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Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

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Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#311
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a master class in becoming so big you don't need compelling products anymore. You are in their ecosystem, you will use their products. It took them 12 years to make Teams almost as good as Slack. Azure only has made it this far because its Microsoft, so many of their roll outs have been terrible (looking at you AKS, Cosmos DB). Copilot is used at my wifes company because they get it for free, and it seri…

To be fair, they did somehow manage to take over javascript while nobody was looking.

Do you mean the non-product people that designed and wrote typescript?

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Apple level of polish. Absurd claim given the untenable OS release cadence under Tim Cook. "But better than M$" is still undeserving of the lofty implication from "level of polish".

I’ve used windows and macOS side by side for over a decade, and macOS BY FAR has a greater level of polish than windows, which to this day is relatively unstable. I haven’t had myself or a relative experience an OS-level crash in macOS in like five years years. Meanwhile, troubleshooting a family member’s BSOD is a regular occurrence.

> Apple level of polish

- I can't tell if my macbook is charging or not while the lid is closed. There is no light indicator - minimize/maximize buttons are very small given that I am using a the touchpad. I am not saying they are unsuably small but far from ideal. - If I fully deplete the battery. I cannot immediatly turn it on with adapter's power. Why? Every windows laptop can be run with adapter even with a dead battery.

> BSOD is a regular occurrence

I hate windows as much as the next guy, but are you really getting BSOD in 2025?

I like linux and I know its not exactly polished but it offers something as a trade off which neither MacOS nor Windows do.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#313
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they did somehow manage to take over javascript while nobody was looking.

Do you mean the non-product people that designed and wrote typescript?

Exactly, and they did it while no one at Microsoft was looking at them.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used windows and macOS side by side for over a decade, and macOS BY FAR has a greater level of polish than windows, which to this day is relatively unstable. I haven’t had myself or a relative experience an OS-level crash in macOS in like five years years. Meanwhile, troubleshooting a family member’s BSOD is a regular occurrence.

> Apple level of polish - I can't tell if my macbook is charging or not while the lid is closed. There is no light indicator - minimize/maximize buttons are very small given that I am using a the touchpad. I am not saying they are unsuably small but far from ideal. - If I fully deplete the battery. I cannot immediatly turn it on with adapter's power. Why? Every windows laptop can be run with adapter even with a dead…

> There is no light indicator

Counter point: Light indicators are ugly and usually unnecessary. Most people charge overnight, and don't want/need a light in their face.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#315
post #61
post #53

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> Even if there is fast takeoff AGI, he thinks human messiness will slow implementation Five years ago during covid all these clunky legacy businesses couldn't figure out a CSV let alone APIs but suddenly with AGI they are going to become tech masters and know how to automate and processize their entire operations? I found it very amusing that at the turn of the decade "digitalisation" was a buzzword as Amazon was ap…

I think you don’t have widespread adoption until AI takes the form of a plug-and-play “remote employee”. You click a button on Microsoft Teams and hire “Bob” who joins your team org, gets an account like any other employee, interacts over email, chat, video calls, joins meetings, can use all your software in whatever state it’s currently in. It has to be a brownfield solution because most of the world is brownfield.

There hardly are any plug and play human employees.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#316
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but these jobs are inefficient mostly because of checks and balances. So unless you have a bunch of AIs checking one another's work (and I'm not sure I can see that getting signed off) doesn't it just move the problem slightly along the road? There's an argument here something like.. if you can replace each role with an AI, you can replace multiple with a single AI, why not replace the structure with a single…

Yup. If we ignore all the ‘people’ issues (like fraud, embezzlement, gaming-the-system, incompetence when inputting data, weird edge cases people invent, staff in other departments who are incompetent, corruption, etc), most bureaucracies would boil down to a web form and a few scripts, and probably one database. Better hope that coder doesn’t decide to just take all the money and run to a non extradition jurisdictio…

It's weird edge cases all the way down.

Just look at names. Firstname, lastname? Jejeje, no.

Treating them as constants? laughs in married woman.

If you can absolutely, 100% cast iron guarantee that one identity field exactly identifies one living person (never more, never less), these problems are trivial.

If not? Then its complexity might be beyond the grasp of the average DOGE agent (who, coincidentally, are males in their early 20s with names conforming to a basic Anglo schema).

And that's just the NAME field.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot (referring to the M365 one) is not a very great product though. It's clearly been rushed to market before it was even done. Microsoft is soooo afraid they'll miss this boat. But we are stuck with the fallout. And it isn't even that affordable.

Microsoft is a master class in becoming so big you don't need compelling products anymore. You are in their ecosystem, you will use their products. It took them 12 years to make Teams almost as good as Slack. Azure only has made it this far because its Microsoft, so many of their roll outs have been terrible (looking at you AKS, Cosmos DB). Copilot is used at my wifes company because they get it for free, and it seri…

.NET is a compelling product, cross platform, open source, well supported, good tooling.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#318
post #290
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is the best direction to go. M$ Nadella is great at business strategic decisions. If only there is another great product person at M$ that pushes the design of their software and hardware. Both has gotten a lot better but still not Apple level of polish.

Have you seen a fail that was Apple “Intelligence” launch? The apple polish is long lost.

Remember Apple Maps? They polish stuff incrementally.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact most of the industries out there are still slow and inefficient. Some physicians only accept phone calls for making appointments. Many primary schools only take phone calls and an email could go either way just not their way. It's just we programmers who want to automate everything.

“ only takes phone calls for appointments” is a huge selling point for a physicians office. People are very tired of apps.

You obviously don't live in the UK, where the mad dash at 8:00am on the dot to attempt to secure an appointment happened, and the line would be busy until 8:30am when they ran out of appointment slots, if you were unlucky on the re-dial/hangup rodeo.

Apps (actually a PWA) mean I can choose an appointment at any time in the day and know that I have a full palette of options over the next few days. The same App(PWA) allows me to click through to my NHS login where I can see my booked appointments or test results.

Re: Microsoft cancels leases for AI data centers, analyst says

#320
post #78
post #57

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> Meanwhile huge orgs like the NHS run on fax I thought this was a German-only thing?

Not convinced. In 2018: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/health-and-social-care-se... > Matt Hancock has banned the NHS from buying fax machines and has ordered a complete phase-out by April 2020. The NHS is quite federated. Hell many parts of it are independent companies. Some trusts have decent modern systems though - I had to go for a test just before christmas - I'd phoned up my GP in the morning got an appoint…

It's all pretty much a central system as of this year, your trust will have localised PWAs or Apps, but it all connects via provider IDs and transfer codes to the same NHS backend.
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