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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

#81

Post by qweiopqweiop »

cezart wrote: post #74
saubeidl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the stock market is not a good system to organize ones economy around then?

I've been thinking about this recently. The centrality of the stock market, while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently, might actually be a big weakness for the USA today. A capable adversary, like China, can kill entire strategic sectors in the US using the stock market. If they undercut the US companies and are willing to accept low returns on their investments, then the respective USA compet…

Do you need the stock market to undercut industries though? I'm not sure it's necessary

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

#83

Post by Sevii »

yks wrote: post #23

AI assistance is a gold rush — promotions are to be made and huge complex system to be over-engineered in Big Tech. The race to stake out the future empires is underway, and there is no time to think about the quality control, UX etc. But who am I kidding though, there is no time to think about those things during the chillest of times either, as any user of Power Automate can concur.

It's being treated like a gold rush but I don't think it really is. This is like dotcom 1.0 all over again. They didn't know what the best use cases for the internet were but they still poured billions into it. The gold rush didn't come until the 2000s when social media took off.

Normally you get a frontier exploration phase where fringe people experiment with the new technology and try to figure out what it's good for. It feels like we just skipped that step entirely.

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

#84

Post by zem »

mrweasel wrote: post #78
saubeidl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the stock market is not a good system to organize ones economy around then?

The stock market weirdly enough ruins the idea of capitalism. Catering to shareholders hurts the idea that competition would create better and cheaper products.

that's not the idea of capitalism; the idea of capitalism is that you should be able to make money by virtue of owning stuff. it's an inherently rich-get-richer scheme, competition has little to do with it.

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

#85

Post by brookst »

coldpie wrote: post #40
neilalexander wrote: post #10

I would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find…

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?

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

#86

Post by stackskipton »

afavour wrote: post #32
this_user wrote: post #9

Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.

Microsoft’s best pitch (and Google benefits from this too) is that contracts are annoying and take forever to execute. If you can sign a deal for Outlook and Teams it’s so much easier than separate contracts for Outlook and Slack. You’ll get very far with that logic alone.

Most companies I’ve been at that use Teams over Slack is not “We can’t get contract for Slack” but “We have Teams included, why would we pay for Slack?” - Accountant

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

#87

Post by Wojtkie »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #62

Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average , which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them. Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has...…

I bet c-suite uses Mac

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

#88

Post by FuckButtons »

cezart wrote: post #74
saubeidl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the stock market is not a good system to organize ones economy around then?

I've been thinking about this recently. The centrality of the stock market, while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently, might actually be a big weakness for the USA today. A capable adversary, like China, can kill entire strategic sectors in the US using the stock market. If they undercut the US companies and are willing to accept low returns on their investments, then the respective USA compet…

We’re already there when it comes to having the industrial base necessary to fight a protracted conventional war with china. Which leaves a large ? over the US dominance over the pacific.

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

#90

Post by dboreham »

this_user wrote: post #9

Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.

People here are mostly too young to remember but the original Microsoft business model was this:

Find a software market currently addressed by high price products; create a reasonably good product for that market; sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make much more profit. Repeat/rinse.

The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after this. You can't lock in customers if they didn't already willingly buy your product.

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