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?
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
"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.
> 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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??
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]
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...
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>"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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's time to let an American take the reigns of this American tech corp again. There's no need to outsource it, they've had their chance and it's not working.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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??
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?
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.'
Maybe it's a fifth column group working to destroy Microsoft.
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.
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.
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/beyond-vibe-checks-a-pms-...
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:
And then this: 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.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.
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.
Edit: Just tried again. It refused to do it. I mean WTF.
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.
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.
How else do you explain Teams and the Hotmail UI?
How did you manage this? Probably some company-wide group policy saves you. It keeps starting copilot for me, drives me crazy.
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...
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...
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?
I know exactly the kind of people who would think to do this. Unfortunately. :)
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.
This was funny to me, because he lives like 8 minutes away.
So, his experience with Copilot agents != Average Customer's experience
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.
They all use Macs lol.
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/
But I'd actually love to know how to achieve that, and so far Microsoft AI is awfully silent on the subject...
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 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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah that's a great business idea, ask Boeing how that's going
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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!
Any empirical support for that?
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.
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 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.
"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.
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...
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".
> “The Congress shall have Power… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;”
Please get your definitions from someone reasonable (Adam Smith might be a good start) rather than Ayn Rand.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
The only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the Windows Terminal and WSL.
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.
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)
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.
Honestly, I had to do a lot of workarounds to get comfy. There's annoying stuff I cannot uninstall.
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.
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.
Satya’s days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very costly and painful lesson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These people have a UI button AND a hardware button on actual consumer devices, and it doesn't do anything. How?
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.
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
On iOS, you type a message and send, and... nothing.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not a great plan.
Although knowing Canonical they might add something to Ubuntu sooner or later.
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>
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.
Updated as it was almost close to being a generic comment about AI overall.
Right direction, wrong execution.
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.
That monkey face simply won’t go away.
ChatGPT respects privacy and allows for maintaining history while also opting out of using ones data for model training
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.
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.
This reads more like a hit piece than good faith article
(But yeah the MS AI products especially on consumer level are pretty terrible)
You using OpenAI’s products? Aren’t Microsoft getting cuts as owners?
It is going to be very hard for OpenAI or Microsoft to compete with this now that Google has gotten their act together.
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.
Helpful chart to draw conclusions
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.
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.
Plenty of SV is building below average products with exceptional talent.
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.