to
| convince in order to get the money from them. Then the
| reality check is whether you can give them that money
| back and more. Those investors should in theory be self-
| interested in making sure that this is actually useful,
| because if they don't they'll lose their money, but in
| practice they are not superhuman and prone to fads and
| echo-chambers (especially because it's a relatively
| smaller group that can move a lot of money around, and
| short-term investing rewards running with the crowd to
| some degree), but there's not a single group of people
| that would not fall victim to poor decisions in this
| regard (whether you're imagining a centrally managed
| economy, the electorate, or some hypothetical benevolent
| dictator).
| mlsu wrote:
| Y-yeah. HYPOTHETICALLY, this is something an adversary to
| the USA might attempt to do, and it would really kneecap
| the US if they were successful.
|
| But would only happen if USA decided to totally
| financialize all sectors of its economy and make a small
| set of oligarchic corporations THE load-bearing element
| of its strategic capacity, leading us to chase market
| returns even if those returns totally kneecapped our
| ability to build anything at all of actual value.
|
| Good thing we haven't done that!
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > while historically a great tool to allocate resources
| efficiently
|
| Any empirical support for that?
| Draiken wrote:
| > a great tool to allocate resources efficiently
|
| Sorry but... WTF are you talking about?
|
| It rewards self-destructive behavior in favor of short-
| term gains. Shareholders have *zero* commitment to the
| companies they buy shares from and will happily switch
| their entire portfolios on a whim. It's essentially
| people chasing the new shiny thing every single day.
|
| Let's not forget it's a known fact that people with
| insider knowledge will profit over everyone else.
|
| How is that efficient in any shape or form?
|
| > If they undercut the US companies and are willing to
| accept low returns on their investments, then the
| respective USA competition will be driven out of business
| by their investors, because there will be other sectors
| to invest in, with higher RoI.
|
| You're basically explaining one of the reasons stocks are
| a horrible idea for distributing resources.
|
| It has nothing to do with whether or not it's central or
| distributed, it's merely the incentives they create. It's
| essentially Goodhart's law on steroids.
| cezart wrote:
| Depends what you compare it with. I grew up in the post
| soviet union. That system allocated resources to various
| monopolies who were too big to fail. Turns out allocating
| capital based on who can make things that people
| want/need to buy, and do it with a profit, multiplies
| said capital way faster. From this point of view, over
| time your initial base grows into all kinds of industries
| etc. That's probably why the USA won the cold war.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Until your economy congeals into various monopolies who
| are too big to fail, and you lose the rematch because
| you're so busy counting beans you stop paying attention.
| saubeidl wrote:
| I'd argue the Cold War isn't over and the US is losing it
| right now with how their president grovels before the
| Russian one
| mrweasel wrote:
| The stock market weirdly enough ruins the idea of
| capitalism. Catering to shareholders hurts the idea that
| competition would create better and cheaper products.
| zem wrote:
| that's not the idea of capitalism; the idea of capitalism
| is that you should be able to make money by virtue of
| owning stuff. it's an inherently rich-get-richer scheme,
| competition has little to do with it.
| graemep wrote:
| I think its obvious the GP means free market capitalism,
| which is what almost everyone who favours capitalism
| thinks is the form it should take.
| zem wrote:
| I don't see how free market capitalism fixes that. I
| looked up a definition to make sure I wasn't missing
| something and as per investopedia:
|
| "The term "free market capitalism" refers to an economy
| that puts no or minimal barriers in the way of privately
| owned businesses. Matters such as worker rights,
| environmental protection, and product safety will be
| addressed by businesses as the marketplace demands."
|
| it's basically worship of owning the means of production
| and not being regulated in its use, e.g. if you own a
| company you get to dictate all sorts of unreasonable
| things to your employees, and any benefits gained from
| automation accrue to whoever can afford the up front
| money to own the machines.
| graemep wrote:
| That is a bad definition and I cannot find it on
| investopedia. it is essentially an extreme libertarian
| spin on the definition.
|
| There are better definitions on both wikipedia and
| Britannica:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_capitalism
|
| https://www.britannica.com/money/free-market
|
| Especially this hit:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_capitalism#Conc
| ept...
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| And these people has audacity to proclaim that socialism
| is based on fantasy.
| Arainach wrote:
| The free market abhors competition. It's much more
| profitable to be a monopoly - and profitable enough by
| far to squash any competitors in infancy.
| graemep wrote:
| Capitalists abhor competition. Adam Smith (as in
| "invisible hand") pointed this out. That is a subversion
| of a free market.
| Draiken wrote:
| Talk about utopia huh?
|
| Free markets never existed, don't exist and never will.
| Markets are defined by laws and regulations in which they
| exist in. They can't ever be "free".
| graemep wrote:
| I agree. A free market requires regulation to ensure
| competition otherwise it ceases to be a free market.
| Lammy wrote:
| Relevant U.S. Constitution: https://constitution.congress
| .gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
|
| > "The Congress shall have Power... To _regulate
| Commerce_ with foreign Nations, and among the several
| States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
| graemep wrote:
| I assume the downvotes are because people do not know the
| difference between "free market" and "entirely
| unregualted market"?
|
| Please get your definitions from someone reasonable (Adam
| Smith might be a good start) rather than Ayn Rand.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Applies globally.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| Competition creating better products isn't an idea that
| defines capitalism though: the same would apply to
| cottage industry.
|
| Capitalism is defined by having the capitalist, who
| provides capital, and without the ability to sell their
| share of stock it's difficult to see what the value would
| be. So you kind of require stock markets.
|
| Edit: which is why it's odd to call China communist. They
| have 3 stock exchanges. They're really a capitalist
| single-party state.
| larkost wrote:
| China uses Capitalism as a tool where the Party feels it
| would be beneficial (for the Party), and crushes it
| mercilessly when it gets in the way (other than this real
| estate problem they have right now).
|
| In the U.S. we have mistaken Capitalism for a religion,
| and so it wags the dog, so to speak. Since our founding
| we have made some attempts at finding a balance between
| our use of the tools of Capitalism and socialism (in more
| the Democratic Socialism style, rather than the Communism
| style), and we had a good run in the decades after WWII.
| But starting with McCarthyism, and really picking up
| under Regan we have prided ourselves on adopting
| Capitalism as a religion, and it really shows up in both
| the income inequality as well as the increasing role of
| (and corrupting influence of) money in our
| politics/government.
| graemep wrote:
| Its not the stock market per se. The biggest problem is a
| lack of good regulation to ensure competition and the
| resulting drift of oligopolies.
|
| The stockmarket enables that by making takeovers easier
| as you have a higher proportion of short termist
| shareholders who 1) fail to block value destroying
| acquisitions on one side and 2) jump at the chance to
| make a quick profit on the other.
| watwut wrote:
| That is not what stock market is. A company does not have to
| focus on stock price and stock price is not its primary
| product.
| coldpie wrote:
| That's fair, I should reframe. The incentive given to
| decision makers at Microsoft is company stock. That means
| the primary focus for everyone who makes decisions at
| Microsoft is the stock price, which in turn means the stock
| price is the primary product for the company itself.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Name a major U.S. public company in recent years that has
| consistently prioritized improving its product over
| boosting short term stock price or extracting maximum
| profits. If capitalism were truly a healthy system about
| building strong products to create healthy markets, this
| should be the norm (and enshitification shunned), not the
| exception.
|
| What we actually see is a system of chartered extraction.
| Corporate executives are like Norman lords, granted their
| 'title' (CEO of instead of Earl of) by shareholders (rather
| than a king) in return for which both are/were expected to
| extract maximum value by any means necessary. Extractive
| tactics often at the expense of long-term product strength
| are behaviors shareholders expect if the CEO is to keep
| their bestowed 'title'.
