Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 348 posts

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

#301

Post by cal_dent »

jjkaczor wrote: post #197
jfarmer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is perhaps one of the most articulate takes on this I have ever read - thank-you! And - for myself, it was friction that kickstarted my interest in "tech" - I bought a janky modem, and it had IRQ conflicts with my Windows 3 mouse at the time - so, without internet (or BBS's at that time), I had to troubleshot and test different settings with the 2-page technical manual that came with it. It was friction that mad…

I tell everyone to introduce friction into their lives...especially if they have kids. Friction is good! Friction is part of the je ne sais quoi that make human's create

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

#302

Post by blinding-streak »

cleandreams wrote: post #215

For the first time I have begun to doubt Microsoft's chosen course. (I am a retired MS principal engineer.) Their integration of copilot shows all the taste and good tradeoff choices of Teams but to far greater consequence. Copilot is irritating. MS dependence on OpenAI may well become dicey because that company is going to be more impacted by the popping of the AI bubble than any other large player. I've read that M…

For the first time? What about Zune, Nokia/Windows Phone, Windows Vista, attacking open source for decades, Scroogled campaign, all the lost Ballmer years, etc. Microsoft has had tons of blunders over time.

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

#304

Post by robocat »

mwkaufma wrote: post #152

Meanwhile, divisions that make actual products people wants are expected to subsidize the hype department: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/new-report-about-crazy-xbox-pr...

It would appear XBox is not subsidizing anything, since Microsoft's gross profit margin is ~70%.

Although that depends on total revenues too (low margin on high revenue can be better than high margin on low revenue).

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

#305

Post by silver_silver »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #224
trollbridge wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?

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…

> 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo

Simply not going to happen

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

#306

Post by moi2388 »

array_key_first wrote: post #288
yoyohello13 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don’t use their own tools. It’s react, electron, JavaScript and Python. And I strongly suspect by Indian engineers from the recent learn page write ups

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

#307

Post by ares623 »

verdverm wrote: post #284
ares623 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah so in this case your social group has started asking how to invest into AI?

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

#308

Post by throwaway2037 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #276
throwaway2037 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I love JetBrains (IntelliJ and friends), I have the same feeling this year. The ratio that I undo an accidental tab/whatever far exceeds the accepted ones. I'm not anti-LLM -- they are great for many things, but I am tired of undoing shitting suggestions. Literally, many of them produce a syntax error. Please don't read this post as dumping on JetBrains. I still love their products. > It is wasting time an…

I agree. I am happiest just using plain Emacs for coding and every once in a while separately using an LLM or once or twice a day use gemini-cli or codex for a single task. My comment is for coding, but same opinion for writing emails - once in a blue moon, then I will use a LLM manually.

You raise a good point. For specific programming tasks, I don't really want token-by-token suggestions in an IDE. And, like you, when I have a specific problem, e.g., "I need to do Kerberos auth like this in that language." -- I go to ask an LLM, and it is generally very useful. Then I look at the produced code and say: "Oh, that's how you do it." I almost never copy/paste the results from the LLM into my code base.

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

#309

Post by verdverm »

ares623 wrote: post #307
verdverm wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah so in this case your social group has started asking how to invest into AI?

One of them is involved in a 10MW data center prototype actually

Not "investing" questions this time lol, more thoughts on the value or future of AI, a lot of hyperbolics online and in the media these days, people tend to ask those they think know something about technical things to get a sense of where reason lies

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

#310

Post by Zardoz84 »

aabajian wrote: post #182
gibsonsmog wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me? You could solve that issue (and probably lot's of similar issues) with something like Auto Hotkey. Seems like extreme overkill to have an autonomous agent watch everything you do, so it might possibly click a button…

Auto Hotkey doesn't work well for Epic manipulation because Epic runs inside of a Citrix Virtual Machine. You can't just read Window information and navigate that way. You'd have to have some sort of on-screen OCR to detect whether Epic is open, has focus, and is showing the tab that I want to close. Also, the tab itself can't be closed...I'm just clicking on the tab next to it.

Do you stop to think of the wastage of resources that is having an auto OCR of the screen and a LLM to simply close a tab.
Post reply on HN