turns out ppl dont want to pay astronomical sums for shitty hallucinating ai when it really matters
Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
261–270 of 348 posts
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#262"after salespeople miss their quotas."
Well.. that's certainly one way to view it. The other is:
"because the company set unrealistic expectations."
I'm sure this will slow down the growth of "AI datacenters." I'm sure of this.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
* That's modern Microsoft's desktop product business model I hear tales of the before-times, when they had a QA department and took quality seriously.
How do you QA adding weird prediction tool to say Outlook. I have to use Outlook at one of my clients and have switched to writing all emails in VS Code and then pasting it to Outlook as “autocomplete” is unbearable… Not sure QA is possible with tools like these…
Part of QA used to be evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing.
... why, it's almost like in eliminating the QA function, we removed the final checks and balances on developers (read: PMs) from implementing whatever ass-backwards feature occurs to them.
Just in time for 'AI all the things!' directives to come down from on high.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#264AI 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…
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Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#265AI 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…
> In other words --- pure greed. Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits. These attempts to try to steer demand despite clear indicators that it doesn't want to go in that direction aren't just driven by greed, they're driven by abject incompetence. This isn't pure greed, it's stupid greed.
No, it's greed right now. They are fundamentally incapable of considering consequences beyond the immediate term.
If the kind of foresight and consideration you suggest were possible, companies wouldn't be on this self-cannibalizing path of exploiting customers right now for every red cent you can squeeze out of them. Long term thinking would very clearly tell you that abusing your customers and burning all the goodwill the company built over a hundred years is idiotic beyond comparison. If you think about anything at all other than tomorrow's bottom line you'd realize that the single best way to make a stable long-term business is to treat your customers with respect and build trust and loyalty.
But this behavior is completely absent in today's economy. Past and future don't matter. Getting more money right now is the only thing they're capable of seeing.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#266AI 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…
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…
It's exactly the same situation as Tesla "self driving". It's sold and marketed in no uncertain terms, VERY EXPLICITLY that AI will replace senior devs.
As you admit, it can't do that. And everyone involved knows it.
How is that anything other than a con?
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#267As 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…
As an old school interface/interaction designer, I see this as a direct consequence of how the discipline of software design has evolved in the last decade or two.
We’ve went from conceiving of software as tools - constructs that enhance and amplify their user’s skills and capabilities - to magic boxes that should aim to do everything with just one button (and maybe even that is one action too many).
This shift in thinking is visible in how junior designers and product managers are trained and incentivized to think about their work. “Anticipating the user’s intent”, “providing a magical experience”, “making the simplest, most beautiful and intuitive product” - all things that are so routine parlance now that they sound trite, but that would make any software designer from the 80s/90s catatonic because of how orthogonal they are to good tool design.
To caricature a bit, the industry went from being run by people designing heavy machinery to people designing Disneyland rides. Disneyland rides are great and have their place, but you probably don’t want your tractor to be designed like one.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#268Earlier 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…
This is perhaps one of the most articulate takes on this I have ever read - thank-you! And - for myself, it was friction that kickstarted my interest in "tech" - I bought a janky modem, and it had IRQ conflicts with my Windows 3 mouse at the time - so, without internet (or BBS's at that time), I had to troubleshot and test different settings with the 2-page technical manual that came with it. It was friction that mad…
I think of it like this:
Friction is an element of the environment like any other. There's an "ecology of friction" we should respect. Deciding friction is bad and should be eradicated is like deciding mosquitoes or spiders or wolves are bad and should be eradicated.
Sometimes friction is noise. Sometimes friction is signal. Sometimes the two can't be separated.
I learned much the same way you did. I also started a coding bootcamp, so I've thought a lot about what counts as "wasted" time.
I think of it like building a road through wilderness. The road gets you there faster, but careless construction disturbs the ecosystem. If you're building the road, you should at least understand its ecological impact.
Much of tech treats friction as an undifferentiated problem to be minimized or eliminated—rather than as part of a living system that plays an ecological role in how we learn and work.
Take Codecademy, which uses a virtual file system with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Even after mastering the lessons, many learners try the same tasks on their own computers and ask, "Why do I need to put this CSS file in that directory? What does that have to do with my hard drive?"
If they'd learned directly on their own machines, they would have picked up the hard-drive concepts along the way. Instead, they learned a simplified version that, while seemingly more efficient for "learning to code," creates its own kind of waste.
But is that to say the student "should" spend a week struggling? Could they spend a day, say, and still learn what the friction was there to teach? Yes, usually.
Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#269Earlier 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.
I worked car sales for years. The same large dealership can have a person anyone would call a decent salesperson, and they made $4k a month. There was also two people at that dealership making $25k+ a month each. If your organization is filled with the $4k type and not the $25k type, you're going to have a bad time. I was #7 in the US while working at a small dealership. I moved the the large dealership mentioned abo…
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Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
* That's modern Microsoft's desktop product business model I hear tales of the before-times, when they had a QA department and took quality seriously.
UX consistency also took a dive, both in MS products and in all the psuedo-webpage crap shipped as Electron apps.