|
| Don't forget the progenitor joint stock company The East
| India Company, Capitalism in it's purest form without
| government restriction. Profit-maximizing, absentee
| extraction, with company executives serving as quasi-feudal
| lords over assets and people. Modern corporate capitalism
| is hard to distinguish, in its structure,history, behavior,
| and incentives, from the Norman extraction system, it's
| just dressed in a more politically palatable wrapper and
| forced to mellow out from it's desired East India Company
| style final form.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Name a major U.S. public company in recent years that
| has consistently prioritized improving its product over
| boosting short term stock price or extracting maximum
| profits.
|
| Well in some perverse sense, I'd say Meta qualifies here.
| Zuck isn't beholden to other shareholders and is free to
| burn truckloads of money on worthless projects. The big
| asterisk is that for Meta, "improving its product" is
| effectively "creating the best digital cigarettes".
| watwut wrote:
| Why it must be "major"? Major is counted by stock price,
| you created a circular test.
|
| And that still does not make stock the product.
| kulahan wrote:
| Lots of companies do this (Arizona green tea immediately
| comes to mind), but more importantly, this has no bearing
| on the discussion of whether or not capitalism is "good"
| (really, who ascribes morality to any economic system?),
| because the US is primarily an exercise in regulatory
| capture.
| rcxdude wrote:
| A company does need to keep its market cap above that of
| its assets, if it wants to avoid a hostile takeover and
| sell-off of those assets.
| nolok wrote:
| It's basically the reason this bubble not only exists but has
| a chance not to pop : there is so much stock value in it that
| the big tech all want to keep feeding it, and they're sitting
| on so much cashflow they can afford to do it
|
| It's absurd, but that's where it is. And a company like
| OpenAI basically hangs on it, because they have obligation
| almost ten time their revenue and the only way this does not
| deflate quickly is if others keep feeding it cash.
| brookst wrote:
| Are you saying they would rather double stock price than
| double revenue?
| coldpie wrote:
| Sure. Decision makers are paid in stock price, not revenue.
| They would rather do whatever increases the stock price the
| most, with the least effort/expense.
| graemep wrote:
| Yyes, and prefer it to doubling profit or cashflow etc.
|
| I have not looked at MS in particular, but generally that
| is what the remuneration of the people at the top of most
| public companies is most strongly linked to.
| Maxatar wrote:
| If you're someone who owns Microsoft, what option would you
| prefer?
|
| 1. Stock price remains the same but revenue doubles.
|
| 2. Revenue stays the same, but stock price doubles.
|
| Assuming all else equal, and recognizing that this is
| absolutely a simplification, but if these were the two
| choices then it seems a no brainer that you'd go with
| option 2. Revenue is a means of increasing stock price.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I guess it depends on what kind of investor you are.
|
| If you're holding MS stock long-term, and you plan to
| gradually shift away from equities as you near retirement
| and then gradually liquidate your holdings to fund your
| retirement, juicing the stock in the short term does
| nothing for you.
|
| If you're holding short-term, then you also need to
| _sell_ the stock after it gets juiced, so that you can
| move your capital to not-yet-juiced stocks.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Missed a point above - that for said short-term
| investor... that strategy doesn't actually work, since a
| "sell high buy low" strategy on individual stocks is
| outperformed by just holding ETFs long-term.
|
| So really, which investors does short-term stock juicing
| benefit? Insider traders, I guess.
| 5kh wrote:
| A long term investor would prefer 1. Most likely option 2
| would shortly be followed by halving of the stock price.
| Option 1 lets someone buy shares in a company that is
| greatly undervalued and will lead to long terms gains.
| Maxatar wrote:
| I just think you are the other person who replied to me
| are making the same mistake, which is mixing the means of
| accomplishing a goal with the goal itself. This is a
| mistake I see a lot (especially in software development),
| where people get too attached to a specific means or
| method that they end up confusing the method itself with
| the actual thing that needs to be accomplished.
|
| The goal for an investor is captured in the stock price
| itself. In programming terms, a corporation is a function
| whose output is its stock price/market cap, and revenue
| is but one of a host of inputs into that corporation that
| determines what the stock price is. Other inputs can be
| operating expenses, whether dividends are issued, future
| prospects for the company such as entering new markets
| etc etc... and you can have beliefs about how those
| various inputs affect the output or how these inputs
| change the output over time (short term vs. long term),
| that's perfectly fine... but when push comes to shove,
| the goal is not the revenue, it's not entering a new
| market, it's not reducing operating expenses... the goal
| is increasing the stock price (well technically the
| market cap).
| 5kh wrote:
| You should look up the concept of value investing. If you
| can buy shares in an undervalued company do so.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Okay thanks.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yes! Not least because doubling revenue doesn't cause the
| stock to double.
| hvb2 wrote:
| > Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary
| product is not products or services, it's their stock.
|
| Yeah that's a great business idea, ask Boeing how that's
| going
| coldpie wrote:
| Current CEO:
|
| > Boeing spent about $300,000 to help Ortberg move to
| Seattle. His decision comes more than two decades after
| Boeing leadership decided to move company headquarters out
| of Seattle. Ortberg received about $18 million for the
| months he was the CEO in 2024.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ortberg
|
| Previous CEO:
|
| > In 2022, Calhoun received $22.5 million from Boeing. Most
| of his 2022 compensation was in the form of estimated value
| of stock and option awards. He received the same $1.4
| million salary as in 2021. ... In February 2023, Boeing
| awarded Calhoun an incentive of about $5.29 million in
| restricted stock units to "induce him to stay throughout
| the company's recovery". In March 2023, Boeing announced
| Calhoun was being given shares worth $15 million that will
| vest in installments over three years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Calhoun
|
| Seems to be going all right?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Works for Tesla, the absolute poster child for this kind of
| behavior. They can lose double digit percentage of market
| share in key places and still give the CEO a trillion
| dollars.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Exactly, even those of us that like Windows have a hard time
| talking about it when Microsoft treats it so badly, I really
| miss Balmer era in regards to Windows.
|
| The only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the
| Windows Terminal and WSL.
| theiz wrote:
| Or do things that actually work. Why, for example, can I not
| translate a PowerPoint using Copilot in Powerpoint? Why do I
| need to save it, then upload it into ChatGPT, translate it,
| then download it again, and open it in PowerPoint for further
| editing. But at the same time get all kind off nonsense I don't
| want pushed at me in Windows, like that MSN news clickbait
| crap.
| dboreham wrote:
| Nobody gets a bonus and a new boat doing that.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| But "we're fixing Windows and Office" doesn't get you a fat
| bonus, and it doesn't get investors a double-digit growth
| quarter. Anyone who tries to do the right thing will be
| disposed of. Why don't people understand this?
| outside1234 wrote:
| Gemini is really great now. Fast is insanely fast and handles 90%
| of queries. Deep Research works better than OpenAI's deep
| research given their search expertise.
|
| It is going to be very hard for OpenAI or Microsoft to compete
| with this now that Google has gotten their act together.
| delaminator wrote:
| That's the joy of not having to compete, your stuff is just
| there.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Still wonder why the OneDrive mobile can't find a file and the
| photo backup has been broken for months. But I have a copilot
| button in notepad.
|
| Satya's days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very
| costly and painful lesson.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And photo back up has never included metadata like locations
| when backing up to OneDrive making it usekdss
| guluarte wrote:
| Onedrive, that useless app that creates a mess in the desktop
| if you have a laptop and a desktop like most users
| IcyWindows wrote:
| Most users do not own two computers.
| PKop wrote:
| A huge percentage do, whether it's most or not would be a
| stupid metric by which to design a cloud storage product in
| such a way that causes issues when one does sign in on
| multiple devices.
| guluarte wrote:
| well, onedrive is the ms solution to dropbox which is main
| purpose is syncing between computers
| jedberg wrote:
| No, but the biggest users who pay the most do.
