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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

#161

Post by Draiken »

graemep wrote: post #109
zem wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Talk about utopia huh?

Free markets never existed, don't exist and never will. Markets are defined by laws and regulations in which they exist in. They can't ever be "free".

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

#163

Post by graemep »

Arainach wrote: post #158
graemep wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The free market abhors competition. It's much more profitable to be a monopoly - and profitable enough by far to squash any competitors in infancy.

Capitalists abhor competition. Adam Smith (as in "invisible hand") pointed this out. That is a subversion of a free market.

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

#164

Post by jacquesm »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #150
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.

I’m actually somewhat stoked about generative AI from a “good enough” perspective, because at this inflection point where a lot of countries and organizations are looking for Microsoft alternatives (digital sovereignty, etc), this is the best time to be able to build and deploy alternatives with the productivity advantages (if any) AI might provide. Big Tech thinks they have a moat, when it’s really diffuse power bei…

Big tech's moat is mostly built up around perceived security (not actual security) and abuse of monopoly positions, AI is going to make it easier for them to maintain this because it serves as an addictive component for the users, or so they hope. In practice it only appeals to the lowest common denominator, which is exactly how they built their empires in the first place. AI allows non-experts to pretend they are experts with confidence, and to produce output they claim as their own to which they have no real title. As a democratizing principle that's great, but as a quality-of-service-provided item it could easily become a disaster and I think MS et-al are betting that they will be able to 'fake it until they make it' on the quality front to avert that disaster.

So far, I'm not seeing it. All I see is a massive leap forward in the first two years that still had some fundamental problems and a lot of fancy packaging of the same broken stuff since then. We're looking at band-aids here, not actual progress.

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

#165

Post by graemep »

Draiken wrote: post #161
graemep wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Talk about utopia huh? Free markets never existed, don't exist and never will. Markets are defined by laws and regulations in which they exist in. They can't ever be "free".

I agree. A free market requires regulation to ensure competition otherwise it ceases to be a free market.

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

#166

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

thinkling wrote: post #145
btbuildem wrote: post #131

> 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…

Claude Code usage probably isn't counted as "chatbot" use. Also, I think you're overestimating how many people program vs. how many people are using AI chatbots as the new websearch. Orders of magnitude more of the latter.

Sure - US has 1M developers vs 300M pop. At least the Claude Code developers are paying for it though, vs only 5% of users paying for ChatGPT.

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

#167

Post by stackskipton »

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.

Microsoft won this battle if you check the numbers. Last I saw it was 85% Microsoft vs 15% Google which seems right with my experience. Current company is Google Worksapce while last 3 were Office365.

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

#168

Post by cezart »

Draiken wrote: post #156
cezart wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

> a great tool to allocate resources efficiently Sorry but... WTF are you talking about? It rewards self-destructive behavior in favor of short-term gains. Shareholders have *zero* commitment to the companies they buy shares from and will happily switch their entire portfolios on a whim. It's essentially people chasing the new shiny thing every single day. Let's not forget it's a known fact that people with insider k…

Depends what you compare it with. I grew up in the post soviet union. That system allocated resources to various monopolies who were too big to fail. Turns out allocating capital based on who can make things that people want/need to buy, and do it with a profit, multiplies said capital way faster. From this point of view, over time your initial base grows into all kinds of industries etc. That's probably why the USA won the cold war.

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

#169

Post by hvb2 »

coldpie wrote: post #40
neilalexander wrote: post #10

I would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find…

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…

> Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock.

Yeah that's a great business idea, ask Boeing how that's going

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

#170

Post by burningChrome »

throw310822 wrote: post #75
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...…

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".

I've fooled around with some vibe coding on several LLM's like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT with some pretty decent results.

Since I have a full Copilot license at my corporate day gig, I figured I would try using Copilot for a basic static site. Nothing too hard, and something that's been handled easily with the other LLM's.

The prompt was pretty basic just to get something to start working with. "Build a four page template. With a home or index page, two pages of content and a contact page with a responsive slide out menu from the left hand side of the page."

It ran and put everything in a folder. I open the home page and everything was broken. I opened the files in VS Code and saw this:

    
      index.htmlHome
      services.htmlServices
      
      contact.htmlContact
And then this:

    
    
    
    Home · Acme Web
I mean, if you can't even this right, I don't have much hope it can do anything more complicated. To say this was pretty sad is an understatement and clarified how far Microsoft is behind other LLM's.
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