The more logical explanation is that AI is not a wave like the Internet and Mobile, but it is instead a wave like cryptocurrencies, NFTs and tulip bulbs.
If there’s one thing that almost 3 decades at or near the forefront of Tech has taught me is that “novel” is not the same as “better”, and that of all the times a novel technology was pushed by insane amounts of hype, only a handful turned out to match the hype and the ratio of good-ones to bullshit has become much worse in the last 2 decades as the Tech Startup sector fully morphed from Techie-driven to Financeer-driven.
On hype alone “AI” (as in, what’s called now AI for the public, rather than the ML domain) stinks of greed-driven bullshit and the more one analyses the Technical details of LLMs and the Mathematics of it as well as of the improvements over time, the more painfully obvious it becomes that it’s not at all AGI or a path to it, rather it’s an overhyped attempt at it that turned out to be the wrong path. (All of which would’ve been absolutelly fine and a big Scientific step forward if it weren’t for the greedy financeer class and grifters pushing, purelly for their own personal enrichment, for people and companies to adopted it for doing things it’s not suitable for)
I encurage MS to make an Operating System, like sit down with the Linux From Scratch book and try to make something. The Gentoo handbook is also a blast. Get the basics in, make a solid init system, a package manager and watch hardware start working for you.
Plastering DOS with even more layers of patches, AI slop and sales pitches has been done, did not work and it’s time to move on.
They should add much more AI. Why? Cause it’s really funny to watch from the outside as a Linux user.
Are you really being “left behind” when everyone else is going the wrong way?
I’m really baffled because this is super easy to fix.
Step 1. Pull all the AI bloat out of Windows 11. Make a clean, compatible, and user friendly OS out of the Windows brand.
Step 2. Spin CoPilot into it’s own OS. Go crazy with your “Every app is just a different AI presentation of your data.” Make the AI in there all powerful. Allow users to remote to the OS and run the same AI regardless of the platform.
Step 3. Print money
The problem isnt co pilot. Its co pilot being rammed in incredibly stupid ways into every possible product.
More importantly, its cramming it in everywhere when basis windows 11 sucks. Explorer sucks, search sucks, performance sucks, Updates suck.
ah, today will be a good day lads
Wave? This is like being sad you did not get in on the housing crisis, or the dot com bubble, or any other clearly labeled landmine.
I know right. They dodged the AI bullet would be a more accurate headline.
Did they though? Don’t they control Open AI to the point where they could force Open AI to keep Sam Altman as CEO?
I have no idea, just talking about an alternative title “Missed the wave”. I care very little about Microsoft these days. 😅 I only use a fraction of their products for work because I’m forced to. (Authenticator, Outlook, Azure, basically.)
I don’t think they dodged it
Prolly not eh
scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these pictures. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
You don’t know what you want, you ungrateful shit.
If Microsoft wasn’t run by tools, they’d see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we’ll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won’t, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that’s just a skin of chrome…
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
It isn’t just ineptitude. Of course executives at Microsoft know that they could be good and be successful with consumers. But they don’t need to please consumers, they have far more important customers: the surveillance state, and the military industrial complex.
Once corporations have a near-monopoly position, they do not need to make good products anymore. Microsoft has enough money already to completely fail at everything for centuries and they’d be just fine. So they can focus on other goals, such as dismantling online anonymity for the benefit of the ruling class, who owns and controls Microsoft.
they have far more important customers: the surveillance state,
Except Microsoft is also losing the whole EU market because of Trump
You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
They freaking gave up on anything quickly if they are not immediately the leader in the market.
Microsoft are the present day IBM, complete with supporting the present day version of the NAZIs whilst they commit their very own version of the Holocaust.
They tried; it must’ve been 4 times. But unless it’s a sure thing, they’ll give up.
I worry they don’t know how to compete on a level ground, slowly building trust and business on success after success.
