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The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.

Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.

Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.

Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.

I expect this is the crux of the problem.

There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.

Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.

But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.

For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.

I strongly felt this way about most software I use before LLMs became a thing, and AI has ramped the problem up to 11. I wish our industry valued building useful and reliable tools half as much as chasing the latest fads and ticking boxes on a feature checklist.

I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma.

I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.

Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t.

It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.

I think this may have been Dell?

Dell reveals people don't care about AI in PCs (https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows-laptops/dell-rev...)

Consumers is nice, but far more important are the big corporate purchases. There may be a lot of people there too who don't want AI, but they all depend on decisions made at the top and AI seems to be the way to go, because of expectations and also because of the mentioned prisoner's dilemma, if competitors gain an advantage it is bad for your org, if all fail together it is manageable.

>It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.

I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no different from crypobros who put their kids' entire college fund into some failed and useless project and now they need that project to succeed or else it's all over.

I’m not sure that really explains how people get onto hype trains like this in the first place, though. I doubt many people intentionally stake their livelihoods on a solution in search of a problem.

My guess is that it’s more of a recency bias sort of thing: it’s quite easy to assume that a newer way of solving a problem is superior to existing ways simply because it’s new. And also, of course, newfangled things naturally attract investment capital because everyone implicitly knows it’s hard to sell someone a thing they already have and don’t need more of.

It’s not just tech. For example, many people in the USA believe that the ease of getting new drugs approved by the FDA is a reason why the US’s health care system is superior to others, and want to make it even easier to get drugs approved. But research indicates the opposite: within a drug class, newer drugs tend to be less effective and have worse side effects than older ones. But new drugs are definitely much more expensive because their period of government-granted monopoly hasn’t expired yet. And so, contrary to what recency bias leads us to believe, this more conservative approach to drug approval is actually one of the reasons why other countries have better health care outcomes at lower cost.

Currently if someone posts here (or in similar forums elsewhere) there is a convention that they should disclose if they comment on a story related to where they work. It would be nice if the same convention existed for anyone who had more than say, ten thousand dollars directly invested in a company/technology (outside of index funds/pensions/etc).

A browser plugin that showed the stock portfolios of the HN commenter (and article-flagger) next to each post would be absolutely amazing, and would probably not surprise us even a little.

The perception may be that anything AI related will be obsolete in months. So why pay to have it built into a laptop?

I doubt obsolescence anticipation has anything to do with it. That’s how tech enthusiasts think, but most people think more in terms of, “Is this useful to me?” And if it’s doing a useful thing now then it should still be doing that useful thing next year as long as nobody fucks with it.

I would guess it’s more just consumer fatigue. For two reasons. First, AI’s still at the “all bark and no bite” phase of the hype cycle, and most people don’t enjoy trying a bunch of things just to figure out if they work as advertised. Where early adopters think of that as play time, typical consumers see it as wasted time. Second, and perhaps even worse, they have learned that they can’t trust that à product will still be doing that useful thing in the future because the tech enthusiasts who make these products can’t resist the urge to keep fucking with it.

That’s because so much experience with ai is completely crap and useless.

This is exactly what I was thinking about my current place of employment. Wouldn't all of our time be spent better working on our main product than adding all these questionably useful AI add ons? We already have a couple AI addons we built over the years that aren't being used much.

To you – yes. But have you thought about the shareholders?

I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.

In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.

For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.

So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.

It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.

> cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth

Microsoft Azure was launched in 2010. They've been a "cloud" company for a while. AI just represents a sharp acceleration in that course. Unfortunately this means the software products have been rather neglected and subject to annoying product marketing whims.

They've had cloud products for a long time, but I don't think that Microsoft fundamentally changed. I still see them organized and treated as an Enterprise software company. (This is from my N=1 outside perspective.)

ChatGPT says that "productivity and business processes" is still the largest division in Microsoft with 43% of revenues and 54% of operating income (from their FY2025 10K). The "intelligent cloud" division is second with 38% revenue and 35% operating income. Which helps to support my point -- their legacy enterprise software (and OS) is still their main product line and makes more relative profits than the capital heavy cloud division.

Yeah. Hyperscalers who are building compute capacities became asset heavy industries. Today's Google, MSFT, META are completely different than 10 years ago and market has not repriced that yet. These are no longer asset light businesses.

