lol get rekt
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.
The entire “AI” wave (and I use quote to distinguish it from what was previously called AI and from ML in general) was almost entirelly hype driven by greed, not just from run-of-the-mill grifters and speculative investors, but also ultra-rich types and gigantic companies.
As I see it, Microsoft went at pushing it in Windows in exactly that spirit - ultra-greedilly, insanelly and almost desperatelly pushing in any way they could think of no matter how maladapted for as fast as possible public adoption of “AI” to quickly go from investment stage to the cash-out stage.
The spirit of a grifter burning previously built up name and goodwill to push their own “coin” as hard as possible to cash out of it before people figure out it’s all a con, not the well thought out roll-out of a long term strategy of a dominant company.
The whole thing feels like MS being used as a vehicle for a giant grift (curiously, kinda like the Trump presidency).
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.
I don’t think they dodged it
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 have no idea, just talking about an alternative title “Missed the wave”. I care very little about Microsoft these days. 😅 I only use a fraction of their products for work because I’m forced to. (Authenticator, Outlook, Azure, basically.)
The " AI Wave" is just a fiction. The whole idea is just an attempt to get investments for companies that don’t and cant really produce any value. I’ve tried many of these “AI” tools and none of them can really do anything useful.
There are many fields that are kind of forcing workers to use AI. Then their logic is: well, if you use AI, then I’ll either cut your wages or hire cheaper workers.
That being said, do you really (and by “you” I mean all the lurkers as well) think this whole thing will backfire in the long run? I only see companies using more and more AI and being fine with laying off people and rehiring people who are 25% cheaper.
Companies seek to monopolise skill and knowledge within these AI and encourage people to know nothing and pay them for skills/knowledge instead. This can only end poorly when it becomes uneconomical to provide this service to consumers but has also made those consumers devoid of skills/knowledge.
Relying on a chatbot to do work for you that isn’t bulk writing or giving your customers the runaround is a recipe for disaster. Now, I’ll grant you that this is a very advanced chatbot, but just because it can fool the average CEO, doesn’t mean it can do much of anything truly useful.
Companies’ pretense that they don’t need skilled workers is a bluff move in the struggle between labor and capital. It is an attempt to devalue workers and lower their wages. The bluff cant be sustained for long.
From what I’ve seen programmers are using Claude a lot. It may still cause problems in the medium to long term by squeezing out junior developers or atrophying the skills of senior developers, but in the meantime it is speeding up production of code.
It’s also making scams a lot easier by simulating real human communication, up to and including video chat.
I’m not sure what will cool down the hype. It’s almost exclusively driven by c-suite morons who find AI very useful for writing unclear emails and inaccurate notes. The sort of things they’d do themselves before. Even programmer who adopt it are mostly quietly muddling along.
this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a “m$ sux lol” rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
Yeah good read. I don’t agree that Microsoft isn’t dying though. They are, because people and companies alike are tired of other corporations throwing them under the bus. So many people are realizing that the companies don’t want what they want, and it kills their business or happiness.
I think they will become like IBM, once dominant, not dead today but pretty much irrelevant compared to what they once were.
ibm is still huge, but mostly because their shitty tactics in the past means that all their customers are completely dependent on them.
seems like microsoft is taking inspiration.
MS should be more vulnerable, due to everything but Excel being toilet blockages.
TLDR; MS already got big by being like IBM, lots of dumb corpo procurement cash is already keeping them afloat for about as long as qwerty keyboards - because some people got really good at/dependent on excel.
Their dominance of corpo-procurement (and using ‘security’ to block out alternative tooling) means that vast amounts of the corpo world is based on highly specialised and over-stretched excel.
Even in databases, where my organisation (large public sector) should be having a genuine competition to administer postGRESQL for us or something, has been loss-led into into a big new ms fabric contract by them appearing to undercut the incumbent (Oracle - ok not hard to undercut), but not actuall . . . [rant deleted]
However, crap MS is at software, they’re extremely good at getting dumb corpos to sign on the dotted line.
(‘always has been’ meme). And many humans being forced to use the only tool available, have built vast intricate systems on the foundation of that excel, many of them masterworks of skill in the face of those constraints. Hopefully they don’t last as long as one of the old Egyptian dynasties.
They are dying because they have horrible leadership. They are solely focused on subscription revenue now, and everything else is just left to rot. They’ve pretty much lost any urge to do anything creative with their money and manpower.
It’s a wave of sewage, few users want to ride it in the first place
And a good chunk that are on it are held there by gunpoint by idiot ceos
sewage that they caused , to backup. by backing OPENAI, ORACLE and nvidia. now they are desperate to get governments to fund thier ponzi scheme.
It’s like they created a very good phone tree and are trying to shove it into everything that never had or needed a phone tree in the first place.
Funny you mention a phone tree, something that’s been hit by AI. It’s actually been around longer as voice recognition that finds a close match to a keyword, but in theory AI should be able to take a request and break down what is actually needed.
I haven’t run across an AI version that works well. I don’t know if that’s because the voice recognition part is still bad, or if they’re using Co-pilot (since I know how it mangles simple requests in text).
