Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

finance.yahoo.com

61–68 of 68 posts

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#61
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percent of dollars are tied up in in-flight oil transactions? And I suppose also in accounts that will be used for oil transactions in the planned future? That’s the mechanism for that supporting the value of the dollar, right, like, increased dollar demand via being used for oil market transactions?

The point is that the Petrodollar system requires countries to buy US treasuries to be able to buy oil. That is what makes borrowing cheap for the US, and what keeps the dollar demand up.

I'm not clear on how the Petrodollar system actually works.

If oil is sold in dollars, that only has to affect dollar demand for the time it takes to transit through some other currency to dollars to oil. So however long that takes to settle.

Where do the additional demand components come from? Why do countries have to buy US treasuries to be able to buy oil? Don't they just have to use dollars for the transaction?

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you hear this advice from 100 broke people or one lucky schmuck?

This is significantly safer than shorting that some people here suggest. You can't lose money sitting on cash. While when shorting your potential loss is infinite.

Mistiming the market is losing out on potential gains, which is losing money compared to sitting on cash. Cash doesn't grow.

Most people are best off investing in index funds and forgetting about it for 10+ years.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#64
post #3

If one were to think a major stock market crash was coming up, led by the AI bubble bursting, but reinforced by the major self-own that is the Iran war, how would one best prepare ones investments?

If you genuinely think these two events will shake the foundations of the US economy, then no investment is really going to protect you; you can't expect a system to shield you from the very thing that's breaking it.

There is crypto but even that got infiltrated by institutional wall street money. There are off-shore jurisdictions but the recent Iran war has showed these can be very vulnerable at a moment notice. There is China, but a Taiwan invasion could reduce your assets there to zero.

Honestly, I think the best bet is crypto/Bitcoin, by far. It operates across borders and still relatively insulated from government reach. Unlike gold, oil, or anything physical, it can be moved without physical visibility.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#65
post #21

Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot. This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude! This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That…

“Copilot” is not one product, it’s around 15 different products, seriously. I think that people often compare apples to oranges by comparing the “copilot” they have in Windows/Office/Teams etc to Claude Code which is ridiculous. A better product to compare Claude Code to would be “Github Copilot CLI”, but I haven’t seen the two seriously compared anywhere.

Office is now the "Microsoft 365 Copilot App." It's ridiculous.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#66
post #21

Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot. This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude! This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That…

Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product. But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific…

> A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.

That isn't possible with the technology right now and it will not change. Multimodal computer use and long context for high quality outputs are expensive.

This is like complaining about buying an automobile because it's more expensive than a horse.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#67
Microsoft consistently set the bar for mediocrity.

The office workers who use their products do so grudgingly, since Office and Excel are so baked into business ecosystems.

Nobody will shed a tear when the aging dinosaur finally dies.

Unfortunately it has been given a transfusion and a new name, Microsoft 365 Copilot or some rubbish.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot is actually significantly more reliable at technical tasks with SQL or C# than others, i've found. Do we have different use cases? Copilot seems to hit the technical level I'm asking about much more reliably. It keeps a more grounded general semantic model.

You might be using different copilots since there are approximately three different Microsoft copilot products Are you using the one that's part of Microsoft 365?

the copilot.microsoft.com one, and the Visual Studio one
Post reply on HN