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Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
41–50 of 348 posts
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#42But is it sold enough to regular Windows Home users? If MS brings an ultimatum: "you need to buy AI services to use Windows", they might get a bunch more clueless subscribers. In the same way as there's no ability to set up Windows without internet connection and MS account they could make it mandatory to subscribe to Copilot.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#43AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…
Looking forward to the OpenAI (and Anthropic) IPOs. It’s funny to me that this info is being “leaked” - they are sussing out the demand. If they wait too long, they won’t be able to pull off the caper (at these valuations). And we will get to see who has staying power.
It’s obvious to me that all of OpenAIs announcements about partnerships and spending is gearing up for this. But I do wonder how Altman retains the momentum through to next year. What’s the next big thing? A rocket company?
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#44AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…
How do you guarantee your accelerationism produces the right results after the collapse? If the same systems of regulation and power are still in place then it would produce the same result afterwards
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#45Despite having an unlimited warchest I'm not expecting Microsoft to come out as a winner from this AI race whilst having the necessary resources. The easy investment was to throw billions at OpenAI to gain access to their tech, but that puts them in a weird position of not investing heavily in cultivating their own AI talent and being in control of their own destiny by having their own horse in the race with their own SOTA models.
Apple's having a similar issue, unlimited wealth that's outsourcing to external SOTA model providers.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#46AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
Thing is, it's hard to predict what can be done and what breakthrough or minor tweak can suddenly open up an avenue for a profitable use-case.
The cost of missing that opportunity is why they're heavily investing in AI, they don't want to miss the boat if there's going to be one.
And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#47AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…
Yeah, it started with the whole Wall Street, with all the depression and wars that it brought, and it hasn't stopped, at each cycle the curve has to go up, with exponential expectations of growth, until it explodes taking the world economy to the ground.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#48AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…
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Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#49As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you".
This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I am doing to something I don't want or didn't intend.
It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#50AI is people looking at EV hype and saying - I'll 100x it.
It has all the same components, just on much higher scale:
1. Billionaire con-man convincing large part of market and industry (Altman in AI vs Musk in EV) that new tech will take over in few years.
2. Insane valuations not supported by an actual ROI.
3. Very interesting and amazing underlying technology.
4. Governments jumping on the hype and enabling it.