ITT: we assume that "computer rooms", mainframes, and other dev tools weren't a thing for software companies pre-cloud

I se no one that assumes that.

100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.

They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.

And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.

I thought Copilot was just ChatGPT - isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI ?

they somehow made it worse and use a less capable version with smaller context window.

The only potential upside for businesses it that it can crawl onedrive/sharepoint, and acts as a glorious search machine in your mailbox and files.

That's the only thing really valuable to me, everything else is not working as it should. The outlook integration sucks, the powerpoint integration is laughably bad to being worthless, and the excel integration is less useful than Clippy.

I actually prefer using the "ask" function of github copilot through visual studio code over using the company provided microsoft copilot portal

Depends on the flavor. Now has Claude, as well. And Copilot Studio can extend to any model AI Foundry supports.

Someone somewhere understands that ChatGPT as a brand is too valuable to have it ruined by middle management. Hence Copilot.

They bet the company on AI. If their AI push fails, everything else does not matter anymore. What you are seeing is desperation and Hail Marys.

My guess is every team's metric is probably reduced to tokens consumed through the products owned.

take it a step further: the global market is stagnant, and the big gains of the 90s-2010s are gone.

you either hail mary AI or you watch your margins dwindle; captialism does not allow for no-growth.

For coding,ai is amazing and getting better.

Spell checking is also good, grammar better then me lol

And pumping out fake news and propaganda, way worth it when you do it

> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.

Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.

The thing about giving your application a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it is, then your application has a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it.

For the usecase of "How do I do thing X in Excell" you could probably get pretty far with just adding a small, local LLM running on the user's machine.

That would move the cost of running the model to the end user but it would also mean giving up all the data they can from running prompts remotely.

It would probably also make Office users more productive rather than replacing them completely and that's not the vision that Microsoft's actual customers are sold on.

Fair. But I sure wish we could instead solve this problem the way we did 20 years ago: by not having Web search results be so choked off by SEO enshittification and slop that it’s hard to find good information anymore. Because, I promise you, “How do I do thing X in Excel?” did not used to be nearly so difficult a question to answer.

To be fair. MS Office product defects should be regarded just as harmful as hallucinations. Try a lookup in excel on fields that might have text.

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.

The comparison to the dotcom bubble isn't without merit. As a technology in terms of its applications though I think the best one to compare the LLM with is the mouse. It was absolutely a revolution in terms of how we interact with computers. You could do many tasks much faster with a GUI. Nearly all software was redesigned around it. The story around a "conversational interface" enabled by an LLM is similar. You can literally see the agent go off and run 10 grep commands or whatever in seconds, that you would have had to look up.

The mouse didn't become some huge profit center and the economy didn't realign around mouse manufacturers. People sure made a lot of money off it indirectly though. The profits accrued from sales of software that supported it well and delivered productivity improvements. Some of the companies who wrote that software also manufactured mice, some didn't.

I think it'll be the same now. It's far from clear that developing and hosting LLMs will be a great business. They'll transform computing anyway. The actual profits will accrue to whoever delivers software which integrates them in a way that delivers more productivity. On some level I feel like it's already happening, Gemini's well integrated into Google Drive, changes how I use it, and saves me time. ChatGPT is just a thing off on the side that I chat randomly with about my hangover. Github Copilot claims it's going to deliver productivity and sometimes kinda does but man it often sucks. Easy to infer from this info who my money will end up going to in the long run.

On diversification, I think anyone who's not a professional investor should steer away from picking individual stocks and already be diversified... I wouldn't advise anyone to get out of the market or to try and time the market. But a correction will come eventually and being invested in very broad index funds smooths out these bumps. To those of us who invest in the whole market, it's notable that a few big AI/tech companies have become a far larger share of the indices than they used to be, and a fairly sure bet that one day, they won't be anymore.

I started working in 1997. Cisco was one of our big customers so I knew a lot of engineers there. Cisco stock hid $80 in 2000. In 2002 it was at $10.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/

I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.

I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.

I have zero doubt that AI will eventually make many people lots of money. Just about every company on earth is collecting TBs of data on everyone and they know they're sure they can use that information against us somehow, but they can't possibly read and search through it all on their own.

