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??
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".
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?
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.
> 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 keep starting copilot for me, drives me crazy.
I bet c-suite uses Mac
And everything aimed at developers assumes you're using Unix.
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...
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.
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.
> 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...
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
> 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.
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.
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.
To be pedantic, IBM is a service company
And IBM could have been AWS a decade earlier had they so chose.
This follows from the parents statement.
That's the point.
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.
Are you saying they would rather double stock price than double revenue?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the stock market is not a good system to organize ones economy around then?
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.
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.
> while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently
Any empirical support for that?
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!
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.
Do you need the stock market to undercut industries though? I'm not sure it's necessary
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.
The stock market weirdly enough ruins the idea of capitalism. Catering to shareholders hurts the idea that competition would create better and cheaper products.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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#Concept...
And these people has audacity to proclaim that socialism is based on fantasy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Nobody gets a bonus and a new boat doing that.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
>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
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.
I find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap software.
It's the oldest trick in the IT book - focus on the buyer persona and ignore the user persona.
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.
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.
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.
That's exactly what I was thinking of!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
And photo back up has never included metadata like locations when backing up to OneDrive making it usekdss
Onedrive, that useless app that creates a mess in the desktop if you have a laptop and a desktop like most users
Most users do not own two computers.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Is there an excellent "AI Free" linux distro that one can escape to when AI is inescapable from both Windows/MacOS
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.
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.
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.
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.
The more MS pushing a product - the less people want to use it.
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.
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.
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.
Or is it that nobody wants to use integrated (i.e. force fed) AI products?
The AI beating will continue untill the buying improves. And the use will be forсed by changing the OS.
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.
Satya is doing with AI what Ballmer did with cloud.
Right direction, wrong execution.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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>
Just remember what SPJ said what the problem with Microsoft is.
Aw, that won't matter when management just forces you to use Copilot or else you're fired.
Unfortunately that is probably how it will end.
That's how it already is in some companies.
MS Bob -> Clippy -> Copilot -> ?
You have forgotten Cortana
So did Microsoft
Open VSCode, close co-pilot again.
That monkey face simply won’t go away.
Who are the likely successors if Satya steps down?
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
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.
> 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.
I mean have you tried them ? I did and they're beyond terrible, of course they're not the one I pay for
> 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)
Anyone remember Cortana? It seems like MS doesnt learn
Wait, Cortana doesn't exist anymore?
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.)
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748
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.
That’s the joy of not having to compete, your stuff is just there.
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.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ...
Helpful chart to draw conclusions
I doubt it's useful to draw conclusions in today's world. The chart is almost two years old.
Not so helpful, it's too out of date
Is Bing now called "Copilot" too?
Or "Watson". I lose track.
Copilot .NET Core, not to be confused with Copilot Core, and Microsoft Core Copilot Plus.
That's 2 years old?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s exactly what happened. For the past decade, the crème de la crème 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.