| PKop wrote:
| This is what's so amazing to me, a primary feature of cloud
| storage is multi-device usage. But by default this ridiculous
| product causes a mess if you use it on 2 or more computers,
| and many apps save app data to my documents so you have
| useless (at best) or conflicting at worst bloat being copied
| between computers. I want to use it but Microsoft makes it a
| huge pain if I do.
| voidfunc wrote:
| IMO, it's time for leadership change at Microsoft. Satya
| revitalized the company but now it needs a Product person that
| knows how to rebuild the quality of it's products.
| johnyzee wrote:
| MS Bob -> Clippy -> Copilot -> ?
| Perz1val wrote:
| You have forgotten Cortana
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| So did Microsoft
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Cortana... ah yes, that thing that I immediately disabled. I
| had forgotten its name.
| yks wrote:
| AI assistance is a gold rush -- promotions are to be made and
| huge complex system to be over-engineered in Big Tech. The race
| to stake out the future empires is underway, and there is no time
| to think about the quality control, UX etc. But who am I kidding
| though, there is no time to think about those things during the
| chillest of times either, as any user of Power Automate can
| concur.
| Sevii wrote:
| It's being treated like a gold rush but I don't think it really
| is. This is like dotcom 1.0 all over again. They didn't know
| what the best use cases for the internet were but they still
| poured billions into it. The gold rush didn't come until the
| 2000s when social media took off.
|
| Normally you get a frontier exploration phase where fringe
| people experiment with the new technology and try to figure out
| what it's good for. It feels like we just skipped that step
| entirely.
| eviks wrote:
| The AI beating will continue untill the buying improves. And the
| use will be forsed by changing the OS.
| ripvanwinkle wrote:
| I see mentions of Gemini as a fast growing alternative to
| ChatGPT. Isn't anyone troubled by the fact that for consumers
| there is no way to keep your data from being used for model
| training if you want to maintain history of your Gemini chats.
|
| ChatGPT respects privacy and allows for maintaining history while
| also opting out of using ones data for model training
| big-and-small wrote:
| I trust Google ad monopoly to keep my data actually secure.
| They have a great track record of not sharing their datasets
| with anyone because this gives them an edge pushing ads down
| people throats. Google is honest about what they doing. Google
| also not going away anytime soon so they also not going to sell
| off their datasets to highest bidder.
|
| And I don't trust Sam Altman and AI.com at all since their
| whole thing was built on lies. They could start regaining the
| trust by changing their company name.
| jofla_net wrote:
| > I trust Google...
|
| Yup, yeah, sure. The company that attempts to open your
| password-protected zip files. Let us not give it a free pass
| either.
|
| There is no good incumbent.
| dudneet wrote:
| You just made that up, huh?
| jofla_net wrote:
| https://grahamcluley.com/shouldnt-gmail-zip-files-
| password-i...
|
| Its been a while so i had trouble finding it (but Grok
| obliged)
|
| Moreover its always the edge cases that people are 'OK'
| with, but again if they can do it (setup the
| infrastructure) for one thing they can do it for
| anything, and it makes 'trusting' them seem naive. Since
| trusting was the original statement.
| ripvanwinkle wrote:
| It's not just about protecting data in the old sense -
| typically from other corporate entities. It would suck if
| your information somehow made it into a generally available
| model that then leaked some of that anyone asking a question
| zubiaur wrote:
| Their copilot stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed with
| marketing slop on top of an under-performing product.
|
| However; their azure offerings are somewhat decent. AI Search is
| getting quite decent, access to Open AI models served through
| foundry is quite the differentiator (although the rate limits are
| an issue), their reference architectures are very helpful and
| their ancillary services, like document intelligence integrate
| well.
|
| I'm a bit worried that their marketing dept has gotten their
| crappifying and obfuscating eyes set on those services though,
| given the recent rebranding of Foundry and what not, but the
| underlying services are decent.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Their <snip> stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed
| with marketing slop on top of an under-performing product.
|
| Updated as it was almost close to being a generic comment about
| AI overall.
| pjmlp wrote:
| See WinUI after Project Reunion announcement 5 years ago,
| unfortunately fits exactly the same description, and we are
| way past COVID to use that as an excuse.
| orev wrote:
| It doesn't matter. Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and
| they have no qualms using it to displace competing products. They
| did it with Teams, and they'll keep doing it because they know
| there's no appetite for anti-trust prosecution anymore (or maybe
| they feel comfortable arguing they're no longer a monopoly
| because they have no presence in mobile).
|
| Every procurement team is going to point to copilot, saying it's
| included with the other Microsoft services a company is already
| paying for, so duplicate AI products won't be approved for
| purchase.
|
| Microsoft is laying claim to the desktop real estate, so in a few
| more generations of the technology, they'll have the customers
| and competitors will already be starved out.
| andy99 wrote:
| Big corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons that
| some committee decided solved a problem.
|
| When the internet came out, did many legacy companies lead the
| way with online experiences, figuring out what the real killer
| apps now that everyone was connected were? I don't know for sure,
| but I doubt it, I think it gave rise to some of the present crop
| of big tech, and others reinvented themselves after the use cases
| were discovered.
|
| All that to say, I expect the same here. In 10 years there will
| be AI uses we take for granted, built by companies we haven't
| heard of yet (plus the coding apps) and nobody will talk about
| stupid "rephrase with AI" and other mindless crap that legacy
| companies tried to push.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > Big corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons
| that some committee decided solved a problem.
|
| Or not even .. maybe someone said all products need to be AI
| enabled, so now they are. Just append "AI" to the product name,
| add bolt-on to call an LLM to do something, and declare mission
| accomplished.
| akomtu wrote:
| Big corpos have reached the stage where they can hire ex-
| politburo apparatchiks from the soviets or china, straight into
| C-suite roles, and nothing will materially change.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748
| guluarte wrote:
| Anyone remember Cortana? It seems like MS doesnt learn
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| Wait, Cortana doesn't exist anymore?
| Elfener wrote:
| It doesn't (but it seems pretty much every Windows install
| has it installed, and if you try to open it, it just tells
| you that there's no Cortana anymore.)
| Findecanor wrote:
| BTW. They did the same with Maps and the PDF reader: the
| two apps I used the most on my Windows tablet. An "upgrade"
| replaced the app with a nonce. That just made me so
| incredibly angry.
| 6thbit wrote:
| Who are the likely successors if Satya steps down?
| burnte wrote:
| They bought Dragon a few years ago, and 2 years ago they debuted
| the Dragon Ambient Experience, then renamed to Dragon Copilot. We
| had dozens of doctors try it, after a handful of months most had
| quit, it was a bad product. We switched to a competitor at
| literally 1/6th the price, and we don't even have to offer it,
| the doctors tell each other about it and they ask for it.
|
| Nadella has done a lot of listening through is CEO reign but it
| looks like MS is back in a "don't listen to customers, tell them
| what they'll get" phase.
| Xiol wrote:
| So, you're saying it's a Bad Dragon?
| nolok wrote:
| I mean have you tried them ? I did and they're beyond terrible,
| of course they're not the one I pay for
| elpakal wrote:
| Not just about the products imho. I do some consulting for law
| firms who typically use the MSFT stack, and I was excited about
| the private ChatGPT services in Azure, because from my
| (admittedly limited) sample of law firms, nobody likes using
| Copilot and LLMs need to be private/secure. The amount of
| outdated and poor quality documentation for Azure services is
| amazing given how nascent these services are.
| devinprater wrote:
| Lol the Copilot app isn't even that useful on iOS for a blind
| person. On Android, you type something in, hit sent, and the app
| pipes the pure output of the AI, Markdown formatting and citation
| markup included, to the screen reader. That's at least something.
| I mean it's crumbs, yes, but we blind people are very, very used
| to crumbs.
|
| On iOS, you type a message and send, and... nothing.
| delaminator wrote:
| Open VSCode, close co-pilot again.
|
| That monkey face simply won't go away.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI
| products are not only _shoddier than average_ , which is nothing
| new for them in many categories, but that this time the
| competition can actually easily leapfrog them.
