311–320 of 344 posts
Curious if/when this will be available to users. This and Google's announcement happening in the same week makes me wonder how much of this already works.
Google's announcement was in reaction to this one, I believe. That's why it felt so rushed (e.g. they hadn't even set up the waitlist yet)
Google announced a handful of LLM-based features. This is Microsoft adding LLM-based features to all of their core office software.
For big companies being able to ask questions and get answers informed by all your documents, emails, chats, etc is huge. For small companies the features in Excel, Teams, and perhaps Power automate will be big. Maybe the Word features too depending on how fundamental writing is to the core business.
Google's haphazard and unfocused product development is going to really hurt them. MS must have coordinated thousands of people to build this stuff. As for Google, well they are undeniably at or near the top when it comes to research, but they are not good at product and execution. I am not optimistic.
I am no lover of Microsoft. I use their products as little as possible and I still have plenty of gripes. But this could be the biggest step change since email, word processing, and spreadsheets became widely available in the later 80s/early 90s.
This is going to revolutionise office work. If it works as advertised, we are witnessing the complete reshuffling of (office) work and unprecedented productivity increases. I'm wondering about the future job market. edit: livestream: https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/
No it won't, we'll get more useless texts because it's easier to write them, we'll get more communication errors because people will only read the summaries instead the real texts.
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I was thinking about this last night. The new AI tools are like performance enhancing drugs in sports. Especially in bodybuilding, there was a really painful transition from the world of non-PEDs to PEDs. They solved that by going to natural and non-natural competitions. Other sports didn’t handle it so well (baseball, cycling, etc) Just as people were asking “did Lance / Sammy / Barry / Arnold really do that incredi…
EVERY professional athlete is juicing. Most of them just don't get caught.
All pro golfers?
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> " after which Atom was ~extinguised~ deprecated. " That isn't what 'extinguished' meant! It was supposed to be that you and Oracle exchanged email by open SMTP, Microsoft wedged some new features into Exchange SMTP which then enough Microsoft customers relied on that Oracle rolled over to MS-SMTP, and then you practically couldn't use plain standard SMTP because everyone you wanted to email was using proprietary Mi…
I guess as an end-user, I fail to see the difference. And it wasn't like Microsoft started developing Atom and then stopped it, they bought the company that started developing it, and shut it down in favor of their own product. And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best.
> "And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best.
Yes, welcome to the elephant in the room of Open Source, 'many eyes makes bugs shallow', and the other pretenses we don't question. But at least the principle stands - you can still get the Atom source code[3] and pay someone as a contractor to change it for you, employ some people to work on it, start up a foundation, beg someone. Compared to a closed source program built on patented algorithms when the company shuts down and nobody can practically or legally improve it, or compared to a multiplayer game with online servers which the company shuts down and you can't use the game ever again, it is different.
[1] If you think it's impossible for Microsoft to reach into your Linux machine and take your Atom editor away, you'll see why EEE is a moral-panic rather than a real thing which could ever happen.
[2] you know, like Google actually does with HTML/Chrome strong-arming through Google-custom extensions, AMP pages, and the like. You'll see that this still hasn't resulted in other people being unable to make browsers or webservers or web-like protocols (Gemini).
This spells doom to a lot of other companies. Consider Otter.ai, who's core offering is automatic meeting notes. MS Teams just ate their lunch. Pretty much anything your startup's productivity tool can do, Microsoft can do better with the benefit of better context since it's embedded in all of your customers' other productivity tools.
Amazing! I keep banging on about how Microsoft is building the business lock-in of the next decade, and this is a sign of it. Put down your snubs about Clippy and frothing about "EEE" and look at that announcement: > " Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can gi…
> Something DropBox could have been doing with their massive trove of business documents? Something Slack could have been doing with their massive haul of chat history? Absolute truth. Discoverability in modern apps is a sad joke at the expense of the users. I guess "search that actually works" isn't enough of a value prop to actually get dev time.
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"BingBot, could you please write an email subtly undermining inter–team cohesion by hinting at gossipy shit-talk without mentioning it explicitly, and also praise my report in a way that demonstrates I don't know or appreciate what they've been doing for the past 2 years, calibrated to hurt their self-confidence without quite causing them to quit?"
You are all presumably incredibly privileged tech workers that are free to find a better place to work instead of acting like this shit is inherent in a workplace, because it isn’t.
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I guess as an end-user, I fail to see the difference. And it wasn't like Microsoft started developing Atom and then stopped it, they bought the company that started developing it, and shut it down in favor of their own product. And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best.
One difference is that you can continue using your old Atom install, and if it had been "extinguished", you couldn't[1]. The other difference is that EEE was largely about interoperable protocols, not what one person could do with one program - it was about TCP/IP and SMTP and HTML and trying to take those over to Microsoft's benefit[2]. > " And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive produc…
It is just a business strategy, that's all. And it's one that Microsoft employed successfully, and which people who join likely learn of or know of, and some of whom try to emulate to be successful at Microsoft now. And many of us don't like the effect EEE has on our industry, when Microsoft or any other entity does it. And just because Atom may not fit the strategy exactly, doesn't mean the unmistakable parallels which I already mentioned should be ignored. I personally used Atom, but more than that, I liked the world more when there was more than just one Electron based editor competing out there in the world, and we are seeing the fruits of VSCode winning so completely (both good and bad), whether through aggressive corporate strategies or not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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No it won't, we'll get more useless texts because it's easier to write them, we'll get more communication errors because people will only read the summaries instead the real texts.
It seems like everyone is just focusing on auto-generated/summarized emails which is rather myopic. The real value add here is the ability to make all of an organization's data more easily discoverable and searchable.