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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

#291

Post by ethbr1 »

bdangubic wrote: post #280
ethbr1 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

exactly!! though evaluating whether a change was actually helpful in doing the thing it was supposed to be doing is hard when no one knows what it is supposed to be doing :)

Which was the other benefit of a formal QA org -- you had to be able to tell them what you changed and how it was supposed to work.

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

#292

Post by somenameforme »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #136
somenameforme wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you a fan of reading? Good character fiction is based on reality as understood at a time and a great way to get insights into how and what people think, particularly as it's precisely those believable portrayals that tend to 'stick' with society. For example even most of George R. R. Martin's tales are directly inspired by real things, very much living up to the notion that reality is much stranger than fiction! Or similarly, read something like Dune and the 60s leaks into it hard.

In modern times the tale of Scrooge probably wouldn't really resonate, nor 'stick', because we transitioned to a culture of worshiping wealth, consumerism, and materialism. See (relevant to this topic) how many people defend unethical actions by claiming that fiduciary duty precludes any value beyond greed. In the time of Scrooge this was not the case, and so it was a more viable cautionary tale that strongly resonated.

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

#294

Post by ilteris »

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…

Yep, ship it out now, we'll figure out the rest later. I remember there was that motto, "respect the user." I am so tired.

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

#295

Post by snoman »

themafia wrote: post #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.

Every salesperson will tell you that good products sell themselves and therein lies the real story.

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

#296

Post by throwawaylaptop »

gernigg wrote: post #269
throwawaylaptop wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

No but several women that came to buy cars (some with male coworkers, or so they told me) eventually did over the years.

Tbh this wasn't some crazy brag post, as making $250-300k a year working 80 hours a week isn't all that impressive when software devs make more than that easily, and the top guys make many multiples of that.

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

#297

Post by neRok »

gwerbret wrote: post #201

A bit tangential and pedantic, but: > At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual. "Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".

About 2 years ago I was using Whisper AI locally to translate some videos, and "hallucinations" is definitely the right phrase for some of its output! So just like you might expect from a stereotypical schizo: it would stay on-task for a while, but then start ranting about random things, or "hearing things", etc.

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

#298

Post by snoman »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #75
type0 wrote: post #42

But 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.

> In the same way as there's no ability to set up Windows without internet connection and MS account Not true. They're clearly unwilling or unable to remove this code path fully, or they would have done so by now. There's just a different workaround for it every few years.

There’s probably some compliance requirement that it’s technically possible to set it up without an internet connection, so they leave it there, but make it unreasonably difficult for a majority to do it.

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

#299

Post by cal_dent »

seg_lol wrote: post #127
greenavocado wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes i agree with this. I think more people, than not, would benefit from actively cultivating space in their lives to be bored. Even something as basic as putting your phone in the internal zip part of your bag, so when you're standing in line at the store/post office/whatever you can't be arsed to just reach for your phone and instead be in your head or aware of your surroundings. Both can be such wonderful and interesting places but we seem to forget that now

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

#300

Post by cal_dent »

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…

Thank you for expressing this. It might not be pithy but its something I've been thinking about a lot for a long time and this a well articulated way of expressing this
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