Are you really being “left behind” when everyone else is going the wrong way?
I’m really baffled because this is super easy to fix.
Step 1. Pull all the AI bloat out of Windows 11. Make a clean, compatible, and user friendly OS out of the Windows brand.
Step 2. Spin CoPilot into it’s own OS. Go crazy with your “Every app is just a different AI presentation of your data.” Make the AI in there all powerful. Allow users to remote to the OS and run the same AI regardless of the platform.
Step 3. Print money
The problem isnt co pilot. Its co pilot being rammed in incredibly stupid ways into every possible product.
More importantly, its cramming it in everywhere when basis windows 11 sucks. Explorer sucks, search sucks, performance sucks, Updates suck.
They should add much more AI. Why? Cause it’s really funny to watch from the outside as a Linux user.
Wave? This is like being sad you did not get in on the housing crisis, or the dot com bubble, or any other clearly labeled landmine.
I know right. They dodged the AI bullet would be a more accurate headline.
Did they though? Don’t they control Open AI to the point where they could force Open AI to keep Sam Altman as CEO?
I don’t think they dodged it
scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these pictures. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
Conflating two issues there.
If they’re talking about developing ‘an AI’, they were late but are still in the game.
If they’re talking about adoption of AI, they shat the bed there. They slapped copilot on everything and tried to force us into the way they thought we should be working. They forced us to give up old hardware and to use their garbage new OS. All that was wrong and seriously turned a lot of people against MS. They forgot that ‘the customer is always right’. Again.
I still think there will be a big role for AI, but its in the background, quietly assisting in a way we barely notice. Big Tech will pay for how they’ve missold AI.
I like AI, but I think that Microsoft’s approach was all wrong for handling it. Instead, they should have made a completely new Windows built from the ground up to be AI-oriented, and kept Windows 1X as mainline.
Once the AI Windows was fully cooked, Microsoft could have either released it as Windows 20, or give it an entirely new name when the time to start pushing it out to the public has arrived. This would give time for suitable hardware to arrive and to sort out teething issues, along with just having a platform that is free of legacy spaghetti code.
Missed the wave? They’re the ones who realized chatGPT.
These motherfuckers started the wave and are salty cause it didn’t help them long term.
If Microsoft wasn’t run by tools, they’d see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we’ll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won’t, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that’s just a skin of chrome…
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
It isn’t just ineptitude. Of course executives at Microsoft know that they could be good and be successful with consumers. But they don’t need to please consumers, they have far more important customers: the surveillance state, and the military industrial complex.
Once corporations have a near-monopoly position, they do not need to make good products anymore. Microsoft has enough money already to completely fail at everything for centuries and they’d be just fine. So they can focus on other goals, such as dismantling online anonymity for the benefit of the ruling class, who owns and controls Microsoft.
they have far more important customers: the surveillance state,
Except Microsoft is also losing the whole EU market because of Trump
You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
They freaking gave up on anything quickly if they are not immediately the leader in the market.
They tried; it must’ve been 4 times. But unless it’s a sure thing, they’ll give up.
I worry they don’t know how to compete on a level ground, slowly building trust and business on success after success.
Satya may have grown the company share price but he’s absolutely killed everything that made Microslop even remotely interesting before he became CEO.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
Agreed I have been a Linux Stan since the 90s and even I thought windows phone was pretty good.
The windows phones were fucking magical
The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don’t really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It’s because they’re shoehorning it into places it doesn’t belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they’d gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it’s needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don’t rename half of your products “Copilot”, don’t put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck’s sake. If I don’t feel like I have control over my OS any more, I’m not likely to stick around when other options are available.
Remember how Google tried to shove Google+ down everyone’s throat? And G+ was a better social network compared to Facebook.
And now we’re talking slop that people REALLY disn’t ask for.
lol get rekt
They didn’t miss the “wave”, they discovered it’s just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don’t want. This really sums the problem up well:
According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
I’m sure I’m like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it’s ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that’s really it. I don’t find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It’s not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I’ve tried it’s really plateaued. I just really don’t see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.
I certainly wouldn’t pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.
No one wants copilot because it’s highly unpleasant hot garbage. There is definitely a market for AI for the competent players.
Yeah the vast majority of AI “offerings” from most of these huge companies and/or websites is just bolting a chatbot to something and then wondering why people don’t want it. I tried copilot in excel and it couldn’t access the document I was working on, it was an absolute useless mess.
I don’t know how Microslop is managing to stay around. They haven’t been at the front of any tech innovations since Windows. And Windows have steadily been going downhill too.
I guess they are still around because they somehow convinced most corporations to use Windows back in the early days when it was good and the switch to Linux has been slow because everything now depends on windows in those corporations and switching is expensive.
The movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” shows how being the better product isn’t a requirement to dominate.
Windows wasn’t the first on the scene with a GUI, they just got a better foothold into the market and spread into the business world to become the default. If we’re talking about waves, MS has been riding that wave of being used the most everywhere for a long time while giving mediocre products.
