Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

windowscentral.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 385 posts

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

#231

Post by RajT88 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #133
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.

I agree with it, but it's a wild world we live in when the best spreadsheet has default behaviors which will fuck your data pasted into it when you're not paying attention.

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

#232

Post by saubeidl »

rcxdude wrote: post #227
saubeidl wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody doesn't consider himself a capitalist, wouldn't it be fair to say it is "the most efficient" in precisely one thing: capital reproducing itself? And if so, why is that necessarily a good thing? Why should that be our goal as society as opposed to things like minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy rates, making sure we don't have a ton of our fellow humans living on the street in misery etc etc -…

Ultimately that money is made by people choosing to spend their money on something, because it helps them, because they like it, because they need it for whatever reason (real or imagined). That's what grounds the financial markets: eventually someone is buying a thing because they want the thing , and all the rest of it is basically just figuring out who can make the thing, how many people want the thing and how bad…

But isn't that counter to the very article we're commenting on? Everyone is shoving half baked AI junk into everything because that's what makes number go up on the stock market, but I'm pretty sure that's not actually what most people would want those resources to be used for.

I'd posit that markets are completely detached from the real world and are more of a speculative/religious element than an indicator of any ground truths.

Edit: I just realized I missed a sentence of yours where you kinda spoke to this. I still believe that this is more of a rule than an exception - there is nothing inherently tying markets and reality together - they're mostly about people making bets on what the next big hype is; not on what is actually useful to anyone.

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

#233

Post by flkiwi »

jandrese wrote: post #173
jsheard wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is just him aping every other AI CEO. Every single one has to act like the agents are super-geniuses mere moments away from achieving the singularity like people can't try them out themselves and be disappointed. Some of it is "we think this will work soon so it's ok if we pretend like it's working now", but I think a lot is just needing to constantly shove hot air into the balloon before it pops.

On the other hand, if it's true, it explains a LOT about Microsoft's silly AI strategy.

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

#234

Post by chung8123 »

I am honestly struggling to figure out Microsoft's licensing system. We have it here and there are some on my team that want to try "CoPilot" (not even sure what that means now) but there is no licenses option for me to enable them to do that. I am sure they are targeting the larger places than my 50 person shop but it is so confusing I don't have the time in my day to figure out how to enable copilot for my team.

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

#235

Post by onraglanroad »

themafia wrote: post #182
jsheard wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. What a dorky thing to do. Does the CEO have some concept he's living a life that precisely _zero_ of his customers do? Who would even think to do this? > “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job Yea, I have actual work to do, perhaps you should…

Are you kidding? You get to be the star guest of every podcast you listen to and everything you say is amazingly witty and insightful.

I know exactly the kind of people who would think to do this. Unfortunately. :)

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

#236

Post by mv4 »

What fascinates me is how someone at MSFT managed to get their own button (the Copilot) button approved. Having your own button or tab is a big deal (I remember we debated having our own shopping tab on the Instagram app while I was at Meta - and we had to abandon it when it didn't get the traction we were hoping for).

These people have a UI button AND a hardware button on actual consumer devices, and it doesn't do anything. How?

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

#237

Post by PLenz »

flkiwi wrote: post #230
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".

Me: Can you access my inbox and Teams messages? Copilot: Yep! Me: Please find any items in my inbox or sent items indicating (a) that I have agreed to take on a task or (b) identifying me as the person responsible for a task, removing duplicates and any items that I have unambiguously replied to via email or Teams. Time window is preceding 7 days. Copilot: Prints a list with, at best, 5% accuracy I know some folks ha…

It's a generalization problem. We can train LLMs that 'know' a lot of stuff in the global sense but the tasks that are interesting to people require the LLM to know a lot about you and your world in a very specific sense. The technical problem is that it's all corner cases and that's impossible to scale right now. No amount of context window is going to get you there either.

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

#239

Post by lll-o-lll »

kayhantolga wrote: post #96

As a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer—and honestly, it might overtake it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got. If you haven’t seen how bad it is, here’s one example: Copilot Terminal. In theory, it should help you wi…

Works good in Teams. Summarises meetings, collects action items. It’s pretty great actually.

I don’t know how many forests we are burning to have a digital secretary, but surely the environment can take one more for the team?

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

#240

Post by danudey »

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…

Imagine a circumstance where Windows Search was as good as Apple's Spotlight, and could integrate with cloud services to index documents, browser bookmarks, web history, maybe podcasts, etc.)

Hey Copilot, where is that document I was reading about the new network diagramming software Jacob is testing out?

Or Hey Copilot, my disk is getting pretty full. What software is taking up a lot of space that I haven't used for a while? Or are there any files I can move to cloud storage to free up space?

But no, instead it's just 'we're going to take screenshots of all your windows, OCR it, and index it, so that when someone infects your machine they can see your credit card numbers and pornography habits.'

Post reply on HN