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Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

finance.yahoo.com

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI also signed an agreement with AWS. And Anthropic has signed on with Microsoft as well as GCP. The underlying dynamic is that no single cloud provider has the capacity required to host all the demand, so the frontier AI labs have no choice but to diversify for their infrastructure needs.

can you elaborate on this? diversifying compute doesn't create more compute - is it that the different LLM vendors have different peak times and so spreading themselves over more compute vendors spreads peak load?

Huh? If I need 10 bananas and my local shop only has 5 bananas available I need to go to multiple stores to satisfy my ravenous banana craving.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specific thing(s) are you worried that USD will take a dive relative to? Then once you have an answer to that question, that might point you towards what you want to be long.

Traders could start buying their oil using Yuan, for example. That’s not a theoretical anymore

What percent of dollars are tied up in in-flight oil transactions? And I suppose also in accounts that will be used for oil transactions in the planned future? That’s the mechanism for that supporting the value of the dollar, right, like, increased dollar demand via being used for oil market transactions?

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advice I have heard is if you think there will be a significant drop in the market you liquidate all your holdings while they are still high and then rebuy when the price is low. Granted this is a gamble though, if you’re wrong then you just sold all your stock and are no longer participating in the market plus you need to pay capital gains tax

Did you hear this advice from 100 broke people or one lucky schmuck?

This is significantly safer than shorting that some people here suggest.

You can't lose money sitting on cash. While when shorting your potential loss is infinite.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#54
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you elaborate on this? diversifying compute doesn't create more compute - is it that the different LLM vendors have different peak times and so spreading themselves over more compute vendors spreads peak load?

Huh? If I need 10 bananas and my local shop only has 5 bananas available I need to go to multiple stores to satisfy my ravenous banana craving.

Yes but if there are three banana shops around and there are five banana addicted people living nearby the number of bananas available on average for every person is not 15.

In other words, if all ai companies need more compute that a single provider can provide, then there's just not enough of it. So the question "why everyone partners with everyone" must have a different answer.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#55
post #21

Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot. This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude! This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That…

Copilot was by far the worst for coding. Not that the code snippets it would generate were not good, but due to the insane number of bugs in its UI. It would just spit out blank blocks thinking they contained code. When I asked it to repeat the steps which were empty, it would generate the same empty blocks like "here's your code" lol How TF can you go to market with such bugs.

i can't even upload co e properly because it gets mangled

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#56
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traders could start buying their oil using Yuan, for example. That’s not a theoretical anymore

What percent of dollars are tied up in in-flight oil transactions? And I suppose also in accounts that will be used for oil transactions in the planned future? That’s the mechanism for that supporting the value of the dollar, right, like, increased dollar demand via being used for oil market transactions?

The point is that the Petrodollar system requires countries to buy US treasuries to be able to buy oil. That is what makes borrowing cheap for the US, and what keeps the dollar demand up.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#57
post #21

Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot. This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude! This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That…

I have no interest in Copilot from Microsoft in general but I do like GitHub Copilot overall. That said, I’m _very_ interested in a viable alternative. I only use it for “fancy autocomplete” and have zero use for the agent/chat capabilities (I use Claude Code for that). It’s been a year or so since I looked at and tried alternatives but when I last did, copilot was the best IMHO.

What are people using as an alternative?

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product. But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific…

Copilot is actually significantly more reliable at technical tasks with SQL or C# than others, i've found. Do we have different use cases? Copilot seems to hit the technical level I'm asking about much more reliably. It keeps a more grounded general semantic model.

You might be using different copilots since there are approximately three different Microsoft copilot products

Are you using the one that's part of Microsoft 365?

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's on Microsoft for their choice of naming/branding.

Absolutely. They've made the same mess with "Copilot" as with ".NET" in the early 00's [0]. Everything was ".NET" from consumer oriented services (".NET Passport"), to "Visual Studio .NET" without anyone understanding what ".NET" was. Now it's "Microsoft Copilot" which is different from "Microsoft 365 Copilot", which is different from "Copilot Chat" and from "GitHub Copilot", and the many other flavors. It's a mess.…

I've been a C# developer on and off since the dotnet core/standard split. I still have no clue what .NET was ever supposed to mean.

Re: Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

#60
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? If I need 10 bananas and my local shop only has 5 bananas available I need to go to multiple stores to satisfy my ravenous banana craving.

Yes but if there are three banana shops around and there are five banana addicted people living nearby the number of bananas available on average for every person is not 15. In other words, if all ai companies need more compute that a single provider can provide, then there's just not enough of it. So the question "why everyone partners with everyone" must have a different answer.

It's not really "creating more compute" it's just a natural outcome of everyone desperately grabbing whatever becomes available. The dynamics make sense for all parties involved.

Firstly, it's very clear now that everyone is seriously crunched for capacity (like, each of the hyperscalers' backlogs -- i.e. capacity for which payment is committed, but as yet unsatisfied -- are in the double-digit billions.)

So as the compute providers bring more capacity online, everyone with demand wants to get a slice of that. Like, why would anyone NOT dive in and try to secure some capacity for themselves? Especially when the rate of capacity growth is constrained by the availability of GPUs and energy and data center buildouts, which is measured in years.

On the flip side, why would the compute providers NOT want multiple customers? It creates competition and drives prices up.

There are likely other forces at play too. For one, none of the parties - the model providers and the compute providers, with some of them like Google being both -- wants to get too dependent on any of the other parties, but they also want to secure a slice of each others' future growth, so they're all partnering with each other. Obviously, Google wants Gemini to win and Microsoft wants Copilot to win, but as a hedge, they'll be happy hosting their competitors' products and taking a cut.

This is partly the origin of the "circular investments" concerns. The scale at which this industry is growing, all these players have enormous mountains of money that they must invest to secure their future, but they are also the only players that can operate at this scale, and so the only place they can invest that money in is each other.

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