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

291–300 of 385 posts

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

#291

Post by BizarroLand »

danudey wrote: post #244
motoboi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what move fast and break things looks like in a enterprise the size of microsoft. It's mostly break things and little moving fast. But the idea is that it's AI or death, so some broken buttons seems of less importances than the buttons itself being there, because the button working is a problem involving several teams, so no one is actually responsible, but the button being there is some team problem, and hel…

"Move fast and break things" is fine if you're a social networking site and breaking things means people can't get their racist memes or browse marketplace for twenty minutes until you push a change. It's less fine if the things you're breaking are your core operating systems and the office suite that makes you most of your money and it takes you months to get the relevant teams aligned to push out a fix for the bad…

It should be noted that the things you are supposed to be allowed to break are YOUR things. When you start breaking MY things then we're going to have a real problem.

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

#292

Post by sylens »

vezuchyy wrote: post #252
sylens wrote: post #116

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…

I don't have data to support it and I know AD was a gamechanger but I feel like Microsoft pumping free software to educational institutions was the main driver for it's adoption in the corporate world. When every person who kind of knows how to use the computer, can use MS windows and office and has to be retrained to use anything else, it's a no brainer to just give users what they know.

Don't you think this is why alarm bells should be going off right now about Google's complete domination of primary school systems? Google Classroom and Chromebooks are everywhere. Google Docs is the lingua franca, not Microsoft Word

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

#293

Post by sylens »

paxys wrote: post #254
sylens wrote: post #116

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…

Three years? Try 20.

There was a honeymoon period after Nadella took the reigns where it looked like they were putting out good products - Edge before enshittification, VS Code, buying GitHub.

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

#294

Post by knollimar »

hahn-kev wrote: post #272
knollimar wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Byrow, bycol, map, reduce, scan, makearray, and most recently groupby and pivotby.

Basically functions that take a lambda argument and apply it over some range.

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

#295

Post by 5kh »

Maxatar wrote: post #275
5kh wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should look up the concept of value investing. If you can buy shares in an undervalued company do so.

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

#296

Post by mkehrt »

btbuildem wrote: post #220
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…

> 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…

Wow a thing I really want is an AI I didn't install to read all my terminal commands and ship them off to MS for analysis.

Thank god for this security team.

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

#298

Post by JamesSwift »

PLenz wrote: post #237
flkiwi wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I respectfully disagree. The scenario posted by the GP is very clearly an "easy" task of basically sentiment analysis. The only thing it requires is a way to query your message history, then it just goes through them 1-by-1. I would expect any of the current SOTA agentic models to handle this with ease.

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

#299

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

It's so broken. I have a suspicion the AI teams are in some kind of an internal standoff with privacy/compliance teams, and Copilot simply never gets access to any tools or data.

Because if not that, then I don't know what. I can half-ass a better product with ChatGPT API and a PowerShell script, and I could've since GPT-4 was released; in fact the product can actually write itself, it's that simple to do a better job.

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

#300

Post by TeMPOraL »

cmckn wrote: post #196
joshstrange wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> in the car on his commute to Redmond This was funny to me, because he lives like 8 minutes away.

Does that number include hours wasted in traffic jams?
Post reply on HN