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Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

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181–190 of 293 posts

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

#181
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…

It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.

I think it’s governance. It can make sense to ask to put AI into everything. But then you also need to check it’s done in a useful way. MS leadership seems to have skipped this step.

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

#182
Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)?

And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?

Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?

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

#183
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 wh…

> they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.

They also missed the boat on mobile, and I suspect they didn't want to miss the "AI" boat this time around.

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

#184
Great. Let us hope that support for hardware without TPM is next. Creating several mountains worth of electronic waste was a terrible decision. And in the middle of the AI-induced memory shortage!

Although I have to admit: The combination of AI and required new hardware has been a nice boost for switching to Linux.

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

#185
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…

A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work.

If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.

This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.

People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.

So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.

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

#186
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistia has them at a loss, but varying around breakeven: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom... But that doesn't matter. It was bought as a toy and propaganda network. It can lose money indefinitely as long as its owner is paid by Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo

Tesla is also collapsing.

Musk's net worth was $300Bn in November 2024 and he ended 2025 at $726Bn.

... where is this collapse?

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

#187

Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)? And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this? Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug…

I got that feeling by looking at their C# docs. It looks like someone had a KPI that was "words of documentation written"

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

#188

As a side topic, I wish we still had something like Windows 3.1/95/98, that has a touch of personal usage (focuses on multimedia/gaming instead of business/server). Do you still remember Microsoft Home? My first Windows gaming experience, other than Minesweeper and Solitaire ofc, was the Fury3 demo, which contains only one level from the licensed game, on a Windows 95 Home Entertainment CD. There were also Encarta an…

Thing is, at the time it felt like these experiences (e.g. demos) were rare and a treat; nowadays you can open up Steam or the App Store and get full versions of full games with hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay right there and then.

Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.

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

#189
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years , such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen. They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company. Its a bit the equivalent of architect buil…

I saw a presentation awhile back which included the slide (roughly): "Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it." As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.

The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.

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

#190

AI feels like the ultimate “a solution in search of a problem.” Forms of it are very powerful and have a lot of uses for sure. But there seems to be an enormous amount of top-down “figure out how to fit AI into our product/processes” for both producers and consumers.

For sure, and mainly because the stakes are so high - they invested billions into it. But despite AI being very popular - loads of people ask ChatGPT or Gemini before punching in two words into a search engine - it's hard to monetize, or the monetization does not cover costs let alone investments made.

AI tools are here to stay but they'll be scaled back a lot. Plus, there's still so much investments made into it that there's enough free plans or free alternatives (remember DeepSeek?), and you can't compete with free.

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