I have quite a few doubts that it'll be a net positive for society though. The internet (for all of its flaws) is still a good thing generally for the public. Users didn't have to be convinced of that, they just needed to be shown what was possible. Nobody had to shove internet access into everything against customer's wishes. "AI" on the other hand isn't something most users want. Users are constantly complaining about it being pushed on them and it's already forced MS to scale back the AI in windows 11.

What do you mean exactly by "diversify"? Money/investment-wise?

Sell the risky stock that has inflated in value from hype cycle exuberance and re-invest proceeds into lower risk asset classes not driven by said exuberance. "Taking money off the table." An example would be taking ISO or RSU proceeds and reinvesting in VT (Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF) or other diversified index funds.

Taking money off the table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763769 - October 2025 (108 comments)

(not investing advice)

What tomuchtodo said. When I left Sun in 1995 I had 8,000 shares, which in 1998 would have paid off my house, and when I sold them when Oracle bought Sun after a reverse 3:1 split, the total would not even buy a new car. Can be a painful lesson, certainly it leaves an impression.

Heh, I was at Netscape when the Sun-Netscape Alliance was created. Tip of the hat to a fellow gray beard. ;)

How do you diversify now? I presume you don't refer to stock portfolio, do you?

Stocks are fine for diversification, just stocks that have a different risk factors. So back in the 90's I had been working at Sun then did a couple of startups, and all of my 'investment' savings (which I started with stock from the employee purchase plan at Sun) were in tech of one kind or another. No banking stocks, no pharmaceutical stocks, no manufacturing sector stocks. Just tech, and more precisely Internet technology stocks. So when the Internet bubble burst every stock I owned depreciated rapidly in price.

One of the reasons I told myself I "couldn't" diversify was because if I sold any of the stock to buy different stock I'd pay a lot of capital gains tax and the IRS would take half and now I'd only be half as wealthy.

Another reason was my management telling me I couldn't sell my stock during "quiet" periods (even though they seemed too) and so sometimes when I felt like selling it I "couldn't."

These days, especially with companies that do not have publicly traded stock, that is harder than ever to diversify. The cynic in me says they are structured that way so that employees are always the last to get paid. It can still work though. You just have to find a way to option the stock you are owed on a secondary market. Not surprisingly there are MBA types who really want to have a piece of an AI company and will help you do that.

So now I make sure that not everything I own is in one area. One can do that with mutual funds, and to some extent with index funds.

But the message is if you're feeling "wealthy" and maybe paying your mortgage payments by selling some stock every month, you are much more at risk than you might realize. One friend who worked at JDS Uniphase back in the day just sold their stock and bought their house, another kept their stock so that it could "keep growing" while selling it off in bits to pay their mortgage. When JDSU died they had to sell their house and move because they couldn't afford the mortgage payments on just their salary. But we have a new generation that is getting to make these choices, I encourage people in this situation to be open to the learning.

The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.

no one has ever used blockchain. consumer ai apps have billions of MAUs how is this even remotely comparable dude

> at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do

The revolution already happened. I can't imagine life without AI today. Not just for coding (which I actually lament) but just in general day to day use. Sure it's not perfect but I think it's quite difficult to ignore how the world changed in just 3-4 years.

It makes me sad trying to imagine what it's like to not being able to imagine life without AI

That's just so strange to me. In my experience, it hallucinates and makes things up often, and when it's accurate, the results are so generic and surface level.

Yes but I use it as a substitute friend, gf, therapist, dumb questions like "how 2 buy clothes and dress good and is this good and how to unclog my toilet shits"

I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.

> top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong

There's another post on the front page about the 2008 financial crisis, which was almost exactly that. Investors are vulnerable to herd mentality. Especially as it's hard to be "right but early" and watch everyone else making money hand over fist while you stand back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889008

this was the top 10 companies in the s and p in 2008

Rank,Company 1,Exxon Mobil 2,General Electric (GE) 3,Microsoft 4,Procter & Gamble 5,Chevron 6,Johnson & Johnson 7,AT&T 8,Walmart 9,JPMorgan Chase 10,Berkshire Hathaway

1 financial institution.

8 of the top 10 currently are tech companies. its completely different

The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.