|
| Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New
| Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-
| designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it
| has... _zero_ items when expanded.
|
| I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By
| ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to
| make that button _actually do something_ , ending the
| conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"...
|
| Oh, well, and I actually _also_ have a dedicated Copilot button
| on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what,
| it does _exactly nothing_! I can elect to either assign this
| button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm,
| yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me
| that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable
| that.
|
| So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you
| _ever_ tried to, like, actually _use_ , like _anything_ that you
| 're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have
| been obvious, right? Right??
| throw310822 wrote:
| The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot
| prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this
| meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere,
| so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it
| admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Absolutely! There are _so many_ scenarios where they could
| actually add _some_ value, and they 're fulfilling, like,
| exactly _none_ of those?
|
| Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer
| product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code
| regardless of model output. I _truly_ cannot fathom how _any_
| of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that
| situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we
| are.
|
| And, again, it's fine with me: I'll just use Claude Code, but
| if I were a Microsoft VP-or-above, the lack of execution
| would sort-of, well _concern_ me? But maybe I 'm just focused
| on the wrong things. I mean, Cloudflare brought down, like,
| half the Internet _twice_ in the past two weeks, and they 're
| still a tech darling, so possibly incompetence is the new
| hotness now?
| Sanzig wrote:
| I have Copilot at work, it feels _so_ useless sometimes. As
| an example, I had a report which I needed to make some
| batch edits to. I figured why not let the robot take a
| crack at it, so I clicked the Copilot button and spent a
| couple minutes describing what I needed changed.
|
| Copilot tells me it can't edit my current document, but it
| can create a new one. I figured okay, Microsoft doesn't
| want to set it loose on the original, guess it makes sense
| that it requires a copy. So I said yes.
|
| Nope. Instead of creating a copy of my document and editing
| it, it created an entirely new document which excised
| basically everything in the original report and replaced it
| with a very short summary - I'm talking 5000 words down to
| 500. All my tables and figures were gone, as was the
| standard report template my employer uses.
|
| What utter garbage. Office productivity is a major use case
| for LLMs, and here the largest vendor of productivity
| software on the planet is happy to fuck it up.
| Angostura wrote:
| I've found it fairly useful in Excel. The suggestions to
| clean up data are pretty good and it's spat out some quite
| gnarly formula on request
| danudey wrote:
| Imagine a circumstance where Windows Search was as good as
| Apple's Spotlight, and could integrate with cloud services
| to index documents, browser bookmarks, web history, maybe
| podcasts, etc.)
|
| Hey Copilot, where is that document I was reading about the
| new network diagramming software Jacob is testing out?
|
| Or Hey Copilot, my disk is getting pretty full. What
| software is taking up a lot of space that I haven't used
| for a while? Or are there any files I can move to cloud
| storage to free up space?
|
| But no, instead it's just 'we're going to take screenshots
| of all your windows, OCR it, and index it, so that when
| someone infects your machine they can see your credit card
| numbers and pornography habits.'
| rickydroll wrote:
| > I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a
| cursory review.
|
| Maybe it's a fifth column group working to destroy
| Microsoft.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| LOL
|
| Since DECADES Outlook is _not_ capable of putting the
| first(!) just(!) useful datetime-stamp found in an email
| which says "calendar" or something in the text when
| pressing CTRL+R: This function creates a calendar entry
| from the current email with current receiver list, but
| default-date/time is alwsys set to the current even if
| recipients last ansewer was simply "lets do: 11am" - why
| does even this simple shit not work today? You dont need AI
| for this simple idea even, a robus / probability parser
| will do fine in 99% cases
| jll29 wrote:
| Agree 100%. Don't train a 100-billion parameter neural
| transformer if you can solve it with a bash one-liner.
|
| Use your human intelligence and save our planet!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's so broken. I have a suspicion the AI teams are in some
| kind of an internal standoff with privacy/compliance teams,
| and Copilot simply never gets access to any tools or data.
|
| Because if not that, then I don't know what. I can half-ass
| a better product with ChatGPT API and a PowerShell script,
| and I could've since GPT-4 was released; in fact the
| product can actually write itself, _it 's that simple_ to
| do a better job.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sounds like Siri - unable to control much of anything on the
| iPhone outside of reading/sending text messages and setting
| alarms.
| donkey_brains wrote:
| And that's ok. Those are core features of the phone that
| absolutely must work reliably and consistently. Far better
| to do a few important things really well than a hundred
| things execrably.
| throw310822 wrote:
| However the other day I asked the Gemini assistant on my
| phone to check the birthdays in my calendar, get all
| their dates, then make a graph of how many fall in each
| period with a 15-day moving average. It did everything as
| instructed including writing a python script to generate
| the graph, then discussed the results with me :)
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I would expect Siri to be able to do anything on the
| iPhone that I can - change settings, report stats,
| kill/launch apps, etc.
|
| It would be nice if it could control 3rd party apps too,
| like GMail, but being able to control the stuff that
| Apple themselves have built doesn't seem a lot to ask.
| microtherion wrote:
| It also can initiate phone calls and play music.
|
| And those are really the core use cases for AirPods,
| HomePods, and CarPlay, the contexts where a hands-free
| eyes-free interface is most useful.
| burningChrome wrote:
| I've fooled around with some vibe coding on several LLM's
| like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT with some pretty decent
| results.
|
| Since I have a full Copilot license at my corporate day gig,
| I figured I would try using Copilot for a basic static site.
| Nothing too hard, and something that's been handled easily
| with the other LLM's.
|
| The prompt was pretty basic just to get something to start
| working with. "Build a four page template. With a home or
| index page, two pages of content and a contact page with a
| responsive slide out menu from the left hand side of the
| page."
|
| It ran and put everything in a folder. I open the home page
| and everything was broken. I opened the files in VS Code and
| saw this: <ul class="drawer__list">
| <li>index.htmlHome</a></li>
| <li>services.htmlServices</a></li> <li><a
| class="nav-linkeduling</a></li>
| <li>contact.htmlContact</a></li> </ul>
|
| And then this: <head> <meta
| charset="utf-8" /> <meta name="viewport"
| content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
| <title>Home * Acme Web</title> <meta
| name="description" content="Accessible, responsive starter
| template with a slide-out menu."/>
| <linkts/css/styles.css /assets/css/styles.css
| </head>
|
| I mean, if you can't even this right, I don't have much hope
| it can do anything more complicated. To say this was pretty
| sad is an understatement and clarified how far Microsoft is
| behind other LLM's.
| imiric wrote:
| Not a problem. We can call it HTML6 and make browsers
| interpret it correctly.
| estetlinus wrote:
| Kudos to you. I never use new buttons out of fear of
| something irreversible happening, like sending a random email
| or deleting something. I still feel uncomfortable with the
| Gmail UX, I would _never_ use a "hello iz magic ai"-button.
| outside2344 wrote:
| I asked Microsoft 365 Copilot to create a new word document
| for me (since they have hidden the link on office.com) and...
| it refused to do that.
|
| Edit: Just tried again. It refused to do it. I mean WTF.
| artrockalter wrote:
| It's so easy to ship completely broken AI features because
| you can't really unit test them and unit tests have been the
| main standard for whether code is working for a long time
| now.
|
| The most successful AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor)
| are all dogfooding their products as far as I can tell, and I
| don't really see any other reliable way to make sure the AI
| feature you ship actually works.
| bn-l wrote:
| Microsoft: What? You want us to eat this slop? Are you
| crazy?!
| danudey wrote:
| 50% of our code is being written by AI! Or at least,
| autocompleted by AI. And then our developers have to fix
| 50% of THAT code so that it does what they actually
| wanted to do in the first place. But boy, it sure
| produces a lot of words!
| sk7 wrote:
| Tests are called "evals" (evaluations) in the AI product
| development world. Basically you let humans review LLM
| output or feed it to another LLM with instructions how to
| evaluate it.
