11–20 of 399 posts
Don't worry, after a decade or two of having Windows reinstall and re-enable it every couple weeks against their users' wishes I'm sure they'll get the market penetration they're looking for...
Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time.
They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have carved out some of this search space with web-search being native to the tools now.
But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.
For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.
I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.
Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…
One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.
Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.
But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off. Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off. Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.