And this is the broken mindset tanking multiple large companies' products and services (Google, Apple, MS, etc). Focus on the stock. The product and our users are an afterthought.

Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.

0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/

Microsoft has done the worst of any Mag 7 stock since the day before ChatGPT's release: https://totalrealreturns.com/n/AAPL,MSFT,AMZN,GOOGL,META,TSL...

Is sacrificing everything for short term gains really the right move in any situation?

That's an excellent question, but the answer would depend on goals and the evaluation system used.

It seems to me that CEOs have a different opinion than anyone who cares instead about actual people.

The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.

Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.

In particular it's the short term stock price. They'll happily grift their way to overinflated stock prices today even though at some point their incestuous money shuffle game will end and the stocks will crash and a bunch of people who aren't insider trading are going to be left with massive losses.

Stock price increases that don't lead to higher dividends eventually are indistinguishable from Ponzi schemes after the fact.

Buybacks lead to stock price increases and are indistinguishable from dividends in theory, and in practice they are better than dividends because of taxation.

The problem I have with that logic is that it still doesn't really give any sensible reason for why the stock should have any economic value at all. If the point is that the company will pay for it at some point, it makes more sense for it to be a loan rather than a unit of stock. I stand by my claim that selling a non-physical item that does nothing other than hopefully get bought again later for more than you sold it for is indistinguishable from a scam.

every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.

name a technology that every single top tech company has invested billions of dollars in and then has flopped. the metaverse does not count unless google, amazon, microsoft etc was also throwing billions into it.

weird goalpost

by that logic financial crashes wouldn't happen

This industry has seen several bubbles in its existence. Many previously top companies didn't even survive them.

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

It's happened before.

Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.

Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.

> It's happened before.

source?

Seriously? Have you just emerged from a hundred-year sleep in a monastery on the top of a mountain?

should be really easy to conjure up examples then. where every single business leader has been wrong about a new technology to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.

Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.

Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026

This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...

> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.

> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology

> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked

> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died

("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)

Were you around in 2008?

Doesn't matter what the leaders think if the users hate it and call it slop

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...

right because copilot is bad, that must mean no one uses chatgpt, or claude code, or gemini. they only have billions of MAUs, people must really hate it

The mistake is simple. It is like the difference between giving you many tools to use vs making you the tool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

I get the feeling that a lot of people using AI, feeding it their private data, and trusting what it tells them are certainly being tools.

MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…

For years I've used this as a home page of sorts for Microsoft products. It's very annoying not to be able to use it now.

I haven't used office.com but it does seem to have links to the four main webapps (did there used to be more?). They're the second row of big boxes titled "Word with Copilot", etc. Admittedly with very confusing names.

I checked way back machine and they have been making large changes to that page every day for the last month. It used to be a lie that office 365 was rename to office 365 copilot, yet it is an app with only chat bot functionality. They advertise the copilot integration for the main office apps now, but those are not part of the copilot app they are trying to trick you into installing.

Well there is no "Office" anymore, the suite is named "Microsoft 365 Copilot".

There are no office tools. It’s just a chatbot app. The page says they combined word and excel and PowerPoint, but it still doesn’t do anything but chat. I asked it to create a word document and it offered me a download link to a word template…

I noticed this and I wad enraged but it. The URL to the old page is way less easy to remember and I had to add it to my bookmarks. I'm still peeved about it.

This is the bad side of things like OKRs. They push you away from user satisfaction since that harder to measure, coupled with go consequences for missing them. People just force adoption without taking the product signals that come from users rejecting your changes.

I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.

I see Microsoft throwing spaghetti at the wall just in time as “AI” functionality hits government and educational procurement procedures.

The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.

My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).

They boosted copilot numbers by renaming office to copilot. No I'm not joking.

Musk could learn from this to boost his FSD subscription numbers for his bonus payouts.

They did the same thing with Azure right? I remember articles about Microsoft stock that would mention that Azure subscription numbers included Office 365. But the thing is, their weird game of inflating numbers worked. There wasn’t really any negative consequence of doing that. So why wouldn’t they do it again? It’s yet another unfortunate example of dishonesty being rewarded these days.

I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling.

Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.

Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.

We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.

