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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

#341

Post by sallveburrpi »

somenameforme wrote: post #292
sallveburrpi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrooge is a fictional person and Microsoft have been getting away with it since I’m alive with people hating it probably just as long. So I think GP definitely has a point.

Are you a fan of reading? Good character fiction is based on reality as understood at a time and a great way to get insights into how and what people think, particularly as it's precisely those believable portrayals that tend to 'stick' with society. For example even most of George R. R. Martin's tales are directly inspired by real things, very much living up to the notion that reality is much stranger than fiction!…

I think we would agree on a lot of things over a beer or beverage of your choice.

I also think that we as a (globalised?) culture have decided that money trumps everything.

But I don’t think that it’s the “fault” of single sociopaths or big companies; it’s some inherent flaw in human intelligence - we’re just not equipped to make smart long-term decisions or deal with a vast alien intelligence such as “the market”.

Scrooges tale just resonates strongly - why else would it be still so popular that basically everyone know it - we just aren’t able to stop this machine and it will grind on until our species is wiped from the planet.

Not that it matters too much for you and me - but a thousand years more of this? I can’t imagine what that would look like.

Edit: you ever read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair? I don’t think being greedy above all morals is a new thing, it’s always been there. We just “scaled up”

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

#342

Post by carlosjobim »

flohofwoe wrote: post #340
carlosjobim wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The internet without search engines is like the printing press without distribution.

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

#343

Post by pnt12 »

glimshe wrote: post #60

The difference between poison and medicine is the amount. AI is great and very useful, but they want the AI to replace you instead of supporting your needs. "AI everywhere" is worse than "AI nowhere". What we need is "AI somewhere".

I fully agree.

It's great for prototypes reactors, sometimes debugging (I'm kinda annoyed at how googling seems less and less efficient nowadays), and also reviewing.

But you gotta be critical about it. It's like a junior assistant eager to show work - you shouldnt take it and deliver it as is, it needs to be filtered by a competent person with taste!

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

#344

Post by type0 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #75
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.

> In the same way as there's no ability to set up Windows without internet connection and MS account Not true. They're clearly unwilling or unable to remove this code path fully, or they would have done so by now. There's just a different workaround for it every few years.

I wrote about Windows Home, they sure can divert the code further and lock it down completely. The same probably can't be done for Pro version unless they want to break Group Policy

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

#346

Post by jjkaczor »

cal_dent wrote: post #301
jjkaczor wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is perhaps one of the most articulate takes on this I have ever read - thank-you! And - for myself, it was friction that kickstarted my interest in "tech" - I bought a janky modem, and it had IRQ conflicts with my Windows 3 mouse at the time - so, without internet (or BBS's at that time), I had to troubleshot and test different settings with the 2-page technical manual that came with it. It was friction that mad…

I tell everyone to introduce friction into their lives...especially if they have kids. Friction is good! Friction is part of the je ne sais quoi that make human's create

Heh... I wanted to say in my original comment - that friction is so good, without it we wouldn't have kids... but...

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

#347

Post by somenameforme »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #341
somenameforme wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a fan of reading? Good character fiction is based on reality as understood at a time and a great way to get insights into how and what people think, particularly as it's precisely those believable portrayals that tend to 'stick' with society. For example even most of George R. R. Martin's tales are directly inspired by real things, very much living up to the notion that reality is much stranger than fiction!…

I think we would agree on a lot of things over a beer or beverage of your choice. I also think that we as a (globalised?) culture have decided that money trumps everything. But I don’t think that it’s the “fault” of single sociopaths or big companies; it’s some inherent flaw in human intelligence - we’re just not equipped to make smart long-term decisions or deal with a vast alien intelligence such as “the market”. S…

The thing is, the shift happened relatively recently. This [1] is an extremely interesting little report from UCLA where they poll the incoming class on a wide array of things. And there have been some massive shifts as recently as the 60s.

In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, while only 42% felt the same of "being very well of financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important. It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more.

So we went from a society where the most important value for people was developing a life philosophy to one where the most important value is becoming wealthy. It's fairly easy to see how that leads directly to the situation we see now a days. In a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, what else can we expect other than endless greed?

---

In the time of The Jungle, that book resulted in dramatic change that eventually led to the creation of the FDA. In modern times you have that same FDA approving everything from pink slime [2] to Alzheimer's drugs that they know don't work. [3] I think the fact that society has changed is an inescapable conclusion

[1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime

[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-ad...

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

#348

Post by davidivadavid »

davidivadavid wrote: post #134
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…

Looking at it from a slightly different angle, one I find most illuminating, removing "friction" is like removing "difficulty" from a game, and "friction free" as an ideal is like "cheat codes from the start" as an ideal. It's making a game where there's a single button that says "press here to win." The goal isn't the remove "friction", it's the remove a specific type of valueless friction, to replace it with valuab…

edit: *to remove.
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