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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

#311

Post by Marsymars »

Marsymars wrote: post #189
Maxatar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're someone who owns Microsoft, what option would you prefer? 1. Stock price remains the same but revenue doubles. 2. Revenue stays the same, but stock price doubles. Assuming all else equal, and recognizing that this is absolutely a simplification, but if these were the two choices then it seems a no brainer that you'd go with option 2. Revenue is a means of increasing stock price.

I guess it depends on what kind of investor you are. If you're holding MS stock long-term, and you plan to gradually shift away from equities as you near retirement and then gradually liquidate your holdings to fund your retirement, juicing the stock in the short term does nothing for you. If you're holding short-term, then you also need to sell the stock after it gets juiced, so that you can move your capital to not…

Missed a point above - that for said short-term investor... that strategy doesn't actually work, since a "sell high buy low" strategy on individual stocks is outperformed by just holding ETFs long-term.

So really, which investors does short-term stock juicing benefit? Insider traders, I guess.

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

#312

Post by pjc50 »

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…

You'd be hearing a few more hair raising failure stories if they hadn't done that. And possibly a few big customers institute Win11 or Copilot site wide bans. Or just straight up going out of business. In businesses other than software, it's possible to be legally liable for mistakes.

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

#313

Post by pjc50 »

brookst wrote: post #85
coldpie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock. Selling products & services can be an advertisement for their stock, but there are other methods of convincing people to buy their stock, too. Currently the stock market only wants stocks that have "AI" associated with them. It doesn't matter whether users like it or not, because having a viable business is…

Are you saying they would rather double stock price than double revenue?

Yes! Not least because doubling revenue doesn't cause the stock to double.

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

#314

Post by pjc50 »

hvb2 wrote: post #169
coldpie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock. Selling products & services can be an advertisement for their stock, but there are other methods of convincing people to buy their stock, too. Currently the stock market only wants stocks that have "AI" associated with them. It doesn't matter whether users like it or not, because having a viable business is…

> Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock. Yeah that's a great business idea, ask Boeing how that's going

Works for Tesla, the absolute poster child for this kind of behavior. They can lose double digit percentage of market share in key places and still give the CEO a trillion dollars.

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

5kh wrote: post #295
Maxatar wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by imiric »

burningChrome wrote: post #170
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".

I've fooled around with some vibe coding on several LLM's like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT with some pretty decent results. Since I have a full Copilot license at my corporate day gig, I figured I would try using Copilot for a basic static site. Nothing too hard, and something that's been handled easily with the other LLM's. The prompt was pretty basic just to get something to start working with. "Build a four page t…

Not a problem. We can call it HTML6 and make browsers interpret it correctly.

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

#317

Post by badc0ffee »

dugidugout wrote: post #188
janlukacs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap software.

I'm guessing the broader demographic of users simply don't think the software is crap. My buddy working in water transportation was just raving about Teams to me the other day. His praise basically boiled down to being integrated with his organization, providing him easy access to his department-resources. I suppose it does serve my buddy well.

Could be because I use a Mac, and I do most of my work chatting in Slack, but I don't hate Teams. It has my calendar, it has chat that is shitty but good enough during meetings (although finding which room you have unread messages in can be confusing), and it has video meetings with transcripts and great Exchange integration.

Windows 11, on the other hand, offends me.

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

#318

Post by lll-o-lll »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #280
lll-o-lll wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive. This is such a BS attitude. A person’s ability doesn’t map directly with their salary. The very best developers I’ve ever worked with? Small companies outside of major cities (for life style reasons). Not everyone is trying to max their income; some want a…

You are coping. Overwhelmingly the quality of developers is reflected in their pay packages. Overwhelmingly most people are motivated by money/benefits/QOL/GPUs. This attitude is how you maximize your TC.

> You are coping.

This is an amusing response. I personally have chased the TC (to an extent), climbed the ladder, and sit at the top (below the c-suite). This isn’t cope, it’s a genuine reflection based on many years of experience having worked for multinationals in various countries.

Perhaps compensation should be a reflection of ability, but the real world is far more nuanced.

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

#319

Post by ethbr1 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #299
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jo…

Being Microsoft, I'd guess it's less that and more Product Team A doesn't want to spend time building enabling features for Product Team B to look good.

The org chart joke, etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...

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

#320

Post by ethbr1 »

azemetre wrote: post #276
sk7 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tests are called "evals" (evaluations) in the AI product development world. Basically you let humans review LLM output or feed it to another LLM with instructions how to evaluate it. https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/beyond-vibe-checks-a-pms-...

Interesting, never really thought of it outside of this comment chain but I'm guessing approaches like this hurt the typical automated testing devs would do but seeing how this is MSFT (who already stopped having dedicated testing roles for a good while now, rip SDET roles) I can only imagine the quality culture is even worse for "AI" teams.

Yes. Because why would there ever be a problem with a devqaops team objectively assessing their own work's effectiveness?
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