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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

#331

Post by array_key_first »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #211
donkey_brains wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s ok. Those are core features of the phone that absolutely must work reliably and consistently. Far better to do a few important things really well than a hundred things execrably.

I would expect Siri to be able to do anything on the iPhone that I can - change settings, report stats, kill/launch apps, etc. It would be nice if it could control 3rd party apps too, like GMail, but being able to control the stuff that Apple themselves have built doesn't seem a lot to ask.

Apple is somewhat privacy focused, allegedly. I would imagine that letting an unpredictable LLM read whatever system data it wants is not something they want to partake in.

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

#332

Post by array_key_first »

danudey wrote: post #244
motoboi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what move fast and break things looks like in a enterprise the size of microsoft. It's mostly break things and little moving fast. But the idea is that it's AI or death, so some broken buttons seems of less importances than the buttons itself being there, because the button working is a problem involving several teams, so no one is actually responsible, but the button being there is some team problem, and hel…

"Move fast and break things" is fine if you're a social networking site and breaking things means people can't get their racist memes or browse marketplace for twenty minutes until you push a change. It's less fine if the things you're breaking are your core operating systems and the office suite that makes you most of your money and it takes you months to get the relevant teams aligned to push out a fix for the bad…

This is a problem at a wide array of tech companies. Everyone wants to Meta, everyone wants to be Google.

Guys, we're building B2B enterprise software. The most important things our clients care about is this hunk of junk working. Changing it is probably bad, actually, because the users are using it 8 hours a day and they don't want to deal with annoying popups about new features and UI churn for the sake of churn.

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

#333

Post by array_key_first »

sylens wrote: post #292
vezuchyy wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have data to support it and I know AD was a gamechanger but I feel like Microsoft pumping free software to educational institutions was the main driver for it's adoption in the corporate world. When every person who kind of knows how to use the computer, can use MS windows and office and has to be retrained to use anything else, it's a no brainer to just give users what they know.

Don't you think this is why alarm bells should be going off right now about Google's complete domination of primary school systems? Google Classroom and Chromebooks are everywhere. Google Docs is the lingua franca, not Microsoft Word

The main benefit of Google Docs is that, at least, Google is a better steward. Not good, but better.

And also, their software is exceedingly simple, which is great for breaking vendor lock-in. Microsoft got away with murder because none of their shit works like it should and every single product they make is the "black sheep" in the category it's in.

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

#334

Post by array_key_first »

kulahan wrote: post #273
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a major U.S. public company in recent years that has consistently prioritized improving its product over boosting short term stock price or extracting maximum profits. If capitalism were truly a healthy system about building strong products to create healthy markets, this should be the norm (and enshitification shunned), not the exception. What we actually see is a system of chartered extraction. Corporate execu…

Lots of companies do this (Arizona green tea immediately comes to mind), but more importantly, this has no bearing on the discussion of whether or not capitalism is "good" (really, who ascribes morality to any economic system?), because the US is primarily an exercise in regulatory capture.

Good doesn't mean moral in this case, it means valuable. Capitalism, or whatever the fuck we have right now, doesn't create much real value, but instead it creates a lot of fake value that we just proxy.

And I say "or whatever the fuck" because, as you point out, it's not really capitalism. And maybe it never was - after all, the US Golden Era was when we had the most central planning, the most social services, and the highest taxes.

But everybody right now is exploiting one teensy little flaw of the economy - humans don't live very long. There's no reason to make stuff good for later when you can take a cash advance and get rich now. Everything is always someone else's problem.

I think one fun case study is superstar CEOs. They're so highly desirable, and they work 5 years at a company and "turn it around" before moving onto the next. But if you look at the company after they leave, it's in shambles. And yet, they are the most sought after CEOs. You don't want the Arizona Green Tea guy, no, you want the guy who ran Chipotle into the ground. But hey, at least he increased their stock price for, like, a little bit.

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

#335

Post by gaigalas »

When you're on the internet for a while, you develop an intuition for the average level of Microsoft hate that is supposed to exist at any given time. It's a rather stable measure.