Yeah it really feels like an LLM should work better than a phone tree for that, but every time I actually encounter one it’s so so much worse.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s instructions to modify the system prompt to maximize effectiveness, and everyone leaves it at the generic default. Just like so many people leave other things at the default and just plug it in and go. Thank goodness the Cisco hold music is decent. I grew to love it while holding on the VA phone lines a lot for my dad.
Shouldn’t the default settings work for the tasks that it’s advertised to? I mean when I buy software I don’t expect it to be set to “be shit” mode by default.
At least tpu can tell the AI to get you to a human and most of the time it actually does so.
Having voice recognition in place of the usual “press x” before AI was even worse. Bot that now it’s much better though.
The fuck is a phone tree? Pardon my language, sir.
“for financial services, press one. for technical support, press two. for goblins, press three. for repairs, press four.”
“three”
#beep#
dispatching goblins. good luck!
*click*
You forgot the mandatory lead message. “Please listen closely as our menu options have changed.” No, they haven’t. Ever.
Also the standard “outdated message you have to listen to twice in entirety despite it not applying to you,” like “Please note, starting June 1, 2021 as a result of the Covid 19 Virus we will be starting social practicing guidelines in our offices” and they repeat a number twice for curbside that hasn’t existed in half a decade.
Thanks! I just thought that’s some non-existent thing, which Microsoft invented and nobody needs it ever. Well, that’s not far from your point, I guess. But still. Didn’t know that’s called a phone tree!
I know them as IVR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response
i thought that was specifically for the voice recognition ones but apparently not.
I TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK ABOUT GOBLINS
Why do you call it Troll 2 if there are only goblins in the movie?
A movie of such quality and esteem such as Troll 2 does not need to explain itself
you’re absolutely right! substituting pigeons.
funny you should use that example in particular because i recently had the displeasure of using microsoft’s phone tree. i was trying to a dead relative’s account and the info on the website was wrong.
they built a phone tree that remembers you. if you try to call in multiple times during some time period (at least several hours) it will just assume you have the same question and skip to your last choice.
It sounds like you’re trying to write a letter.
it’s a tsunami. uncontrollable, started far away from any normal humans, sweeps up everyone in its wake, and will cause massive damage when it inevitably crashes into a place with lots of people.
I don’t care anymore. Haven’t used Windows in years.
First off, copilot is just ChatGPT.
Second off, their implantation of ChatGPT is so bad it actually makes the original look good. And that is a damn low bar to reach for and miss.
I didn’t know that. So they can’t even rebrand well.
Aah, remember how good Visio used to be - when it had those green corner boxes, and a nice grid.was done
Those guys actually made a decent app to run on win 95 - so I guess MS had to try to disembowel them to find out how it such a thing was possible.
They didn’t miss shit, they just competed and lost to like the four other AI companies that executed much better than them.
You know the real problem? They thought because their button was easier to find and press that people would use it and not look for better buttons. And, to an extent, they are right, but… the other buttons are compellingly better at the things they specialize in, and right now no company specializes in ALL THE THINGS particularly well. Claude is a better writer, ChatGPT makes better drawings, Gemini is (getting closer to) what Google Search always wanted to be. They’re all imperfect, but each has its niche and people shop around enough to discover that CoPilot isn’t usually the best scratch for their personal itch.
Yeah but you’d expect they could make copilot the best at working with excel and it’s just not as good as the competition in that specialization
Why would you expect that? When was the last time Micro$lop made the best anything? Or even something good? Or at least decent? Or at the very least not openly hostile to the user?
Core Excel development team was made redundant 10 years ago, profits over people. I wish that was /s but it’s more likely true than not.
There is no “AI wave”. Machine learning can he incredibly powerful when used properly, and is being used to process scientific and medical data in pursuit of improving humanity’s understanding of reality around us.
But that is not what Microslop is pushing. LLMs that exist to chew up RAM, water, and electricity to shit out slop and generate suicidal tendencies in children.
They aren’t trying to make copilot useful, they are trying and failing to make it profitable, just like every other LLM.
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.
Well it is quite easy.
The majority of the world does not care about the things your bubble cares about.
They are a massive company, even if they didn’t make any profit (which they still do every quarter) they could still easily survive 50 years on the money they currently have.
They also probably realized providing free Copilot in Windows would get very expensive quickly, and that not enough users would pay for it.
Basically yeah
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.
They’re spending billions to get millions.
Peak capitalism!
Good article 👍
Microslop was right there along with the rest of them. Idiots with more resources than are actually capable of managing letting fear/fomo drive their decision making is going to bury us all.
Great, can I now buy RAM, SSDs, and HDDs on a cheaper price?
Unfortunately, like GPUs during the cryptomining era, consumers have shown their hand as to just-how-many-people will pay insane exorbitant prices. Remember when you could pay $200-300 every 2 years and get about double the GPU power? (It was only 5 years ago…) Nvidia & AMD learned that they no longer had to offer that anymore.
RAM prices have quadrupled in a year. Yet 25% of gamers still plan to upgrade this year, and 40% in the next 2 years. Even if we make believe that the previous status-quo was “everyone upgrades every year” (which is obviously a gross overestimation), this is a huge “line-going-up” scenario for the RAM manufacturers.
Why would they even bother lowering prices until forced to do so?
The amount of consumers who get a chub for overpaying is way too high. “Look at how much money I have! I can pay $3000 for a $400 product and not bat an eye!” Absolute schmucks.