|
| https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/beyond-vibe-checks-a-
| pms-...
| azemetre wrote:
| Interesting, never really thought of it outside of this
| comment chain but I'm guessing approaches like this hurt
| the typical automated testing devs would do but seeing
| how this is MSFT (who already stopped having dedicated
| testing roles for a good while now, rip SDET roles) I can
| only imagine the quality culture is even worse for "AI"
| teams.
| flkiwi wrote:
| Me: Can you access my inbox and Teams messages?
|
| Copilot: Yep!
|
| Me: Please find any items in my inbox or sent items
| indicating (a) that I have agreed to take on a task or (b)
| identifying me as the person responsible for a task, removing
| duplicates and any items that I have unambiguously replied to
| via email or Teams. Time window is preceding 7 days.
|
| Copilot: _Prints a list with, at best, 5% accuracy_
|
| I know some folks have the peculiar idea that search is dead
| in favor of AI, but if AI can't accurately find information,
| it is useless. As near as I can tell, Copilot finds 3-4 items
| (but rarely the SAME 3-4 items across runs) and calls it a
| day. It just seems like nobody is actually testing any of
| this stuff. Microsoft is actively destroying its credibility
| because it's offering a tool with a party trick but is
| utterly unreliable. I will, therefore, not rely on it.
| PLenz wrote:
| It's a generalization problem. We can train LLMs that
| 'know' a lot of stuff in the global sense but the tasks
| that are interesting to people require the LLM to know a
| lot about you and your world in a very specific sense. The
| technical problem is that it's all corner cases and that's
| impossible to scale right now. No amount of context window
| is going to get you there either.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. The scenario posted by the GP is
| very clearly an "easy" task of basically sentiment
| analysis. The only thing it requires is a way to query
| your message history, then it just goes through them
| 1-by-1. I would expect any of the current SOTA agentic
| models to handle this with ease.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| I bet c-suite uses Mac
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Yeah, and I also bet their Outlook 'Copilot' button has more-
| than-zero options in its dropdown menu.
|
| But I'd _actually love_ to know how to achieve that, and so
| far Microsoft AI is awfully silent on the subject...
| gertlex wrote:
| Nah, they probably just have Copilot as a bullet point on a
| slide, count that as "using AI", and are psyched for their
| next board meeting.
| shiandow wrote:
| And everything aimed at developers assumes you're using Unix.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Hard disagree: there is a whole universe of Windows-based
| developers. But even for them, the best offer seems to be a
| frequently-updated but still-entirely-underwhelming Visual
| Studio Enterprise plug-in that after 6 months (or so) can't
| even show proposed changes in response to a prompt without
| destroying surrounding code...
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I bet they use iphones and leave computers to their
| underlings/assistants.
| lioeters wrote:
| "Compute? Think with own brain? Our servants do that for
| us."
| furyofantares wrote:
| > Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my
| New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-
| that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu,
| and it has... zero items when expanded.
|
| I guess that's worse than the Gemini button in Google Sheets
| that asks me to subscribe to AI services. I have multiple times
| been in a sheet and thought "asking an LLM how to do this thing
| I want to do right here in this product would actually be great
| if it works", remembered there was an AI-looking button in the
| top right, clicked it, and nope'd out of the subscription.
|
| I just want to know if it works or not before I buy it.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| > Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button
| on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what,
| it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this
| button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm,
| yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs
| me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually
| enable that.
|
| How did you manage this? Probably some company-wide group
| policy saves you. It keeps starting copilot for me, drives me
| crazy.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| > How did you manage this?
|
| I did _absolutely_ nothing special, other than running the
| latest-and-greatest Windows 11 Enterprise, which is what we
| put on most of our laptops without any customizations other
| than "require 2FA and some antivirus and firewalling" via
| Intune.
|
| And I just went into our Azure admin portal, looking for any
| AI goodies to enable, and... there just doesn't seem to be
| anything there? And we have an Enterprise P2 subscription,
| which is usually where all the good stuff is, but, yeah...
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| There's AI in Teams to. I wanted to use it to recolect info
| from my chats but apparently it's unable to do so.
| transcriptase wrote:
| So it's like Copilot in Excel, that can't interact with or
| seemingly even see the contents of the spreadsheet that's in
| focus.
| jsheard wrote:
| > So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you
| ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're
| selling?
|
| Satya Nadella insists that Bing365Pilot has supercharged his
| productivity, but determining if he's high on his own supply or
| lying through his teeth is an exercise for the reader.
|
| _> Copilot consumes Nadella's life outside the office as well.
| He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads
| transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat
| with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the
| car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on
| Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook
| and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from
| Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff,
| delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots.
| "I'm an email typist," Nadella jokes of his job, noting that
| Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages._
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...
| rynn wrote:
| Nadella has to have his own custom agents. It isn't even
| possible for an enterprise like MSFT to _not_ have custom
| agents that are still remotely useful.
|
| So, his experience with Copilot agents != Average Customer's
| experience
| danudey wrote:
| Look, if the CEO of a five trillion dollar company
| investing hundreds of billions into AI can come up with
| some custom agents to handle every aspect of the CEO's
| work, surely your average Microsoft 365-subscribing
| corporation can do the same.
|
| It's just another example of the rich being wildly out of
| touch. Yes, Beyonce has the same 24 hours in a day that the
| rest of us have, but she also has enough money to pay
| people to do every aspect of her life that isn't bringing
| her joy or wealth. Yes, AI can be used to streamline
| workflows or help you find signal in the noise so you can
| focus on the important things better, but if every company
| has to build that themselves then no company is going to
| see the value of spending a bunch of extra money on
| something that they can only get benefit from if they spend
| even more money.
|
| If the 'AI agents' that Nadella is talking about were part
| of Copilot then sure, okay, I could see a benefit, but when
| people in this thread are saying that Outlook can't even
| tell you who is in a meeting then it certainly explains why
| Nadella doesn't understand the lack of value.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he
| loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he
| can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an
| episode in the car on his commute to Redmond.
|
| I remember reading that when it first came out and all I can
| think is: No, he doesn't like podcasts, if you like podcasts
| you listen to them.
|
| That's like saying "He loves food, but instead of eating it
| he feeds it to an analyzer that tells him what elements were
| detected in it".
|
| I have to assume it's all BS/lies because if that's a
| truthful statement (about podcasts and the other things) then
| I really question wtf they are doing over there. None of that
| sounds like "the future", it sounds like hell. I cannot
| imagine how shitty it would be to have all my emails/messages
| to the CEO being filtered through an AI and getting AI slop
| back in return.
| cmckn wrote:
| > in the car on his commute to Redmond
|
| This was funny to me, because he lives like 8 minutes away.
| boznz wrote:
| Maybe he has Microsoft Copilot Full-Self-Driving
| installed
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Does that number include hours wasted in traffic jams?
| jmuguy wrote:
| The podcast thing reads like something he made up that
| sounds cool and futuristic on the surface, but doesn't
| actually make any sense. Maybe what's actually happening is
| he's just having the LLM give him the cliff's notes of the
| transcript, but that isn't interesting enough so he's
| making up some BS about having a conversation with the AI.
| jandrese wrote:
| This is just him aping every other AI CEO. Every single one
| has to act like the agents are super-geniuses mere moments
| away from achieving the singularity like people can't try
| them out themselves and be disappointed. Some of it is "we
| think this will work soon so it's ok if we pretend like it's
| working now", but I think a lot is just needing to constantly
| shove hot air into the balloon before it pops.
| flkiwi wrote:
| On the other hand, if it's true, it explains a LOT about
| Microsoft's silly AI strategy.
| themafia wrote:
| > he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so
| he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an
| episode in the car on his commute to Redmond.
|
| What a dorky thing to do. Does the CEO have some concept he's
| living a life that precisely _zero_ of his customers do? Who
| would even think to do this?
