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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

#101

Post by coldpie »

brookst wrote: post #85
coldpie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock. Selling products & services can be an advertisement for their stock, but there are other methods of convincing people to buy their stock, too. Currently the stock market only wants stocks that have "AI" associated with them. It doesn't matter whether users like it or not, because having a viable business is…

Are you saying they would rather double stock price than double revenue?

Sure. Decision makers are paid in stock price, not revenue. They would rather do whatever increases the stock price the most, with the least effort/expense.

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

#102

Post by graemep »

brookst wrote: post #85
coldpie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock. Selling products & services can be an advertisement for their stock, but there are other methods of convincing people to buy their stock, too. Currently the stock market only wants stocks that have "AI" associated with them. It doesn't matter whether users like it or not, because having a viable business is…

Are you saying they would rather double stock price than double revenue?

Yyes, and prefer it to doubling profit or cashflow etc.

I have not looked at MS in particular, but generally that is what the remuneration of the people at the top of most public companies is most strongly linked to.

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

#103

Post by PKop »

guluarte wrote: post #47
ChicagoDave wrote: post #13

Still wonder why the OneDrive mobile can’t find a file and the photo backup has been broken for months. But I have a copilot button in notepad. Satya’s days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very costly and painful lesson.

Onedrive, that useless app that creates a mess in the desktop if you have a laptop and a desktop like most users

This is what's so amazing to me, a primary feature of cloud storage is multi-device usage. But by default this ridiculous product causes a mess if you use it on 2 or more computers, and many apps save app data to my documents so you have useless (at best) or conflicting at worst bloat being copied between computers. I want to use it but Microsoft makes it a huge pain if I do.

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

#104

Post by ZeroConcerns »

Wojtkie wrote: post #87
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...…

I bet c-suite uses Mac

Yeah, and I also bet their Outlook 'Copilot' button has more-than-zero options in its dropdown menu.

But I'd actually love to know how to achieve that, and so far Microsoft AI is awfully silent on the subject...

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

#105

Post by PKop »

IcyWindows wrote: post #91
guluarte wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onedrive, that useless app that creates a mess in the desktop if you have a laptop and a desktop like most users

Most users do not own two computers.

A huge percentage do, whether it's most or not would be a stupid metric by which to design a cloud storage product in such a way that causes issues when one does sign in on multiple devices.

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

#106

Post by fodkodrasz »

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...…

> Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.

How did you manage this? Probably some company-wide group policy saves you. It keeps starting copilot for me, drives me crazy.

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

#107

Post by John23832 »

morkalork wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they so much want to be a service business than a software business. Microsoft execs are losing sleep over becoming the next IBM, not realizing they are already there and have been for a long time. Their main problem is that they never really learned how to compete on merit, just on first-to-market and all kinds of legal (and illegal) tricks.

To be pedantic, IBM is a service company

That's the point.

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

#108

Post by graemep »

mrweasel wrote: post #78
saubeidl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the stock market is not a good system to organize ones economy around then?

The stock market weirdly enough ruins the idea of capitalism. Catering to shareholders hurts the idea that competition would create better and cheaper products.

Its not the stock market per se. The biggest problem is a lack of good regulation to ensure competition and the resulting drift of oligopolies.

The stockmarket enables that by making takeovers easier as you have a higher proportion of short termist shareholders who 1) fail to block value destroying acquisitions on one side and 2) jump at the chance to make a quick profit on the other.

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

#109

Post by graemep »

zem wrote: post #84
mrweasel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock market weirdly enough ruins the idea of capitalism. Catering to shareholders hurts the idea that competition would create better and cheaper products.

that's not the idea of capitalism; the idea of capitalism is that you should be able to make money by virtue of owning stuff. it's an inherently rich-get-richer scheme, competition has little to do with it.

I think its obvious the GP means free market capitalism, which is what almost everyone who favours capitalism thinks is the form it should take.
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