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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

#131

Post by isk517 »

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…

In my experience part of the 'frictionless' experience is also to provide minimal information about any issues and no way to troubleshoot. Everything works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you are now at the mercy of the customer support que and getting an agent with the ability to fix your problem.

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

#132

Post by Ylpertnodi »

seanw444 wrote: post #92
justonceokay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming slow sales on salespeople is almost always a scapegoat. Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Not saying that sales is useless, far from it. But with an established product that people know about, the sales team is more of a conduit than they are a resource-gathering operation.

> Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Why do people use this useless phrase template? Yeah, the point is that it's not selling, and it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value.

> it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value.

So why are the sales-peops being blamed?

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

#133

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

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.

"They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way."

And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"

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

#134

Post by davidivadavid »

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…

Looking at it from a slightly different angle, one I find most illuminating, removing "friction" is like removing "difficulty" from a game, and "friction free" as an ideal is like "cheat codes from the start" as an ideal. It's making a game where there's a single button that says "press here to win." The goal isn't the remove "friction", it's the remove a specific type of valueless friction, to replace it with valuable friction.

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

#135

Post by ihsw »

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.

[dead]

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

#136

Post by sallveburrpi »

somenameforme wrote: post #61
jqpabc123 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They think we're all stupid. As time goes by, I'm starting to think they may be right more than they're wrong. And this is a sad and depressing statement about humanity.

Not really. It's just that the point you have to push people to get them to start pushing back on something tends to be quite high. And it's very different for different people on different topics. In the past this wasn't such a big deal because businesses weren't so large or so frequently run by myopic sociopaths. Ebenezer Scrooge was running some small local business, not a globe spanning empire entangling itself w…

Scrooge is a fictional person and Microsoft have been getting away with it since I’m alive with people hating it probably just as long. So I think GP definitely has a point.

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

#137

Post by rwyinuse »

saubeidl wrote: post #54
foobarchu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever. Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.

And if it does deliver, everyone's gonna be out of a job and the US economy is also going to crash. Nice cul-de-sac our techbro leaders have navigated us into.

Yep, either way things are going to suck for ordinary people.

My country has had bad economy and high unemployment for years, even though rest of the world is doing mostly OK. I'm scared to think what will happen once AI bubble either bursts or eats most white collar jobs left here.

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

#138

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

tech_ken wrote: post #21
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…

> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.

"In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents,"

I thought in 2008 we told the incumbents "you are the most important component of our economy. We will allow everybody to go down the drain but you. That's because you caused the problem, so you are the only ones to guide us out of it"

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

#139

Post by LtWorf »

grim_io wrote: post #55

What can you even do in the ms enterprise ecosystem with their copilot integration? Is it just for chatting? Is it a glorified RAG? Can you tell copilot co to create a presentation? Make a visualisation in a spreadsheet?

It's basically clippy without the funny animations.

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

#140

Post by thewebguyd »

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.

> I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

How would they? They are a monopoly, and partake in aggressive product bundling and price manipulation tactics. They juice their user numbers by enabling things in enterprise tenants by default.

If a product of theirs doesn't sell, they bundle it for "free" in the next tier up of license to drive adoption and upgrades. Case in point, the InTune suite (includes EntraID P2, Remote assistance, endpoint privilege management) will now be included in E5, and the price of E5 is going up (by $10/user/month, less than the now bundled features cost when bought separately). People didn't buy it otherwise, so now there's an incentive to move customers off E3 and into E5.

Now their customers are in a place where Microsoft can check boxes, even if the products aren't good, so there's little incentive to switch.

Try to price out Google Workspace (and also, an office license still because someone will need Excel), Identity, EDR, MDM for Windows, mac, mobile, slack, VoIP, DLP, etc. You won't come close to Microsoft's bundled pricing by piecing together the whole M365 stack yourself.

So yeah, they escape market discipline because they are the only choice. Their customers are fully captive.

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