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Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

arstechnica.com

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Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#281

Post by stingraycharles »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #203
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment It's because I've used it and it doesn't come even close to delivering the value that its advocates claim it does. Nothing mysterious about it.

I think what it comes down to is that the advocates making false claims are relatively uncommon on HN. So, for example, I don't know what advocates you're talking about here. I know people exist who say they can vibe-code quality applications with 100k LoC, or that guy at Anthropic who claims that software engineering will be a dead profession in the first half of '26, and I know that these people tend to be the loud…

The whole point I tried to make when I said “you need to learn how to use it” is that it’s not vibe coding. It has nothing to do with vibes. You need to be specific and methodological to get good results, and use it for appropriate problems.

I think the AI companies have over-promised in terms of “vibe” coding, as you need to be very specific, not at all based on “vibes”.

I’m one of those advocates for AI, but on HN it consistently gets downvoted no matter how I try to explain things. There’s a super strong anti-AI sentiment here.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#282

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

xnorswap wrote: post #150
Arwill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…

You can still use the older ML-model (and non-LLM-based!) IntelliCode completion suggestions - it’s buried in the VS Installer as an optional feature entirely separate from anything branded CoPilot.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#283

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #272
Arwill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

This is a great post. Next time that you see it, grab a screenshot, put on GitHub pages and post it here on HN. It will generated lots of interesting discussion about rubbish suggestions from poor LLM models.

> rubbish suggestions from poor LLM models.

We get rubbish suggestions from SOTA(tm) LLM models too, y’know.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#284

Post by verdverm »

ares623 wrote: post #195
verdverm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, we're getting their, had some people reach out to me who only do so once a hype bubble is well formed

What do you do and why do people reach out to you?

I'm the "computer guy" in an IRL social group, same thing when blockchain was hyping

I also have a PhD in CS/ML, work with a healthcare AI company, and am building my own agentic setup

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#285

Post by netsharc »

Edmond wrote: post #96
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…

>As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This the nightmare scenario with AI, ie people settling for Microsoft/OpenAI et al to do the "thinking" for you. It is alluring but of course it is not going to work. It is similar to what happened to the internet via social media, i…

A world full of humans being guided by computers would be... dystopian.

Although I imagine a version where AI drives humans who mindlessly trust them to be more vegetarian or take public transport, helping save the environment (an ironic wish since AI is burning the planet). Of course "AI" is being guided by their owners, so there'd be a camp who uses Grok who'll still drive SUVs, eat meat, and be racist idiots...

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#286

Post by array_key_first »

a_t48 wrote: post #161
Arwill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

The last time I asked Gemini to assist me with some SQL I got (inside my postgres query form): This task cannot be accomplished USING standard SQL queries against the provided database schema. Replication slots managed through PostgreSQL system views AND functions, NOT through user-defined tables. Therefore, I must return It's feels almost haiku-like.

Now this is prime software gore

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#287

Post by amlib »

N19PEDL2 wrote: post #52
type0 wrote: post #42

But is it sold enough to regular Windows Home users? If MS brings an ultimatum: "you need to buy AI services to use Windows", they might get a bunch more clueless subscribers. In the same way as there's no ability to set up Windows without internet connection and MS account they could make it mandatory to subscribe to Copilot.

I think Microsoft's long-term plan is exactly that: to make Windows itself a subscription product. Windows 12 Home for $4.99 a month, Copilot included. It will be called OSaaS.

I think you wrote Ass OS wrong :)

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#288

Post by array_key_first »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #106
rewilder12 wrote: post #101

Anyone who has had the pleasure of being forced to migrate to their new Fabric product can tell you why sales are low. It's terrible not just because it's a rushed buggy pile of garbage they want people to Alpha test on users but because of the "AI First" design they are forcing into it. They hide so much of what's happening in the background it is hard to feel like you can trust any of it. Like agentic "thinking" mo…

Every new Microsoft product is like this. It all has that janky, slapped together at the last minute feeling.

It's so bizarre because their devs tools and frameworks are so well thought out. You'd think if they're using those it should come out not janky. But I don't think they do use their own devs tools, and I also don't think it would help.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#289

Post by Workaccount2 »

gitremote wrote: post #260
Workaccount2 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, she is, because when reality sets in, these models will probably have monthly cellphone/internet level costs. And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo is roughly a 5-yr ROI on a $2T investment. I cannot believe on a tech forum I need to explain the "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" business model that probably 40% of people here are…

> And training is the main money sink, whereas inference is cheap. False. Training happens once for a time period, but inference happens again and again every time users use the product. Inference is the main money sink. "according to a report from Google, inference now accounts for nearly 60% of total energy use in their AI workloads. Meta revealed something even more striking: within their AI infrastructure, power…

They get paid for inference, those tokens might as well be monetary tokens.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#290

Post by kianN »

jfarmer wrote: post #107
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…

This resonated a lot with me. Thank you for your articulate writing.
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