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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

#131

Post by btbuildem »

> FirstPageSage AI Chatbot Usage Chart (December 3, 2025)

What a bizarre way to organize the chart. Clearly Anthropic is leading -- their early bet on "programming" as the main use case is paying off.

The recent report from Openrouter [1] confirms as much: coding is the number one use case, with role playing / fantasy writing in second place.

I have a feeling the remaining use cases will never dominate, instead they will slowly mature into acceptable practices across the various industries. That will probably take longer than the investment bubble can hold though.

1: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai

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

#132

Post by rynn »

jsheard wrote: post #122
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...…

> So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Satya Nadella insists that Bing365Pilot has supercharged his productivity, but determining if he's high on his own supply or lying through his teeth is an exercise for the reader. > Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening t…

Nadella has to have his own custom agents. It isn't even possible for an enterprise like MSFT to not have custom agents that are still remotely useful.

So, his experience with Copilot agents != Average Customer's experience

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

#133

Post by jeremyjh »

this_user wrote: post #9

Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.

Its all about Excel. It really is the best spreadsheet, and everyone knows how to use it. But that comes in an Office bundle that includes Teams. And that is why we must suffer.

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

#134

Post by shiandow »

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

And everything aimed at developers assumes you're using Unix.

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

#136

Post by jeremyjh »

immibis wrote: post #118
stackskipton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats the whole point. The only people using Teams are the ones who are already committed to Microsoft 365. Companies on GSuite mostly use Slack, I doubt there is a single one using Teams.

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

#137

Post by Sanzig »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #97
throw310822 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".

Absolutely! There are so many scenarios where they could actually add some value, and they're fulfilling, like, exactly none of those? Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we…

I have Copilot at work, it feels so useless sometimes. As an example, I had a report which I needed to make some batch edits to. I figured why not let the robot take a crack at it, so I clicked the Copilot button and spent a couple minutes describing what I needed changed.

Copilot tells me it can't edit my current document, but it can create a new one. I figured okay, Microsoft doesn't want to set it loose on the original, guess it makes sense that it requires a copy. So I said yes.

Nope. Instead of creating a copy of my document and editing it, it created an entirely new document which excised basically everything in the original report and replaced it with a very short summary - I'm talking 5000 words down to 500. All my tables and figures were gone, as was the standard report template my employer uses.

What utter garbage. Office productivity is a major use case for LLMs, and here the largest vendor of productivity software on the planet is happy to fuck it up.

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

#138

Post by larkost »

dboreham wrote: post #90
this_user wrote: post #9

Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.

People here are mostly too young to remember but the original Microsoft business model was this: Find a software market currently addressed by high price products; create a reasonably good product for that market; sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make much more profit. Repeat/rinse. The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after…

No the original Microsoft business model was to get the incumbent (IBM) to bundle your product (DOS, bought from someone else) onto their product so that you had a near-monopoly, then use that to sell your other software onto that, occasionally making technical changes to make it difficult for your competitors.

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

#139

Post by Maxatar »

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?

If you're someone who owns Microsoft, what option would you prefer?

1. Stock price remains the same but revenue doubles.

2. Revenue stays the same, but stock price doubles.

Assuming all else equal, and recognizing that this is absolutely a simplification, but if these were the two choices then it seems a no brainer that you'd go with option 2. Revenue is a means of increasing stock price.

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

#140

Post by wolvesechoes »

cezart wrote: post #74
saubeidl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently

Any empirical support for that?

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