I'm seeing an unusual increase in that, and after some thought, I think the only plausible reason is that another company is afraid of them and creating anti-MS editorialized buzz.

My gut feeling tells me this is all related to long-term sustainability of AI products, and both GitHub and VSCode are major points of anxiety for other AI coding platforms.

We will eventually know if I'm right or not. If we see moves that point to other companies trying to decouple from GitHub and VSCode, then it's probably what is actually happening here.

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

#336

Post by cherrycherry98 »

saubeidl wrote: post #190
jfim wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what's meant by efficiency, it's allocating it to the place that has the highest return on investment. As you point out, in practice what's efficient is what can capture the highest return, not necessarily the highest return per se. If say investing in education had high returns society wide but those returns couldn't be captured, that's not an efficient use of private capital.

As somebody doesn't consider himself a capitalist, wouldn't it be fair to say it is "the most efficient" in precisely one thing: capital reproducing itself? And if so, why is that necessarily a good thing? Why should that be our goal as society as opposed to things like minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy rates, making sure we don't have a ton of our fellow humans living on the street in misery etc etc -…

If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals. This seems to be a hard thing for many to understand or accept because it is largely a second order effect, the capitalist primarily concerned with their own personal gain but winds up improving the lives of others as a side effect.

This is the essence of Adam Smith's often misunderstood invisible hand metaphor. Of the individual he observed: "By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Second order effects stack up and improve quality of life for more people better than trying to do so explicitly.

Multiplying capital creates abundance and that abundance allows for improved standards of living for and the means to spend excess resources in support of charitable endeavors. Growth is good because it means more abundance and opportunity. I would argue that pursuit of growth is not an ideology but a force of nature. Life is opportunistic and will expand to wherever there is fertile conditions, and often adapt even when they are not. We are part of nature and understand this intuitively, seeking growth opportunities. As an example, one is better off being part of a growing company (more wages and opportunities) than one that is stagnant or declining (fighting for scraps and survival).

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

#337

Post by mlrtime »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #271
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…

LOL Since DECADES Outlook is _not_ capable of putting the first(!) just(!) useful datetime-stamp found in an email which says "calendar" or something in the text when pressing CTRL+R: This function creates a calendar entry from the current email with current receiver list, but default-date/time is alwsys set to the current even if recipients last ansewer was simply "lets do: 11am" - why does even this simple shit not…

I would just be happy to never have a ICS file every saved to my drive again. Whoever created the concept of a calendar invite saving a ICS file has created me hours of frustration.

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

#338

Post by elektronika »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #336
saubeidl wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody doesn't consider himself a capitalist, wouldn't it be fair to say it is "the most efficient" in precisely one thing: capital reproducing itself? And if so, why is that necessarily a good thing? Why should that be our goal as society as opposed to things like minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy rates, making sure we don't have a ton of our fellow humans living on the street in misery etc etc -…

If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals. This seems to be a hard thing for many to understand or accept because it is largely a second order effect, the capitalist primarily concerned with their own personal gain but winds up improving the lives of others as a side effect. This…

>If you care about minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy, pulling people up out of poverty, you should be a capitalist, as it's empirically the best way to meet those goals If you look at it empirically, the majority of people brought out of poverty (and I suspect the other metrics but am not as familiar with them) in the past few decades have been in China as the result of deliberate policies by the CPC.

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

#339

Post by mlrtime »

jandrese wrote: post #180
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…

The crazy thing is Microsoft was so early with an AI product but was burned pretty badly when it instantly turned into a Nazi. Funny how the constant complaint on Twitter is how the modern AI agents are too "woke" and how Elon has to keep fighting his own AI model to conform with his viewpoints.

WTH Are you talking about?

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

#340

Post by jandrese »

mlrtime wrote: post #339
jandrese wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing is Microsoft was so early with an AI product but was burned pretty badly when it instantly turned into a Nazi. Funny how the constant complaint on Twitter is how the modern AI agents are too "woke" and how Elon has to keep fighting his own AI model to conform with his viewpoints.

WTH Are you talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
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