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Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

arstechnica.com

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Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#121

Post by piva00 »

jbs789 wrote: post #43
h2zizzle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

> But I do wonder how Altman retains the momentum through to next year. What’s the next big thing? A rocket company?

Hmm, there were news about Sam Altman wanting to buy/invest on a rocket company. [0]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-has-explored-deal-to-...

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#124

Post by parliament32 »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #86
meindnoch wrote: post #33

Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.

Lol "Microsoft can't make something work ergo the technology is not feasible".

"The technology is not useful", at least in enterprise contexts, is what this comes out to. Which is really where the money is, because some vibecoder paying $20/mo for Claude really doesn't matter (especially when it costs $100/mo to run inference for his queries in the first place). Enterprise is the only place this could possibly make money.

Think about it: MS has a giant advantage over every other AI vendor, that they can directly insert the product into the OS and LOB apps without the business needing to onboard a new vendor. This is best case scenario, and by far the easiest sell for these tools. Given how badly they're failing, yeah, turns out orgs just don't see the value in it.

Next year will be interesting too: I suspect a large portion of the meager sales they managed to make will not renew, it'll be a bloodbath.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#125

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #14
jollyllama wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.

Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

Their customers largely aren't their users. Their customers are the purchasing departments at Dell, Lenovo, and other OEMs. Their customers are the purchasing departments at large enterprises who want to buy Excel. Their customers are the advertisers. The products where the customers and the users are the same people (Excel, MS flight simulator, etc.) tend to be pretty nice. The products where the customers aren't the users inevitably turn to shit.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#126

Post by smileson2 »

xnorswap wrote: post #53
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As 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 a…

I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.

that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#127

Post by seg_lol »

greenavocado wrote: post #118
jfarmer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had…

> They want to never be bored

This is the problem. Learning to embrace boredom is best thing I have ever done.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#128

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jfarmer wrote: post #107
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As 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 a…

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…

I think that's partially true. The point is to have the freedom to pursue higher-level goals. And one thing tech doesn't do - and education in general doesn't do either - is give experience of that kind of goal setting.

I'm completely happy to hand over menial side-quest programming goals to an AI. Things like stupid little automation scripts that require a lot of learning from poor docs.

But there's a much bigger issue with tech products - like Facebook, Spotify, and AirBnB - that promise lower friction and more freedom but actually destroy collective and cultural value.

AI is a massive danger to that. It's not just about forgetting how to think, but how to desire - to make original plans and have original ideas that aren't pre-scripted and unconsciously enforced by algorithmic control over motivation, belief systems, and general conformity.

Tech has been immensely destructive to that impulse. Which is why we're in a kind of creative rut where too much of the culture is nostalgic and backward-looking, and there isn't that sense of a fresh and unimagined but inspiring future to work towards.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#129

Post by ecshafer »

jfarmer wrote: post #107
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As 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 a…

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…

I don't think I could agree with you more. I think that more in tech and business should think about and read about philosophy, the mind, social interactions, and society.

ED Tech for example I think really seems to neglect the kind of bonds that people form when they go through difficult things together, and the pushing through difficulties is how we improve. Asking a robot xyz does not improve ourselves. AI and LLMs do not know how to teach, they are not Socratic pushing and prodding at our weaknesses and assessing us to improve. The just say how smart we are.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#130

Post by phantasmish »

greenavocado wrote: post #118
jfarmer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had…

> Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment.

I appreciate the way you distinguish this from actual revealed preference, which I think is key to understanding why what tech is doing is so wrong (and, bluntly, evil) despite it being what "people want". I like the term "revealed impulse" for this distinction.

It's the difference between choosing not to buy a bag of chips at the store or a box of cookies, because you know it'll be a problem and your actual preference is not to eat those things, and having someone leave chips and cookies at your house without your asking, and giving in to the impulse to eat too many of them when you did not want them in the first place.

Example from social media: My "revealed preference" is that I sometimes look at and read comments from shit on my Instagram algo feed. My actual preference is that I have no algo feed, just posts on my "following" tab, or at least that I could default my view to that. But IG's gone out of their way (going so far as disabling deep link shortcuts to the following tab, which used to work) to make sure I don't get any version of my preference.

So I "revealed" that my preference is to look at those algo posts sometimes, but if you gave me the option to use the app to follow the few accounts I care about (local businesses, largely) but never see algo posts at all, ever, I'd hit that toggle and never turn it off. That's my actual preference, despite whatever was "revealed". That other preference isn't "revealed" because it's not even an option.

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