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

arstechnica.com

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

#331

Post by godtoldmetodoit »

tinyhouse wrote: post #196

Microsoft is strange cause it reports crazy growth numbers for Azure but I never hear about any tech company using Azure (AWS and GCP dominate here). I know it's more popular in big enterprises, banks, pharma, government, etc. and companies like Openai use their GPU offerings. Then there's all the Office stuff (Sharepoint, One Drive, etc). Who knows what they include under Azure numbers. Even Github can be considered…

Anecdotally, Azure OpenAI is a big player in the mid sized enterprise market and up. Lots of corps want to use OpenAI models, and the easiest way to onboard is to just spin up Azure OpenAI. You already have an agreement, your legal department is fine with it, you have a MS rep etc.

I think tons of businesses look to Microsoft first when it comes to AI solutions. I'm not saying they have the best products, but when has that ever stopped them?

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

#332

Post by PoignardAzur »

phantasmish wrote: post #130
greenavocado wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had…

> Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. I appreciate the way you distinguish this from actual revealed preference, which I think is key to understanding why what tech is doing is so wrong (and, bluntly, evil) despite it being what "people want". I like the term "revealed impulse" for this distinction. It's the difference between choosing not to buy a bag of chips at the store or a box of cookies, beca…

> I like the term "revealed impulse" for this distinction.

I like it too! I might re-use it.

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

#333

Post by Workaccount2 »

trollbridge wrote: post #325
sensanaty wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 500,000,000 people paying $80/mo Or better yet, you just need 100 people paying 400 million each to get the same amount! > "Get them hooked on the product, then jack up the price" That only works if the product is actually good. The average person isn't going to be paying EIGHTY dollars a month to generate recipes or whatever, that's just delusional

For $960 a year, you could probably buy a recipe-ingredients-tracker-app.

I could sell my car and get my groceries delivered and save a ton of money.

Thankfully, like LLMs, cars have wide utility and use cases. I don't use my car solely for driving to the grocery store.

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

#334

Post by Workaccount2 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #266
Workaccount2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…

It's exactly the same situation as Tesla "self driving". It's sold and marketed in no uncertain terms, VERY EXPLICITLY that AI will replace senior devs. As you admit, it can't do that. And everyone involved knows it. How is that anything other than a con?

Because (as per OpenAI at least) only 4% of tokens generated are for writing software. Don't lose sight of the world because you swim in tech 24/7.

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

#335

Post by jfarmer »

greenavocado wrote: post #118
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…

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had…

Plants "want" nitrogen, but dump fertilizer onto soil and you get algal blooms, dead zones, plants growing leggy and weak.

A responsible farmer is a steward of the local ecology, and there's an "ecology of friction" here. The fertilizer company doesn't say "well, the plants absorbed it." But tech companies do.

There's something puritanical about pointing to "revealed preference" as absolution, I think. When clicking is consent then any downstream damage is a failure of self-control on the user's part. The ecological cost/responsibility is externalized to the organisms being disrupted.

Like Schopenhauer said: "Man kann tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will." One can do what one wants, but one cannot will what one wants.

I wouldn't go as far as old Arthur, but I do think we should demand a level of "ecological stewardship". Our will is conditioned by our environment and tech companies overtly try to shape that environment.

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

#336

Post by BeetleB »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #311
BeetleB wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually would like it to improve my writing. Problem is LLMs aren't particularly good for this (yet).

If you use a LLM for writing, then you aren't writing anything.

Your comment is very knee jerk.

I said "improve", not "write". As in pre-LLM days you'd give what you wrote to someone else to review and give feedback.

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

#337

Post by danny_codes »

drumhead wrote: post #180

Too much money being spent on a technology that isnt ready to do what they're saying it can do. It feels like the 3G era all over again. Billion spent on 3G licences which didnt deliver what they expected it would.

But this time, it’s trillions!

What could possibly go wrong

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

#338

Post by danny_codes »

N19PEDL2 wrote: post #52
type0 wrote: post #42

But is it sold enough to regular Windows Home users? If MS brings an ultimatum: "you need to buy AI services to use Windows", they might get a bunch more clueless subscribers. In the same way as there's no ability to set up Windows without internet connection and MS account they could make it mandatory to subscribe to Copilot.

I think Microsoft's long-term plan is exactly that: to make Windows itself a subscription product. Windows 12 Home for $4.99 a month, Copilot included. It will be called OSaaS.

Imagine subscribing to an OS when Linux exists.

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

#339

Post by tetris11 »

Zigurd wrote: post #85
derekcheng08 wrote: post #69

Super interesting how this arc has played out for Microsoft. They went from having this massive advantage in being an early OpenAI partner with early access to their models to largely losing the consumer AI space: Copilot is almost never mentioned in the same breath as Claude and ChatGPT. Though I guess their huge stake in OpenAI will still pay out massively from a valuation perspective.

Microsoft seems to be actively discarding the consumer PC market for Windows. It's gamers and enterprise, it seems. Enterprise users don't get a lot of say in what's on their desktop.

I'm not even sure if it's gamers anymore, given how they're throttling local compute with buggy updates. Though maybe that's a strategy to increase demand for cloud gaming... shoot the left foot so that the right foot can hop

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

#340

Post by flohofwoe »

carlosjobim wrote: post #322
flohofwoe wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, as a search engine replacement it's totally fine and works reasonably well, but this is also because Google as search engine has regressed dramatically since it's aggressively pushing products at the top of the search results instead of answering questions. But "a slightly better search engine" sounds much less interesting to investors than "will completely transform human civilization" ;)

Search engines did completely transform human civilization, and will continue to be needed.

That was the internet, search engines were just the logical consequence to make the information stored in the internet more accessible. And today's AI is also more or less 'just' a lossy compressing of the information that was accumulated on the internet over the last 50 years. Without internet no AI.
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