|
| > "I'm an email typist," Nadella jokes of his job
|
| Yea, I have actual work to do, perhaps you should familiarize
| yourself with this?
| onraglanroad wrote:
| Are you kidding? You get to be the star guest of every
| podcast you listen to and everything you say is amazingly
| witty and insightful.
|
| I know exactly the kind of people who would think to do
| this. Unfortunately. :)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I've always suspected Microsoft is a front for an ineffable
| cosmic evil that is trying to crush the human spirit into
| bewildered, abject despair.
|
| How else do you explain Teams and the Hotmail UI?
| thfuran wrote:
| You're thinking of Larry Ellison.
| verzali wrote:
| That would certainly explain the Loop UI
| kuerbel wrote:
| That would make an interesting SCP...
| motoboi wrote:
| This is what move fast and break things looks like in a
| enterprise the size of microsoft.
|
| It's mostly break things and little moving fast.
|
| But the idea is that it's AI or death, so some broken buttons
| seems of less importances than the buttons itself being there,
| because the button working is a problem involving several
| teams, so no one is actually responsible, but the button being
| there is some team problem, and hell yeah they solved in the
| first sprint.
| danudey wrote:
| "Move fast and break things" is fine if you're a social
| networking site and breaking things means people can't get
| their racist memes or browse marketplace for twenty minutes
| until you push a change.
|
| It's less fine if the things you're breaking are your core
| operating systems and the office suite that makes you most of
| your money and it takes you months to get the relevant teams
| aligned to push out a fix for the bad idea your execs pushed.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| It should be noted that the things you are supposed to be
| allowed to break are YOUR things. When you start breaking
| MY things then we're going to have a real problem.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| The only good feature about copilot in Microsoft 365 is that if
| you ask it to delete itself enough times eventually some other
| app will eventually be promoted to the most prominent when you
| first login.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| > So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you
| ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're
| selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have
| been obvious, right? Right??
|
| They all use Macs lol.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| On new-outlook-on-Windows there's an option to disable the
| copilot button. Wanna take a guess what that does?
| danudey wrote:
| Honestly, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic and it
| actually does disable the button, or if you're being jaded
| and cynical and it just hides it for six hours then it comes
| back. Either option seems equally likely at this point.
| adolph wrote:
| At what point does Charlie Brown not kick at the ball Lucy
| offers?
|
| It's been 19 years since "Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod
| Packaging". [0] Is the disconnect displayed in this message
| thread that there's always 10,000 new people discovering a
| fact? [1]
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
|
| 1. https://xkcd.com/1053/
| BizarroLand wrote:
| The other thing is that they're FORCING it on the users. Its
| invasive and creepy and assaulty and it has multiplied my
| loathing of Microsoft infinitely.
|
| Someone in Microsoft needs to watch a lecture on affirmative
| consent.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing with AI, both local and
| online. If you tell me its available if I want it, I might come
| dabble a bit.
|
| But cram AI into every facet of my machine? That's a 1 way
| ticket to never being installed on any system I ever own in the
| future ever again.
|
| Companies should treat AI like a madam treats the workers in a
| whorehouse. You don't make them go door to door. You let the
| johns come to you.
| andybee wrote:
| What do you mean 0 items? When you expand it gives you options
| to write a message or interact with search. Seems like its a
| you problem.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new
| Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does
| exactly nothing!
|
| A physical button? So it's like a mechanical placebo? If you
| have AI FOMO you can keep pressing it to calm the anxiety.
| Havoc wrote:
| > I suspect the issues are deeper for Microsoft, who have worked
| tirelessly under Satya Nadella to create doubt around its
| products
|
| This reads more like a hit piece than good faith article
|
| (But yeah the MS AI products especially on consumer level are
| pretty terrible)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Microsoft has this problem with most of its products.
|
| It's not just AI, it's a market fit and quality problem.
|
| They don't need to solve it, however.
|
| Their strategy has been quite clear: make it barely usable so
| that is passes muster to auditors, integrate it with systems that
| corporations need, and sell them on the integrations.
|
| Teams and Azure suck?
|
| So what?
|
| Big companies will pay for that, because it's integrated with
| their ldap, has an audit trail, gives them the ISO-whatever
| stamp, and lets them worry about something else.
|
| That the users are miserable is almost never the question for the
| ones signing the checks.
|
| In a world where box-checking is paramount, this approach is a
| winning strategy.
| kaluga wrote:
| The irony is that Microsoft didn't lose the AI race on models --
| it lost it on product sense. Copilot isn't failing because the
| tech is bad, but because the integration is sloppy, unfocused,
| and shipped before anyone asked for it.
|
| Google ships features people actually use; Microsoft ships demos
| people tweet about.
|
| In AI, "ship it now, fix it later" doesn't work when everyone
| else is shipping things that already feel finished.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Google ships features people actually use; Microsoft ships
| demos people tweet about.
|
| Can't speak to the part about Microsoft, but it's obvious
| Google is creating AI products the employees want to use and do
| use.
| thevillagechief wrote:
| It's criminal that Microsoft is losing to Cursor, even as they
| own VS Code, Visual Studio and Github. How does that happen?
| thm wrote:
| Just remember what SPJ said what the problem with Microsoft is.
| quchen wrote:
| Which is what?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| ... they have no taste.
| windex wrote:
| Between the RAM shortage and the forced migration to Win11 along
| with a forced HW upgrade, I'd start shorting MS asap. This bit
| about lack of adoption of Copilot is just icing on the cake.
| belval wrote:
| I feel like the case for Microsoft inability to execute in a lot
| of verticals should really be studied, not saying this as a sound
| bite, I'd genuinely like to know how that is possible.
|
| Their investment in OpenAI, giving them what was, at least ~1-2
| year ago if not now, the best possible LLM to integrate in the
| office suite yet they are unable to deliver value with it.
|
| Their ownership of Xbox and Windows should have allowed them to
| get a much better foothold in gaming yet their marketplace is
| still, to this very day, a broken experience with multiple
| account types. It's been 10 years.
|
| The counter point is Azure obviously which still has great growth
| numbers, but that's a different org.
|
| From the outside, it just seems like they should be doing better
| than they are. They have much better business integration than
| Google and Amazon. The fit is obvious and people are borderline
| hooked on excel. Why aren't they dominating completely?
| kayhantolga wrote:
| As a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I
| can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've
| shipped since Internet Explorer--and honestly, it might overtake
| it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors
| gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got.
|
| If you haven't seen how bad it is, here's one example: Copilot
| Terminal. In theory, it should help you with terminal commands.
| Sounds great. In practice, it installs a chat panel on the right
| side of your terminal that has zero integration with the terminal
| itself. It can't read what's written, it can't send commands, it
| has no context, and the model response time is awful. What's the
| point of a "terminal assistant" that can't actually assist the
| terminal?
|
| This lack of real integration is basically the core design of
| most Copilot products. If you've been lucky enough to avoid them,
| good for you. If your company forces you to use them because
| they're bundled with a Microsoft license, I genuinely feel your
| pain.
| jandrese wrote:
| The crazy thing is Microsoft was so early with an AI product
| but was burned pretty badly when it instantly turned into a
| Nazi. Funny how the constant complaint on Twitter is how the
| modern AI agents are too "woke" and how Elon has to keep
| fighting his own AI model to conform with his viewpoints.
| ivape wrote:
| Try to think about it like a bunch of merchants running to line
| up in front of you as fast as possible with anything that
| resembles a product you might buy. The only thing they were
| successful at thus far was recognizing that _something_ needs
| to be in your terminal, and they ran as fast as possible to
| your terminal with _anything_ to beat others to the front of
| the line. I suppose they are doing this with all their efforts.
| A universe where a C-exec said in no uncertain terms, "get
| anything out there", is the very universe we're in.
|
| Apple is the only merchant not running to line up with anything
| at the moment.