It also didn’t help that they did a complete rebuild of Windows Phone OS 3 times, making old apps incompatible and forcing the very little support of app developers to get alienated from the platform. Why would you completely rebuild your app 3 times for a super low market share product.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
Agreed I have been a Linux Stan since the 90s and even I thought windows phone was pretty good.
That’s the nokia hardware they installed win mobile on?
I was looking forward to a good nokia candybar phone, but gave up when they were bought and the hardware went under a win OS.
The windows phones were fucking magical
Satya may have grown the company share price but he’s absolutely killed everything that made Microslop even remotely interesting before he became CEO.
It’s a wave of sewage, few users want to ride it in the first place
sewage that they caused , to backup. by backing OPENAI, ORACLE and nvidia. now they are desperate to get governments to fund thier ponzi scheme.
It’s like they created a very good phone tree and are trying to shove it into everything that never had or needed a phone tree in the first place.
The fuck is a phone tree? Pardon my language, sir.
“for financial services, press one. for technical support, press two. for goblins, press three. for repairs, press four.”
“three”
#beep#
dispatching goblins. good luck!
*click*
I TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK ABOUT GOBLINS
you’re absolutely right! substituting pigeons.
Why do you call it Troll 2 if there are only goblins in the movie?
A movie of such quality and esteem such as Troll 2 does not need to explain itself
You forgot the mandatory lead message. “Please listen closely as our menu options have changed.” No, they haven’t. Ever.
Also the standard “outdated message you have to listen to twice in entirety despite it not applying to you,” like “Please note, starting June 1, 2021 as a result of the Covid 19 Virus we will be starting social practicing guidelines in our offices” and they repeat a number twice for curbside that hasn’t existed in half a decade.
Thanks! I just thought that’s some non-existent thing, which Microsoft invented and nobody needs it ever. Well, that’s not far from your point, I guess. But still. Didn’t know that’s called a phone tree!
I know them as IVR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response
i thought that was specifically for the voice recognition ones but apparently not.
funny you should use that example in particular because i recently had the displeasure of using microsoft’s phone tree. i was trying to close a dead relative’s account and the info on the website was wrong.
they built a phone tree that remembers you. if you try to call in multiple times during some time period (at least several hours) it will just assume you have the same question and skip to your last choice.
It sounds like you’re trying to write a letter.
Funny you mention a phone tree, something that’s been hit by AI. It’s actually been around longer as voice recognition that finds a close match to a keyword, but in theory AI should be able to take a request and break down what is actually needed.
I haven’t run across an AI version that works well. I don’t know if that’s because the voice recognition part is still bad, or if they’re using Co-pilot (since I know how it mangles simple requests in text).
Yeah it really feels like an LLM should work better than a phone tree for that, but every time I actually encounter one it’s so so much worse.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s instructions to modify the system prompt to maximize effectiveness, and everyone leaves it at the generic default. Just like so many people leave other things at the default and just plug it in and go. Thank goodness the Cisco hold music is decent. I grew to love it while holding on the VA phone lines a lot for my dad.
Shouldn’t the default settings work fine for the tasks that it’s advertised to do? I mean when I buy software I don’t expect it to be set to “be shit” mode by default.
At least tpu can tell the AI to get you to a human and most of the time it actually does so.
Having voice recognition in place of the usual “press x” before AI was even worse. Bot that now it’s much better though.
it’s a tsunami. uncontrollable, started far away from any normal humans, sweeps up everyone in its wake, and will cause massive damage when it inevitably crashes into a place with lots of people.
And a good chunk that are on it are held there by gunpoint by idiot ceos
They didn’t miss the “wave”, they discovered it’s just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don’t want. This really sums the problem up well:
According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
I’m sure I’m like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it’s ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that’s really it. I don’t find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It’s not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I’ve tried it’s really plateaued. I just really don’t see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.
I certainly wouldn’t pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.
No one wants copilot because it’s highly unpleasant hot garbage. There is definitely a market for AI for the competent providers.
