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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

#231

Post by blibble »

foobarian wrote: post #225
yoyohello13 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.

Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?

> Why is this, I wonder?

because that's Microsoft's business model

their products are just just good enough to allow them to put a checkbox in a feature table to allow it to be sold to someone who will then never have to use it

but not even a penny more will be spent than the absolute bare minimum to allow that

this explains Teams, Azure, and everything else they make you can think of

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

#232

Post by netsharc »

vel0city wrote: post #228
harvey9 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loosely related: voice control on Android with Gemini is complete rubbish compared to the old assistant. I used to be able to have texts read out and dictate replies whilst driving. Now it's all nondeterministic which adds cognitive load on me and is unsafe in the same way touch screens in cars are worse than tactile controls.

I've been immensely frustrated by no longer being able to set reminders by voice. I got so used to saying "remind me in an hour to do x" and now that's just entirely not an option. I'm a very forgetful person and easily distracted. This feature was incredibly valuable to me.

I got Gemini Pro (or whatever it's called) for free for a year on my new Pixel phone, but there's an option to keep Assistant, which I'm using.

Gotta love the enshittification: "new and better" being more CPU cycles being burned for a worse experience.

I just have a shortcut to the Gemini webpage on my home screen if I want to use it, and for some reason I can't just place a shortcut (maybe it's my ancient launcher that's not even in the play store anymore), so I have to make a tasker task that opens the webpage when run.

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

#233

Post by BeetleB »

aabajian wrote: post #182
gibsonsmog wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me? You could solve that issue (and probably lot's of similar issues) with something like Auto Hotkey. Seems like extreme overkill to have an autonomous agent watch everything you do, so it might possibly click a button…

Auto Hotkey doesn't work well for Epic manipulation because Epic runs inside of a Citrix Virtual Machine. You can't just read Window information and navigate that way. You'd have to have some sort of on-screen OCR to detect whether Epic is open, has focus, and is showing the tab that I want to close. Also, the tab itself can't be closed...I'm just clicking on the tab next to it.

Doable in Autohotkey. You can take a screenshot of what to look for, and tell AutoHotKey to navigate the mouse to it on the screen if it finds it.

I've done similar things.

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

#234

Post by elorant »

foobarian wrote: post #225
yoyohello13 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.

Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?

Probably compute isn’t enough to serve everyone from a frontier LLM.

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

#235

Post by wlesieutre »

mk89 wrote: post #194
xnorswap wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks. The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget. 100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe). This means for a year or more, a lot o…

Reminds me of when Google’s core mission was to put Google Plus integrations in everything

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

#236

Post by ncr100 »

YY843792387 wrote: post #227
Workaccount2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…

This false dichotomy is still frustratingly all over the place. LLMs are useful for a variety of benign everyday use cases, that doesn't mean that they can replace a human for anything. And if those benign use cases is all they're good at, then the entire AI space right now is maybe worth $2B/year, tops. Which is still a good amount of money! Except that's roughly the amount of money OpenAI spends every minute, and i…

Use case == Next iteration of "You're Fired" may be more like it.

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

#237

Post by netsharc »

PyWoody wrote: post #73
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…

> ...Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you" I feel like that describes nearly all of the "productivity" tools I see in AI ads. Sadly enough, it also aligns with how most people use it, in my personal experience. Just a total off-boarding of needing to think.

The term is "cognitive offloading". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cognitive+offloading

Sheesh, I notice I also just ask an assistant quite a bit rather than putting effort to think about things. Imagine people who drive everywhere with GPS (even for routine drives) and are lost without it, and imagine that for everything needing a little thought...

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

#238

Post by s1mplicissimus »

gdulli wrote: post #95
avidiax wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed. If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop". When you go to deploy…

Agreed, but 99% is being very generous.

And that's for tasks it's actually suited for

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

#239

Post by BeetleB »

aabajian wrote: post #148

I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."? Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App ( https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ ). Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For exampl…

I actually would like it to improve my writing. Problem is LLMs aren't particularly good for this (yet).
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