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Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

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

#241

Post by falloutx »

simianwords wrote: post #235

I really wonder what is happening inside where Microsoft does not release a single nice or product in years. What would happen to the morale? What would people proudly say “this is what my company built”? I’m trying to understand how they screwed up the AI thing so much. There’s so much innovation, creativity possible using AI, especially as an integration in the OS.

At least within the Gaming division morale looks like that Chegg stock graph.

> What would people proudly say “this is what my company built”?

Umm, we built the anger among about our best fans.

> There’s so much innovation, creativity possible using AI, especially as an integration in the OS.

No pls, we are already cooked enough.

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

#242

Post by falloutx »

zthrowaway wrote: post #37

I can’t believe I’m going to type this, but I miss the Ballmer days. Current leadership has somehow made this company even worse.

Ballmer's biggest mistake was staying on during the worst financial crisis and also fumbling the phone business. I know some of the bad decisions can all be traced back to start of Win8 design language which happened under him.

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

#243

Post by malfist »

ryandrake wrote: post #237
malfist wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a point of data for your statement, Jassy has repeatedly said that teams that have higher AI adoption are safe from layoffs. Use AI or lose your job is the blunt message

What a wild business metric. Apparently not measuring productivity, profit, or even vague "impact." Just "AI adoption." Imagine your boss said that your job was safe if you switched over to using Python instead of whatever language you're currently developing in.

For sure, my org adopted KPIs for 95% AI usage measured weekly, and it was reviewed. Not 95% rolling weekly average, 95% each and every single week. I personally witness managers being called out why their team of 8 one week suddenly had only 7 people using AI that week. Take a vacation and your manager had to answer for it. Use an AI tool that they couldn't track, well, your manager had to answer for that too and probably had to harass you to use a measurable tool.

It was complete nonsense. Wound up leaving, partly over it. Nobody wanted to hear the emporor had no clothes and it made more sense to get out before that made my a layoff or URA target.

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

#244

Post by Borborygymus »

Microsoft has long been a company where the left hand and the right hand are not well coordinated. It'll be interesting to see if they can reconcile the "everything must be AI" mantra from the executives with the crystal clear "we do NOT WANT THIS" message from their customers.

Place your bets.

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

#245

Post by pjmlp »

enopod_ wrote: post #232
pjmlp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that uses Linux distros since 1995, I have had lots of joy getting it to work on various kinds of hardware, during weekends and long nights.

Ah the good old days. Investing an entire weekend to make your pci soundblaster card work. Nowadays you just install an iso from a thumb drive, it takes 30 mins and everything works out of the box. So boring!

Pity that I am yet to have that boring experience on laptops, even if sold with Linux pre-installed, the fun continues.

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

#246

Post by pjmlp »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #228
pjmlp wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you lost sight of how much AI is being shoved down .NET tooling? See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?

None of those sound like the tooling I'm talking about. I'm thinking of libraries like ML.NET, training and inference, compared to Python its nowhere near, a lot of .NET projects wind up calling out to Python itself. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't do more in this area, if they're truly betting on AI they're betting on it the wrong way. What pure C# inference tooling is out there? I know they have a solid ONNX eng…

You have the great Windows ML experience. :)

Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins.

People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages.

That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevance, while other Microsoft departments double down on Python.

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

#247

Post by jinushaun »

pixelpoet wrote: post #17
Shank wrote: 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…

> The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.

You’ve never worked at MS, have you? PMs aren’t asleep at the wheel. They are doing their job because their performance reviews are tied to adding these top-down goals into the team’s roadmap. That’s the horrible part.

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

#248

Post by wolvoleo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #200
pixelpoet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.) That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and…

My work did although they did avoid paying for it (just using the free offerings).

It actually serves a purpose to them we can say every employee "has AI" so we're an "AI first" company at fancy press events.

Meanwhile nothing actually changed because the free features are even worse than the paid ones.

It's basically greenwashing all over again. AI washing :)

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

#249

Post by theYipster »

markus_zhang wrote: post #139
theYipster wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the care and polish that went into the Microsoft Windows XP Welcome/Tour app that played after install. That was the peak of the summit—quality wise.

Yeah, there was a lot of good memories. And it does have a 64-bit version so not a too-bad option as a retro-OS. But I think we need to find retro hardware for it to work properly.

Actually I just installed it over the weekend in a QEMU/KVM VM on my modern desktop. Took about 20 minutes, and works very nicely. You can give it up to 4GB of RAM. Now, I can't use it for much (aside from playing the welcome tour,) because the last thing I want to do is expose it to the internet... On the other hand, I hear there is a modern browser that is maintained for it.

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

#250

Post by url00 »

packetlost wrote: post #187
alkonaut wrote: post #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…

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

100%. MSDN is the definition of saying nothing with as many words as possible. I guess if you wanted a case for why LLMs are helpful, MSDN is a good one haha
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