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Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

windowscentral.com

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Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#11

Post by lloydatkinson »

Lucasoato wrote: post #7

This is absurd, the fact that Windows has 70% if global desktop operating system market share makes them their most important moat, why are they deliberately taking actions and steps to make it worse? They added ads, forced updates, mandatory Microsoft account activation, so much unwanted AI slop... Think about it, if it was another more competitive company, they would be charging for the AI service and the onboardin…

I think the summary is that "product owner" types and other agile simulacrums wanted it simply because they viewed it as an easy win towards KPI and other performance metrics. The most damning proof of this is Copilot in Notepad, and that half-attempt at renaming the entire Office suite to simply "Copilot" (they seemed to reverse this a few days later).

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#12

Post by Frieren »

Good, maybe Microsoft will start investing to solve real problems and develop better products.

Microsoft have been de-investing in its own companies to put more money into AI. Yes, they have made cuts on highly profitable business to burn money on AI. I hope that they reverse before they fire everyone that was able to build useful software.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#14

Post by greggoB »

OsamaJaber wrote: post #5

The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit. A Copilot button in Notepad doesn't solve a problem anyone has Good to see them pulling back, but the test will be whether the features they keep actually earn their place in the workflow instead of just being there because someone had a KPI to hit

> The real issue was never AI in Windows It was AI with no clear user benefit

Much of the way AI has been forced upon the world by MS and the likes makes it very difficult to separate the two. The trend of enshittification leading up to LLMs has also not been a solid basis for trust. So yes, for a lot of people, the underlying technology isn't necessarily an issue, but it's kind of hard to imagine it being presented in a non-problematic way given the above, which I suspect is a big part of why there's a growing sentiment of distaste with anything AI now.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#16

Post by nusl »

This entire thing seems very iffy. Not much in the way of concrete info, a lot of speculation, and I seriously doubt that MS will suddenly switch directions. It's just being modified/refactored into smaller suppositories over time rather than the large infrequent ones they seem to have used.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#17

Post by pixelpoet »

Shank wrote: post #2

> It appears this moment of pushback has resonated with internal teams: According to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, the company is now reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans changes to streamline or even remove certain AI features where they don’t make sense. Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features ma…

> The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place

It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.

Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.

The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#18

Post by hparadiz »

b3lvedere wrote: post #6
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro

That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)

If they actually did this they would vendor lock you into a custom DM after one or two iterations and then anyone not using that DM would be locked out of any real software. It's a Trojan horse.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#19

Post by dartharva »

Shank wrote: post #2

> It appears this moment of pushback has resonated with internal teams: According to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, the company is now reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans changes to streamline or even remove certain AI features where they don’t make sense. Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features ma…

You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong.

As an OS, Windows died with 10.

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