251–260 of 385 posts
I personally never found Microsoft software anything but shoddy: Microsoft word, internet explorer, power shell, outlook, powerpoint... these all make me shudder... I'll give them visual studio, that one is pretty good. I think Excel is fine. Skype was okay I guess. Anyway, I think the shoddiness can't really be the actual threat to Microsoft given their track record.
Skype was an acquisition.
I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer. Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are…
Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive. But this also means they end up with average products. They don't have the talent to do something exceptional. This has worked well for them when they can just come in and copy something (say AWS in Azure) and not pay the innovation cost, but AI seems differ…
This is such a BS attitude. A person’s ability doesn’t map directly with their salary.
The very best developers I’ve ever worked with? Small companies outside of major cities (for life style reasons). Not everyone is trying to max their income; some want a good job doing something they love.
Small companies can offer more meaningful impact, if you’re not the type who likes being a tiny cog or commanding armies.
I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer. Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
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> 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
It's just another example of the rich being wildly out of touch. Yes, Beyonce has the same 24 hours in a day that the rest of us have, but she also has enough money to pay people to do every aspect of her life that isn't bringing her joy or wealth. Yes, AI can be used to streamline workflows or help you find signal in the noise so you can focus on the important things better, but if every company has to build that themselves then no company is going to see the value of spending a bunch of extra money on something that they can only get benefit from if they spend even more money.
If the 'AI agents' that Nadella is talking about were part of Copilot then sure, okay, I could see a benefit, but when people in this thread are saying that Outlook can't even tell you who is in a meeting then it certainly explains why Nadella doesn't understand the lack of value.
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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.
Was certainly the case in the early years of Google Sheets. For me, the gap is entirely closed. I'm willing to believe that Excel still has the better platform for extreme power users but I've done some pretty slick stuff with Google Sheets and that was four or five years ago. It must be even better today (though I'm not currenlty doing much with spreadsheets).
Passing around vba based xlsm is really awful, so if google sheets has lambdas they can probably get a lead with google sheets queey language over filter.
Groupby and pivotby are the new excel alternative, but if they filled out lambdas, then does that keave VBA and power query as the only reasons for Excel?
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…
> lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products I would wager a month's wages that this is the doing of some internal Security Review, wherein a bunch of out-of-touchers decided that the customers will want to prefer to be Safe and Secure instead of getting some actual value from integrating copilot into shell workflows. Meanwhile people are yolo'ing it with various janky DIY wires an…
You mean the other way around, right? Because what could possibly go wrong when we let a language model hallucinate its way through which terminal command rhymes best with your prompt according to that SO comment from training data.
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…
I think they're scared of the very real security issues with LLMs that may be unsolvable. It's not wise to give an llm free reign, at best maybe across your local computer but to be fully integrated into every application and every file it needs root. That would be the front door to many privilege escalation incidents in an enterprise managed laptop/desktop.
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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…
That is not what stock market is. A company does not have to focus on stock price and stock price is not its primary product.