Yeah the vast majority of AI “offerings” from most of these huge companies and/or websites is just bolting a chatbot to something and then wondering why people don’t want it. I tried copilot in excel and it couldn’t access the document I was working on, it was an absolute useless mess.
The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don’t really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It’s because they’re shoehorning it into places it doesn’t belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they’d gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it’s needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don’t rename half of your products “Copilot”, don’t put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck’s sake. If I don’t feel like I have control over my OS any more, I’m not likely to stick around when other options are available.
this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a “m$ sux lol” rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
Yeah good read. I don’t agree that Microsoft isn’t dying though. They are, because people and companies alike are tired of other corporations throwing them under the bus. So many people are realizing that the companies don’t want what they want, and it kills their business or happiness.
I think they will become like IBM, once dominant, not dead today but pretty much irrelevant compared to what they once were.
ibm is still huge, but mostly because their shitty tactics in the past means that all their customers are completely dependent on them.
seems like microsoft is taking inspiration.
MS should be more vulnerable, due to everything but Excel being toilet blockages.
TLDR; MS already got big by being like IBM, lots of dumb corpo procurement cash is already keeping them afloat for about as long as qwerty keyboards - because some people got really good at/dependent on excel.
Their dominance of corpo-procurement (and using ‘security’ to block out alternative tooling) means that vast amounts of the corpo world is based on highly specialised and over-stretched excel.
Even in databases, where my organisation (large public sector) should be having a genuine competition to administer postGRESQL for us or something, has been loss-led into into a big new ms fabric contract by them appearing to undercut the incumbent (Oracle - ok not hard to undercut), but not actuall . . . [rant deleted]
However, crap MS is at software, they’re extremely good at getting dumb corpos to sign on the dotted line.
(‘always has been’ meme). And many humans being forced to use the only tool available, have built vast intricate systems on the foundation of that excel, many of them masterworks of skill in the face of those constraints. Hopefully they don’t last as long as one of the old Egyptian dynasties.
They are dying because they have horrible leadership. They are solely focused on subscription revenue now, and everything else is just left to rot. They’ve pretty much lost any urge to do anything creative with their money and manpower.
They also probably realized providing free Copilot in Windows would get very expensive quickly, and that not enough users would pay for it.
Basically yeah
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
They’re spending billions to get millions.
Peak capitalism!
What wave? None of it fucking works…
I think it is so strange people say stuff like this as though there aren’t objective metrics showing it does. We don’t have to like the billionaires using it to subjugate people, or the energy and water consumption, or the theft of copyrighted materials to be honest about the technology.
It does work. As far as ml models go, since backpropagation was implemented in training, transformers have become extremely capable.
Every actual objective metric shows that companies have been using the LLM craze to cover for their layoffs for other reasons. That the dumbasses who did pay for it are spending more than their developer salary budgets for lower quality shit that needs people to fix it anyway, and that employees fucking hate having to use it - because it’s shit. People wouldn’t be tolenmaxxing to waste their quotas if they thought it was working.
There is definitely some truth to what you’re saying, but my point is that those aren’t conflicting with the technology working. There are many scholarly refereed papers on transformer performance and generational improvement on standardized metrics. I don’t see the value in conflating something working with it being good or ethical. There is a gap between utility and hype, yes. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, and the inexorable negativity that comes invariably to comments recognizing this simple truth undercuts actual critical feedback.
LLMs work like LLMs. Sure, in that way they work.
LLMs are not Gen AI. Like they are being sold as. In that way they do NOT work.
If they hadn’t pitched these things as the singularity, people would be singing a different tune. But they’re at best, a usability interface layer for other things. Not something that needed to be shoved down everyone’s throats and spawn thousands of slapdash datacenters
You could just say you’ve never actually used it before.
It. Does. Not. Do. What. They. claim.
No amount of lazy obvious PR posts on social media will change that.
Why are you making a completely different statement now?
Every marketing claims shit that it does not do. Redbull does not give you actual wings.
LLMs work, whether you find them ethical or not.