|
| IMHO, one company needs to make the bold move and make a fork
| of their OS that is AI native with AI native apps/workflow and
| phase out the old paradigm. It'll have to be two product lines,
| but I think the new OS will have uptake like we've never seen
| before.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's a problem with this theory.
|
| AI _works_. It 's actually useful. Since GPT-4, tool calling
| capability is good enough. It's trivial to do a better job
| than Copilot on _any_ task using any current model of the
| major LLM providers. I 'm not talking API, even with basic
| chat frontend, regular users easily beat Copilot by simply
| copy-pasting between Word/Excel and the chat frontend.
|
| If a twelve year old can one-shot a better product for any
| given use case than Microsoft Copilot, then it's not just
| "merchants running to line up in front of you", something
| more basic must be broken.
| adabyron wrote:
| When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was
| focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated
| well with each other?
|
| I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved
| in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went
| scatterbrain.
|
| Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and
| has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective.
| See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when
| even slightly pushed.
|
| * Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the
| above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who
| all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was
| building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration
| among productivity apps was one of the key points of
| competition among all of the office suites of that era.
|
| There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC
| initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were
| invisible to end users.
| btbuildem wrote:
| > lack of real integration is basically the core design of most
| Copilot products
|
| I would wager a month's wages that this is the doing of some
| internal Security Review, wherein a bunch of out-of-touchers
| decided that the customers will want to prefer to be Safe and
| Secure instead of getting some actual value from integrating
| copilot into shell workflows.
|
| Meanwhile people are yolo'ing it with various janky DIY wires
| and duct-tape githobbits that mash together whatever open
| weights model and user-level access to the system (or worse).
| isodev wrote:
| > a bunch of out-of-touchers decided that the customers will
| want to prefer to be Safe
|
| You mean the other way around, right? Because what could
| possibly go wrong when we let a language model hallucinate
| its way through which terminal command rhymes best with your
| prompt according to that SO comment from training data.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i mentioned this upthread but an LLM with enough access to
| be fully integrated into all apps/services/files in an
| enterprise managed workstation sounds like privilege
| escalation attacks just waiting to happen.
| mkehrt wrote:
| Wow a thing I really want is an AI I didn't install to _read
| all my terminal commands_ and ship them off to MS for
| analysis.
|
| Thank god for this security team.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You'd be hearing a few more hair raising failure stories if
| they hadn't done that. And possibly a few big customers
| institute Win11 or Copilot site wide bans. Or just straight
| up going out of business. In businesses other than software,
| it's possible to be legally liable for mistakes.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Works good in Teams. Summarises meetings, collects action
| items. It's pretty great actually.
|
| I don't know how many forests we are burning to have a digital
| secretary, but surely the environment can take one more for the
| team?
| ares623 wrote:
| "It's just like your toaster"
| chasd00 wrote:
| > This lack of real integration is basically the core design of
| most Copilot products.
|
| I think they're scared of the very real security issues with
| LLMs that may be unsolvable. It's not wise to give an llm free
| reign, at best maybe across your local computer but to be fully
| integrated into every application and every file it needs root.
| That would be the front door to many privilege escalation
| incidents in an enterprise managed laptop/desktop.
| brandensilva wrote:
| Useless Clippy all over again. At least Clippy stayed in his
| lane and could be turned off.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| I was hoping for a real look at weaknesses in Microsoft's AI
| products. They ship lots of "AI features," but only Copilot and
| Azure's ChatGPT hosting see broad use. Instead, the article
| mostly reads as anti-MS/OpenAI without much detail.
|
| From my experience, Microsoft's GPT-5 integrations in Word,
| PowerPoint, and their ChatGPT clone struggle with basic tasks.
| Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better.
|
| To be fair, building solid AI features is hard when model
| capabilities change so quickly. Reasoning and tool use only
| became reliable in the latest models, and when these Office
| features were planned, GPT-5 didn't exist.
| darknavi wrote:
| > Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better.
|
| Side tangent: Copy/pasting from the Windows Copilot app is
| absolute dogshit. It makes no sense that the simple action of
| "copy this text" is this broken.
| t1234s wrote:
| Is there an excellent "AI Free" linux distro that one can escape
| to when AI is inescapable from both Windows/MacOS
| treyd wrote:
| All of them? I know of no Linux distros that do anything in
| particular to integrate AI.
|
| Although knowing Canonical they might add something to Ubuntu
| sooner or later.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I just had a sales call with someone from Microsoft who was
| looking for an AI tool to automate some Excel work they were
| doing. I doubt they'll buy our product, but it gave me a good
| laugh.
| artingent wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't just have a shoddy AI problem. Microsoft has a
| direction problem. I'm no fan of Ballmer, but his Microsoft
| seemed like they knew what they were doing, and were actually
| trying to be good at it. Nadella seems extremely clueless and
| seems happy to just ignore and later axe consumer products that
| don't generate immediate revenue.
|
| And noone should actually be shocked about his ineffectiveness.
| Covid was a great example of how clueless his leadership has
| been. Skype used to be a verb people used in common parlance, and
| yet they dropped the ball and let Zoom take over both consumer
| and enterprise segments while focusing on "restructuring" Skype
| into Teams for no reason whatsoever.
|
| Prior to Covid, he was ready to let Windows run its course and
| axe that too. The sudden demand for sub-$500 laptops during the
| pandemic showed him that people still liked Windows and wanted a
| good OS from Microsoft. But instead of capitalizing on it to give
| customers what they wanted, he just gave us an ad-filled spyware
| with AI slop.
|
| I have zero hope in any product with a Copilot in its name
| (including GitHub). At this point, unless there's a change in
| leadership, it's only a matter of time before XBox faces the axe.
| sylens wrote:
| I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that
| Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both)
| to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on
| is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They
| owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.
|
| Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the
| largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting
| lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-
| ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100
| billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game
| is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone,
| completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating
| system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity
| hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school
| administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.
|
| The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even
| worse than it was when Nadella took over.
| vezuchyy wrote:
| I don't have data to support it and I know AD was a gamechanger
| but I feel like Microsoft pumping free software to educational
| institutions was the main driver for it's adoption in the
| corporate world. When every person who kind of knows how to use
| the computer, can use MS windows and office and has to be
| retrained to use anything else, it's a no brainer to just give
| users what they know.
| sylens wrote:
| Don't you think this is why alarm bells should be going off
| right now about Google's complete domination of primary
| school systems? Google Classroom and Chromebooks are
| everywhere. Google Docs is the lingua franca, not Microsoft
| Word
| paxys wrote:
| Three years? Try 20.
| sylens wrote:
| There was a honeymoon period after Nadella took the reigns
| where it looked like they were putting out good products -
| Edge before enshittification, VS Code, buying GitHub.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| We've been hearing empty punditry like that for the last
| several decades all while they've been a poster child for
| "number go up":
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...
|
| These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the
| Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen
| anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a
| multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSFT and then maybe
| there's something to discuss.
| gigel82 wrote:
| By that time, it will already be too late. I'd argue it's
| probably already too late... dead man walking kind of
| situation. Definitely true for consumers, it might survive
| out of inertia in the corporate environment for decades.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform.
| They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then
| closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and
| letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up
| and will just let Sony own the console space altogether.
|
| Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was
| always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with the online
| console gaming experience. Halo was an untouchable juggernaut
| of a series for the first 3 titles.
|
| It's mind boggling that Microsoft just let all that die without
| a fight. Worse, they seem to have actively shot themselves in
| the foot and then given up.
| avrionov wrote:
| Xbox was never the leader. They were always the challenger
| from the begging, but it looks like things are not getting
| better.
| cwbriscoe wrote:
| > Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago
|
| Maybe in the US, but not overall.
| awithrow wrote:
| Playstation/Sony always a contender? They were the clear
| leader. The PS2 is still the best selling console of all
| time. 160M units to Xbox's 24M. Xbox360 caught up but the PS3
| still sold more units. PS4 sold twice as many as Xbox One.
