I just had a sales call with someone from Microsoft who was looking for an AI tool to automate some Excel work they were doing. I doubt they'll buy our product, but it gave me a good laugh.
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
#112Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking about this recently. The centrality of the stock market, while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently, might actually be a big weakness for the USA today. A capable adversary, like China, can kill entire strategic sectors in the US using the stock market. If they undercut the US companies and are willing to accept low returns on their investments, then the respective USA compet…
Do you need the stock market to undercut industries though? I'm not sure it's necessary
While not strictly necessary, it is a great power multiplier.
It helps as it is both a gauge of the success of the strategy, and also a lever where the process can be fine tuned, eg. slowly buying stock then strategically dumping in the right time, correlated with other external shocks can have wider effect to whole industries through controlling the public opinion on specific industries.
Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
#114Microsoft doesn't just have a shoddy AI problem. Microsoft has a direction problem. I'm no fan of Ballmer, but his Microsoft seemed like they knew what they were doing, and were actually trying to be good at it. Nadella seems extremely clueless and seems happy to just ignore and later axe consumer products that don't generate immediate revenue.
And noone should actually be shocked about his ineffectiveness. Covid was a great example of how clueless his leadership has been. Skype used to be a verb people used in common parlance, and yet they dropped the ball and let Zoom take over both consumer and enterprise segments while focusing on "restructuring" Skype into Teams for no reason whatsoever.
Prior to Covid, he was ready to let Windows run its course and axe that too. The sudden demand for sub-$500 laptops during the pandemic showed him that people still liked Windows and wanted a good OS from Microsoft. But instead of capitalizing on it to give customers what they wanted, he just gave us an ad-filled spyware with AI slop.
I have zero hope in any product with a Copilot in its name (including GitHub). At this point, unless there's a change in leadership, it's only a matter of time before XBox faces the axe.
Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
#115https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ... Helpful chart to draw conclusions
Not so helpful, it's too out of date
Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
#116I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.
Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.
The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.
Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
#117I see mentions of Gemini as a fast growing alternative to ChatGPT. Isn't anyone troubled by the fact that for consumers there is no way to keep your data from being used for model training if you want to maintain history of your Gemini chats. ChatGPT respects privacy and allows for maintaining history while also opting out of using ones data for model training
I trust Google ad monopoly to keep my data actually secure. They have a great track record of not sharing their datasets with anyone because this gives them an edge pushing ads down people throats. Google is honest about what they doing. Google also not going away anytime soon so they also not going to sell off their datasets to highest bidder. And I don't trust Sam Altman and AI.com at all since their whole thing wa…
> I trust Google...
Yup, yeah, sure. The company that attempts to open your password-protected zip files. Let us not give it a free pass either.
There is no good incumbent.
Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft’s best pitch (and Google benefits from this too) is that contracts are annoying and take forever to execute. If you can sign a deal for Outlook and Teams it’s so much easier than separate contracts for Outlook and Slack. You’ll get very far with that logic alone.
Most companies I’ve been at that use Teams over Slack is not “We can’t get contract for Slack” but “We have Teams included, why would we pay for Slack?” - Accountant
I guess Microsoft lost this battle, at least at some companies, because I'm now at one that uses Slack and Google, with no dependency on Microsoft Office.
Re: Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
#119Well, 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...…
There's AI in Teams to. I wanted to use it to recolect info from my chats but apparently it's unable to do so.