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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

#271

Post by KellyCriterion »

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…

LOL

Since DECADES Outlook is _not_ capable of putting the first(!) just(!) useful datetime-stamp found in an email which says "calendar" or something in the text when pressing CTRL+R: This function creates a calendar entry from the current email with current receiver list, but default-date/time is alwsys set to the current even if recipients last ansewer was simply "lets do: 11am" - why does even this simple shit not work today? You dont need AI for this simple idea even, a robus / probability parser will do fine in 99% cases

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

#272

Post by hahn-kev »

knollimar wrote: post #257
SoftTalker wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Has google sheets filled out the lambda helper functions yet? If so that could narrow the gap. 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?

Not sure what lambda helpers are. But you can write Google AppScript which is just JS and do some pretty cool stuff, including define custom functions and fully integrate with Google APIs. I've used to to send emails, or create calendar events for example.

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

#273

Post by kulahan »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #148
watwut wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Name a major U.S. public company in recent years that has consistently prioritized improving its product over boosting short term stock price or extracting maximum profits. If capitalism were truly a healthy system about building strong products to create healthy markets, this should be the norm (and enshitification shunned), not the exception. What we actually see is a system of chartered extraction. Corporate execu…

Lots of companies do this (Arizona green tea immediately comes to mind), but more importantly, this has no bearing on the discussion of whether or not capitalism is "good" (really, who ascribes morality to any economic system?), because the US is primarily an exercise in regulatory capture.

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

#274

Post by jmuguy »

joshstrange wrote: post #151
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 likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, 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. I remember reading that when it first came out and all I can think is: No, he doesn't like podcasts, if you like podcasts you listen to them. That's like saying "He loves food, but instead of eating…

The podcast thing reads like something he made up that sounds cool and futuristic on the surface, but doesn't actually make any sense. Maybe what's actually happening is he's just having the LLM give him the cliff's notes of the transcript, but that isn't interesting enough so he's making up some BS about having a conversation with the AI.

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

#275

Post by Maxatar »

5kh wrote: post #262
Maxatar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're someone who owns Microsoft, what option would you prefer? 1. Stock price remains the same but revenue doubles. 2. Revenue stays the same, but stock price doubles. Assuming all else equal, and recognizing that this is absolutely a simplification, but if these were the two choices then it seems a no brainer that you'd go with option 2. Revenue is a means of increasing stock price.

A long term investor would prefer 1. Most likely option 2 would shortly be followed by halving of the stock price. Option 1 lets someone buy shares in a company that is greatly undervalued and will lead to long terms gains.

I just think you are the other person who replied to me are making the same mistake, which is mixing the means of accomplishing a goal with the goal itself. This is a mistake I see a lot (especially in software development), where people get too attached to a specific means or method that they end up confusing the method itself with the actual thing that needs to be accomplished.

The goal for an investor is captured in the stock price itself. In programming terms, a corporation is a function whose output is its stock price/market cap, and revenue is but one of a host of inputs into that corporation that determines what the stock price is. Other inputs can be operating expenses, whether dividends are issued, future prospects for the company such as entering new markets etc etc... and you can have beliefs about how those various inputs affect the output or how these inputs change the output over time (short term vs. long term), that's perfectly fine... but when push comes to shove, the goal is not the revenue, it's not entering a new market, it's not reducing operating expenses... the goal is increasing the stock price (well technically the market cap).

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

#276

Post by azemetre »

sk7 wrote: post #248
artrockalter wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so easy to ship completely broken AI features because you can't really unit test them and unit tests have been the main standard for whether code is working for a long time now. The most successful AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor) are all dogfooding their products as far as I can tell, and I don't really see any other reliable way to make sure the AI feature you ship actually works.

Tests are called "evals" (evaluations) in the AI product development world. Basically you let humans review LLM output or feed it to another LLM with instructions how to evaluate it. https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/beyond-vibe-checks-a-pms-...

Interesting, never really thought of it outside of this comment chain but I'm guessing approaches like this hurt the typical automated testing devs would do but seeing how this is MSFT (who already stopped having dedicated testing roles for a good while now, rip SDET roles) I can only imagine the quality culture is even worse for "AI" teams.

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

#277

Post by brandensilva »

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…

Useless Clippy all over again. At least Clippy stayed in his lane and could be turned off.

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

#278

Post by jofla_net »

dudneet wrote: post #243
jofla_net wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I trust Google... Yup, yeah, sure. The company that attempts to open your password-protected zip files. Let us not give it a free pass either. There is no good incumbent.

You just made that up, huh?

https://grahamcluley.com/shouldnt-gmail-zip-files-password-i...

Its been a while so i had trouble finding it (but Grok obliged)

Moreover its always the edge cases that people are 'OK' with, but again if they can do it (setup the infrastructure) for one thing they can do it for anything, and it makes 'trusting' them seem naive. Since trusting was the original statement.

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

#279

Post by microtherion »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #153
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".

Sounds like Siri - unable to control much of anything on the iPhone outside of reading/sending text messages and setting alarms.

It also can initiate phone calls and play music.

And those are really the core use cases for AirPods, HomePods, and CarPlay, the contexts where a hands-free eyes-free interface is most useful.

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

#280

Post by Der_Einzige »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #253
outside1234 wrote: post #8

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…

> 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. 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…

You are coping. Overwhelmingly the quality of developers is reflected in their pay packages. Overwhelmingly most people are motivated by money/benefits/QOL/GPUs.

This attitude is how you maximize your TC.

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