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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

#301

Post by avrionov »

salt-thrower wrote: post #266
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…

Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether. Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with t…

Xbox was never the leader. They were always the challenger from the begging, but it looks like things are not getting better.

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

#302

Post by TeMPOraL »

ivape wrote: post #187
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…

Try to think about it like a bunch of merchants running to line up in front of you as fast as possible with anything that resembles a product you might buy. The only thing they were successful at thus far was recognizing that something needs to be in your terminal, and they ran as fast as possible to your terminal with anything to beat others to the front of the line. I suppose they are doing this with all their effo…

There's a problem with this theory.

AI works. It's actually useful. Since GPT-4, tool calling capability is good enough. It's trivial to do a better job than Copilot on any task using any current model of the major LLM providers. I'm not talking API, even with basic chat frontend, regular users easily beat Copilot by simply copy-pasting between Word/Excel and the chat frontend.

If a twelve year old can one-shot a better product for any given use case than Microsoft Copilot, then it's not just "merchants running to line up in front of you", something more basic must be broken.

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

#303

Post by mr_toad »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #62

Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average , which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them. Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has...…

> I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing!

A physical button? So it’s like a mechanical placebo? If you have AI FOMO you can keep pressing it to calm the anxiety.

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

#304

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

adabyron wrote: post #202
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…

When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated well with each other? I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain. Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams…

I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.

There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.

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

#305

Post by venturecruelty »

neilalexander wrote: post #10

I would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find…

But "we're fixing Windows and Office" doesn't get you a fat bonus, and it doesn't get investors a double-digit growth quarter. Anyone who tries to do the right thing will be disposed of. Why don't people understand this?

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

#308

Post by gigel82 »

ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #265
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…

We've been hearing empty punditry like that for the last several decades all while they've been a poster child for "number go up": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev... These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSF…

By that time, it will already be too late. I'd argue it's probably already too late... dead man walking kind of situation. Definitely true for consumers, it might survive out of inertia in the corporate environment for decades.

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

#309

Post by cwbriscoe »

salt-thrower wrote: post #266
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…

Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether. Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with t…

> Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago

Maybe in the US, but not overall.

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

#310

Post by awithrow »

salt-thrower wrote: post #266
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…

Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether. Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with t…

Playstation/Sony always a contender? They were the clear leader. The PS2 is still the best selling console of all time. 160M units to Xbox's 24M. Xbox360 caught up but the PS3 still sold more units. PS4 sold twice as many as Xbox One. The console wars has been mostly Sony vs Nintendo for a long time.
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