I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html

I tried copilot agent once, and it just claimed that it accessed a website that should have been blocked by corporate firewalls and uploaded a bunch of proprietary data. Lots of very specific information about how it clicked on specific buttons of the website etc.

We raised a high priority ticket with MS and turns out that Copilot Agent lied about the entire thing because the website was blocked. It completely made it up.

The fact that we are supposed to use Copilot Agent for open-ended "research" is mind-boggling.

Copilot uses the Bing search index to access public content. Your corporate firewall is irrelevant.

How did it know about the buttons? Or were they so generic that it could hallucinate them as well?

I wonder if the site you mentioned was earlier harvested through some firewall hole during Copilot's training.

A whole new toolbar appeared in Outlook on my work computer with nothing but a single button to open a copilot chat window. I tried asking it a few simple questions and it completely failed at all of them. Copilot didn't even know if I was using the web or desktop version of the very app it was embedded in!

Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.

I'm baffled by this as well, Microsoft seems to have lost the plot almost completely.

Yeah did they test any of this? Did they run a pilot and ask 1000 users did you use it? Did you like it? Is it better with this than without it?

It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.

Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?

Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.

That only good if you're doing measurably more with the time you save. I feel like I'm significantly faster in parts of my job using Copilot, but when I try to get data on what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before I had it I don't come up with anything. I know I'm working faster, but the time seems to have just gone.

Working faster, but at what?

LLM workflow:

Describing to Claude that I need an edit made in the second paragraph of the third section feels easy, comfortable, and straightforward. I’m using my speech centers, speech to text, and then I wait for a generation during which I hit my phone or Reddit. Poof, the text flies out like magic, taking 20+ seconds, then I re-re-re-read it to make sure the edit was good and nothing was lost in that edit. Oops, the edit inverted the logic of the paragraph, lemme repeat the above… and again… time flies! 2 hours gone in a flash.

Old and boring workflow:

I gruellingly move my mouse to open a file, then take a coffee break. I come back and left-click into the sentence that sucks. I hit Reddit to deal with the anxiety… I think, boo, and then type out the edit I needed. It’s bad, I fix. Coffee break. Squiggly red line from a misspelling? I fix. I google and find a better turn of phrase, copy and paste it in manually with a little edit. Ugh. This sucks. I suck, work sucks. Time sucks. 35 entire minutes of my life has been wasted… time to get another coffee and check Reddit.

———

Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis. The moment to moment feelings are deceptive and we humans are unreliable recorders of time-usage. Particularly when engaged in unwanted effort.

Google has had all this tech for a minute. Their restrained application and lack of 10x-vibe-chad talk make me think their output measurements are aligned with my measurements.

1 rabbit hole hallucination wrong-turn can eat up a lot, lot, lot of magic one-shotting.

> Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis.

Another post on HN likened it to gambling, in the way that slot machines work. Each time you prompt, you could hit the jackpot! But usually you end up with some mediocre or wrong, so you tweak that prompt and pull the lever again. It's and endless cycle.

I wonder if there is somebody here high up in the MSFT stack who understands the tech/code but also oversees more stuff to be able to opine.

They should be trying to convince people it is something they want rather than forcing it on people. Alas that would mean making a product people want and Im not sure they are there.

The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?

But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack

Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.

Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.

Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.

Sounds almost like every manager just covers their ass by formally doing what is expected core top-down idea is "AI is a future, thus make it everywhere".

Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.

Bad leadership, bad management.

So it's FOMO, formalism and conformism.

It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.

Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.

And Teams

The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted.

Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/

If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?

> Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/

It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.

...

On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...

> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."

That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:

The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.

KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!

The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.

My phone, laptop, TV, fridge, etc., all demonstrably worse than they were 5 years ago.

I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.

It's good for creating meeting notes and action lists in Teams, but that's about it.

MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.

I found that the time I spent reviewing and fixing issues/errors/omissions in Copilot’s meeting notes was more than just cleaning up my own notes that I took and sending out.

There's you problem, you care about accuracy!

It's time to accept the new way of working, just change your reality to match the copilot version and boom, you save time fixing its mistakes!

In fact, why have the meeting at all? Just prompt copilot to create notes based on a fictional conception of the meeting and you just saved everyone a whole hour!

Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is complete slop. Claude Code is better with PPT.

even Gemini is better with powerpoint, and they are the nr 1 competitor

CEO has only delivered failure, and in trying to avoid that, they brought it

I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product.

Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.

I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.

> I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do.

That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.

why? I don't base my youtube subscription or my drive subscription based on my AI subscriptions

Sure I get gemini for free now for a year since I have bought a pixel, but I have no intention to renew, I'll likely just leech of the ones my employer pays for

When YouTube is replacing translations with AI-generated ones or if Drive is using all your personal documents as training data, that can definitely drive people away.

Google is certainly looking better than stack overflow.

My take away from mobile first G was “sites need to be fast right guys for mobile?” -> amp -> actually let’s hostile take over the web, oh actually well rework chrome auto sign in, oh actually … just a long string of user hostility

That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.

Incentives almost always drive the outcome.

It's almost as if that's what incentives are for. Whether the outcome is the intended one is of course another question entirely.

You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there

That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.

I'm still super mad at Google+ because it was clearly the cause for Google Reader been killed.

That's when I started losing trust in Google as a company.

They could have led the way to a social web using Google Reader.

Make a Disqus-like comment section that shows the comments in RSS articles from Reader.

Also Reddit, by empowering the GReader Groups capabilities.

But no, let's copy Facebook and force everybody on it. And kill Google Talk while at it.

I'll never forgive Google for that.

Yeah - Google really tried to get people to use Google+ but it always sucked.

YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.

> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.

My experience of Google+ was that it didn't suck, it just didn't offer much Facebook didn't already offer. So why would anyone use it. And then they started automated posting on Google+ for when you did something like comment on youtube, it would make a post on G+ which pissed people off.

>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers.

I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go

Edge /is/ a chromium based browser, it makes sense people wouldn't feel the need to download Chrome unless they want to use their google account to sync devices.

Agree. I gave it a shot recently after being a hater of MS browsers since the 90's and am actually very happy with it. I love the Workspaces and syncing features. Arc had something similar, but Arc started to stall out remain frustratingly buggy. Edge is now my go-to...

Have you forgotten about Edge 1 that was the evolution of IE’s Trident rendering engine? It failed that’s why they then started with the rebranded Chromium Edge 2.

I really enjoyed Edge after it launched, but when they stuffed in all of the shopping plugins and integrations I bailed on it.

Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?

Yes, also it's not even encrypted. It's the worst case of all major browsers.

Firefox & Safari: E2E encrypted, you hold keys, not possible for Mozilla/Apple to access it.

Chrome: Encrypted, Google holds keys meaning it is useless, they can read and give away the data. One can enable sync passphrase which would enable E2E however.

Edge: Nothing is encrypted and no way to change this.

Did you miss the 2019 news that Edge switched to just being another Chromium reskin?

It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?

I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.

That seems far too clear, I'd bet more on "Copilot Online".

I'm holding out for Copilot 365 Explorer Enterprise Edition.

...the only edition where you can disable bing as default search engine

Honestly I didn't even realize Bing hasn't yet been rebranded as Copilot. And honestly who needs a "search engine" anymore when you can just ask Friend Copilot?

> Why can't it just be called "internet"?

Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.

They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.

The Internet Explorer is not for exploring the internet, but the world wide web, so the name never did make sense.

Actually, it views HTML. But if you call it Microsoft HTML Viewer and then wonder why nobody clicks on it.........

I guess intranets don't exist.

Looks like the context understander has logged on. Welcome!

That was the only time when YouTube actually had a proper comment system and you would actually get notified when someone replied to you consistently.

I wish they'd've kept the parts people used the most.

Frankly it's how they insist themselves onto their potential users. When I toyed around with Edge a year or two ago, just to get the t-shirt, it was impossible to set a custom home page for first-open instead of MSN crap. New tabs could be customized, but not the initial page. Apparently they fixed it since, but I still don't see Edge as a serious browser, just another rent seeking marketing tool.

Also Teams and OneNote.

If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.

CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.

Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.

Flashback to the days when literally every MS product had “.NET” shoehorned into its name somewhere because they had to show they were hip to this newfangled information superhighway thing. The development platform that still has that name 20 years later was just one of a zillion confusingly named marketing initiatives back then.

