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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect this is the crux of the problem. There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value. Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. Th…

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe. AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

Were you around in 2008?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#162
post #55
post #40

They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year. When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash. I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.

It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the company to open source, naturally not without their own intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer branding, anything related to Windows.

Just because Satya is bald and Indian, doesn't make him Gandhi. Ballmer was Bill's bulldog, but he couldn't direct the company's strategy nearly as effectively as his predecessor; Nadella is craftier. Microsoft has been Microsofting harder than ever lately, and their open source strategy is very subtly embrace-extend-extinguish. I honestly think that by 2030 they will have begun executing a plan to disallow Linux (or any other OS) from running on new PCs without a Windows hypervisor underneath it.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#163

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#164

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.

And Teams

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#165
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.

I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, b…

Google is certainly looking better than stack overflow.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#166

It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop. It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and…

innovators dilemma. they see that the future is AI, but AI doesnt need Microsoft.

But also while the future may be AI (this is debateable), I live and work in the present.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?

I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.

I'm holding out for Copilot 365 Explorer Enterprise Edition.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#168
What I find deeply troubling is that, from people I know, Microsoft is making it harder to use any other AI tool in the enterprise. Copilot operates like a computer virus where you can only use it for AI or you will be fired. It's really frustrating to hear about people I know when they can't do basic things with AI and their organizational policy changes it day-by-day in order to get the numbers up for Copilot. Their basic workflows involving PyTorch or Sklearn are being kneecapped and it's getting worse. Microsoft is becoming a huge liability for AI professionals that I know of.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are just highly resistant to change, even change for the better.

Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.

Its really not that bad. I used to use it at work all the time. I did word processing, spreadsheets and presentations all the time with it. Maybe not as powerful as Excel, but I was never really a power user. But then again I never saw any spreadsheets that anybody used that were particularly complex.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#170

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

CEO has only delivered failure, and in trying to avoid that, they brought it
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