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Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

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Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#241

Post by adolph »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #62

Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average , which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them. Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has...…

At what point does Charlie Brown not kick at the ball Lucy offers?

It's been 19 years since "Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging". [0] Is the disconnect displayed in this message thread that there's always 10,000 new people discovering a fact? [1]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

1. https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#242

Post by danudey »

arresin wrote: post #225
artrockalter wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so easy to ship completely broken AI features because you can't really unit test them and unit tests have been the main standard for whether code is working for a long time now. The most successful AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor) are all dogfooding their products as far as I can tell, and I don't really see any other reliable way to make sure the AI feature you ship actually works.

Microsoft: What? You want us to eat this slop? Are you crazy?!

50% of our code is being written by AI! Or at least, autocompleted by AI. And then our developers have to fix 50% of THAT code so that it does what they actually wanted to do in the first place. But boy, it sure produces a lot of words!

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#243

Post by dudneet »

jofla_net wrote: post #117
big-and-small wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust Google ad monopoly to keep my data actually secure. They have a great track record of not sharing their datasets with anyone because this gives them an edge pushing ads down people throats. Google is honest about what they doing. Google also not going away anytime soon so they also not going to sell off their datasets to highest bidder. And I don't trust Sam Altman and AI.com at all since their whole thing wa…

> I trust Google... Yup, yeah, sure. The company that attempts to open your password-protected zip files. Let us not give it a free pass either. There is no good incumbent.

You just made that up, huh?

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#244

Post by danudey »

motoboi wrote: post #195
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #62

Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average , which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them. Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has...…

This is what move fast and break things looks like in a enterprise the size of microsoft. It's mostly break things and little moving fast. But the idea is that it's AI or death, so some broken buttons seems of less importances than the buttons itself being there, because the button working is a problem involving several teams, so no one is actually responsible, but the button being there is some team problem, and hel…

"Move fast and break things" is fine if you're a social networking site and breaking things means people can't get their racist memes or browse marketplace for twenty minutes until you push a change.

It's less fine if the things you're breaking are your core operating systems and the office suite that makes you most of your money and it takes you months to get the relevant teams aligned to push out a fix for the bad idea your execs pushed.

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#245

Post by ares623 »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #239
kayhantolga wrote: post #96

As a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer—and honestly, it might overtake it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got. If you haven’t seen how bad it is, here’s one example: Copilot Terminal. In theory, it should help you wi…

Works good in Teams. Summarises meetings, collects action items. It’s pretty great actually. I don’t know how many forests we are burning to have a digital secretary, but surely the environment can take one more for the team?

“It’s just like your toaster”

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#246

Post by rickydroll »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #97
throw310822 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".

Absolutely! There are so many scenarios where they could actually add some value, and they're fulfilling, like, exactly none of those? Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we…

> I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review.

Maybe it's a fifth column group working to destroy Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#247

Post by danudey »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #229
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #62

Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average , which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them. Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has...…

On new-outlook-on-Windows there’s an option to disable the copilot button. Wanna take a guess what that does?

Honestly, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic and it actually does disable the button, or if you're being jaded and cynical and it just hides it for six hours then it comes back. Either option seems equally likely at this point.

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#248

Post by sk7 »

artrockalter wrote: post #221
throw310822 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".

It's so easy to ship completely broken AI features because you can't really unit test them and unit tests have been the main standard for whether code is working for a long time now. The most successful AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor) are all dogfooding their products as far as I can tell, and I don't really see any other reliable way to make sure the AI feature you ship actually works.

Tests are called "evals" (evaluations) in the AI product development world. Basically you let humans review LLM output or feed it to another LLM with instructions how to evaluate it.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/beyond-vibe-checks-a-pms-...

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#249

Post by boznz »

cmckn wrote: post #196
joshstrange wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. I remember reading that when it first came out and all I can think is: No, he doesn't like podcasts, if you like podcasts you listen to them. That's like saying "He loves food, but instead of eating…

> in the car on his commute to Redmond This was funny to me, because he lives like 8 minutes away.

Maybe he has Microsoft Copilot Full-Self-Driving installed

Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

#250

Post by s1mplicissimus »

dudneet wrote: post #238

It seems to me that America is a great big nomenclature butchering machine. If they can butcher what words like crypto or AI mean, they’re willing to put their whole economy behind that. I need to rethink my investment strategies.

I'm always glad to see others notice this too. cheers
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