| The console wars has been mostly Sony vs Nintendo for a long
| time.
| eric-burel wrote:
| Microsoft is using the deep penetration of SharePoint in
| companies to sell Copilot license. At least in France it's well
| and alive and I see much more Copilot licenses than actual OpenAI
| uses.
| epolanski wrote:
| Satya is doing with AI what Ballmer did with cloud.
|
| Right direction, wrong execution.
| davesque wrote:
| Or is it that nobody wants to use integrated (i.e. force fed) AI
| products?
| btbuildem wrote:
| > FirstPageSage AI Chatbot Usage Chart (December 3, 2025)
|
| What a bizarre way to organize the chart. Clearly Anthropic is
| leading -- their early bet on "programming" as the main use case
| is paying off.
|
| The recent report from Openrouter [1] confirms as much: coding is
| the number one use case, with role playing / fantasy writing in
| second place.
|
| I have a feeling the remaining use cases will never dominate,
| instead they will slowly mature into acceptable practices across
| the various industries. That will probably take longer than the
| investment bubble can hold though.
|
| 1: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai
| thinkling wrote:
| Claude Code usage probably isn't counted as "chatbot" use.
| Also, I think you're overestimating how many people program vs.
| how many people are using AI chatbots as the new websearch.
| Orders of magnitude more of the latter.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure - US has 1M developers vs 300M pop. At least the Claude
| Code developers are paying for it though, vs only 5% of users
| paying for ChatGPT.
| smetannik wrote:
| The more MS pushing a product - the less people want to use it.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Counter: I use various co-pilot features at work, they are very
| helpful, save me hours, and many folks in my team do to.
| observationist wrote:
| Mustafa is a side-character, he's the friend of a brother of
| someone who knows what they're doing. Competence isn't something
| that people pick up through proximity, and Microsoft is finding
| that out in real-time.
| mannanj wrote:
| Isn't the problem more so that nobody wants to buy it and
| Microsoft is leveraging its power and influence to successfully
| coerce and pressure people into buying them?
|
| You using OpenAI's products? Aren't Microsoft getting cuts as
| owners?
| ptdorf wrote:
| Nobody sane wants to use their shoddy products.
|
| Their office products can't even agree having the same menu
| options for the same functionality.
|
| People use them out of corporate inertia: Windows laptops are
| cheaper than Macs and that brings the whole office suite in.
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| > People use them out of corporate inertia
|
| And now with how things are going with the American gov,
| foreign companies see security flaws on two fronts: Microsoft's
| AI's unreliability+invasiveness and the US gov's
| unreliability+invasiveness relating to its stateside companies.
| Findecanor wrote:
| BTW. Feeding that AI boom, that is driving up the cost of
| hardware... while at the same time asking people to buy new
| computers only to run the next version of their OS.
|
| Not a great plan.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I moved largely away from Microsoft products in 2010 personally,
| and 2015 or so professionally. Just came back to them last year
| for a client.
|
| What I am seeing are two really disturbing patterns: 1) really,
| really bad stuff that has been there for decades is still there,
| weighing everything down, for "backwards compatibility", and 2) a
| lot of horrible fluff and nonsense everywhere.
|
| #1 is pretty self-explanatory, as I am editing docs in Word I am
| finding my muscle memory circa 1999 or so still works with it due
| to all of the formatting bugs that still exist.
|
| #2 I saw with Windows 11 and the crazy adverts everywhere,
| seemingly random UI choices, half-broken or implemented tools and
| applications, and now random UI buttons thrown everywhere.
|
| The 1-2 punch is devastating and makes using Microsoft products
| 10x more depressing than it was 10-15 years ago, and it wasn't a
| happy fest then either for me.
|
| So to me, AI is just "more of the same" with Microsoft. It is
| more random shit thrown on the wall to see what will stick.
| kevinrineer wrote:
| Backwards compatibility has always been a Microsoft staple.
| What used to be a huge selling point - depending on the
| audience - is now clearly a crutch. Right now, it seems that
| the tech debt has finally started making the whole stack lean
| like the Tower of Pisa.
| estetlinus wrote:
| Nothing an ad carousel full of AI-slop, embedded in the OS won't
| fix
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| I personally never found Microsoft software anything but shoddy:
| Microsoft word, internet explorer, power shell, outlook,
| powerpoint... these all make me shudder... I'll give them visual
| studio, that one is pretty good. I think Excel is fine. Skype was
| okay I guess. Anyway, I think the shoddiness can't really be the
| actual threat to Microsoft given their track record.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Skype was an acquisition.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| And became pretty bad afterwards
| tialaramex wrote:
| When I joined my current employer, a few years ago, one of the
| things I thought might be good was that for the first time in a
| fairly long career I'd be using Visual Studio.
|
| Previously I'm a vi or vim user for everything, for many years.
|
| But I can say after a few years experience I'm not really
| impressed. It's too big and too slow. It has a few things I
| kinda like, a lot of half-working things I'd love if they
| worked consistently (e.g. some things I work on can be
| debugged, some can't, experts might know why but I don't) but
| as they are they're too unreliable to really change how I do
| things - but overall it's not enough to e.g. miss VS when I'm
| writing my own stuff, still in vim on Linux.
|
| Actually all of the Microsoft technologies I've run into were
| disappointing with only two exceptions which I'll get to.
| Powershell felt like they hadn't really learned the right
| lessons from the Unix shells for example, and Entra ID (called
| "Azure Active Directory" when I started caring) is a confusing
| mess.
|
| Two exceptions: 1. C# is a pretty good language. Mostly it's a
| better Java. Is that amazing? Not really, but it's still pretty
| good, it delivers reasonable performance, there's a large
| ecosystem, I don't hate writing it.
|
| 2. Azure itself has to have a way to "cut off" payments because
| Microsoft sold a product where students can get a limited
| amount of credit. The student doesn't _have_ any money, so if
| they had $50 of Azure credit and Microsoft lets them spend $85
| before turning off all the Azure systems that credit was
| funding, well, too fucking bad - Microsoft eats the $35 loss.
| Accordingly Microsoft are better (not perfect, but better) than
| AWS or Google 's thing at actually turning stuff off when it
| exceeds what you asked to spend.
| chung8123 wrote:
| I am honestly struggling to figure out Microsoft's licensing
| system. We have it here and there are some on my team that want
| to try "CoPilot" (not even sure what that means now) but there is
| no licenses option for me to enable them to do that. I am sure
| they are targeting the larger places than my 50 person shop but
| it is so confusing I don't have the time in my day to figure out
| how to enable copilot for my team.
| mv4 wrote:
| What fascinates me is how someone at MSFT managed to get their
| own button (the Copilot) button approved. Having your own button
| or tab is a big deal (I remember we debated having our own
| shopping tab on the Instagram app while I was at Meta - and we
| had to abandon it when it didn't get the traction we were hoping
| for).
|
| These people have a UI button AND a hardware button on actual
| consumer devices, and it doesn't do anything. How?
| dudneet wrote:
| It seems to me that America is a great big nomenclature
| butchering machine. If they can butcher what words like crypto or
| AI mean, they're willing to put their whole economy behind that.
| I need to rethink my investment strategies.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| I'm always glad to see others notice this too. cheers
| Beijinger wrote:
| Would you be so kind to elaborate this?
| Beijinger wrote:
| I have not used Windows in ages. But I use Visual Studio under
| Linux that has some AI included. Does this count?
| pch00 wrote:
| Microsoft's early/rushed attempt at AI (the various things called
| "Copilot") does start to feel like how they lost the mobile wars.
| They had a tech fairly early (Windows Mobile) but utterly failed
| to execute on it and ultimately, allowed a competitor to dominate
| with a better product.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. With the sums of
| money involved it could end up being make or break?
| stahop01 wrote:
| because it is absolute shit and forcefeeding customers it will
| only make them resent it or use it less
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