Edit: Wikipedia sums up the "failed branding campaign" quite scathingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

I think that campaign followed on from everything being named "Enterprise" something. I still miss the days when SQL Server Management Studio was called "Enterprise Manager"...

ASP.NET has the dubious honor of featuring two generations of MS buzzwords: "Active" and ".NET".

> Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.

Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.

MSFT not being good at naming things is not new.

I actually think Google+ was a good idea and it's a shame google now has a dozen different products with completely different social identities. Facebook does this right, you have one profile.

Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".

Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.

What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.

And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?

Youtube comments have been nice and constructive for a few years now

You're right. Youtube comments are great now. Granted, it means you can't have controversial conversations there, but that's not what they're for.

Maybe this is just me only subscribing to channels where people behave in the comments and the channel owner actually does some moderation, but I actually kind of agree.

Sure, you find disagreements and arguments, but you don't get the 'ur mum gae', the reductio ad Hitlerum, the dongers, and the outright insane takes and paragraphs of all caps that I would expect from Youtube comments. Meanwhile, every time I open Facebook because of some event I need to press 'going' on, I get a glimpse of some inane take or someone writing in all caps because reasons.

There have been a few waves of comment spam, but maybe Youtube actually managed to curb that now? Only took them two or so years.

I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.

Comments in Facebook may not be perfect, but they are vastly better than youtube comments. This is a false equivalence.

I've personally seen WAY more abusive and hateful comments on Facebook, from real accounts of real people, with pictures and friends and everything, than I have ever seen on YouTube. This may be very locale dependent, but in my country (Romania, which has a pretty large proportion of people online from very socially conservative backgrounds) you can easily find extremely explicitly misoginistic, racist, homophobic, and just plain hateful comments coming from real FB and Instagram accounts, again, from people using their real names and faces and everything. I've seen far fewer similar comments on YouTube videos, even ones from the same country.

Our experiences differ in that regard. And no it isn't a false equivalence since Facebook's "use your real ID" commenting system is directly comparable to any proposed system to mandate use of someone's ID to post on other platforms.

> I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.

This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.

The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.

It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.

I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.

Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.

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Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular.

Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time.

They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have carved out some of this search space with web-search being native to the tools now.

But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion

this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.

Your comment makes me wonder how long have you been online? Google was amazing from ~1999 until 2010 and has slowly deteriorated since.

The first 3 pages are literal copy paste blog slop or SEO ads for the competitor of the thing you are looking for. I dropped Google as primary search ages ago. It's a pale shadow of what it once was.

Google search business is not the most successful in history. It's their ad business and monopolization of online advertising that's the most successful in history and the only way to break their ad monopoly is to stop using their junk.

Google Search hasn't been designed for users in like 10 years

I don't see how "most successful and profitable product" is supposed to disprove a big drop in quality.

people dont use and pay for things that suck

Sure they do. People don't abandon products very fast when they turn worse. And the power of being the default option is massive.

And it's easy to imagine a situation where the other options are still mediocre most of the time, so switching has an advantage but it's not a big compelling thing you shout to the rooftops, so it doesn't get a big popularity wave.

Google search is extremely vulnerable to SEO scams. It's very common to see advertised/high ranked scams with similar domain names (e.g bankname.com vs bankname.co). I switched to Kagi mainly for this reason.

The fact that Google grabbed a monopoly and now is making bank does not mean the product is good.

It was amazing.

Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.

But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.

And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.

Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.

Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.

They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.

it's not "unfounded", mountains of people have observed it. That's the foundation.

There was a brief time when everyone was trying Bing to see the new copilot feature for themselves.

> most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity.

The iPhone is a much stronger contender for that title. It has probably surpassed $1 Trillion in profit for Apple since 2007.

Then prove it? There have been actual studies that confirm this fact. You could also use the fact that google search has been losing market share steadily since 2023 and since search was supported on things like chatGPT as evidence it has been in decline. But, as I have in the past also said, I refuse to argue about this with google employees/devotees because there seems to be a fair amount of delusion involved.

For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)

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Nadella himself wrote:

"2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. [...] We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion. We are beginning to distinguish between “spectacle” and “substance”."

Customers are not buying the spectacle and investors are wondering why there is no substance.

[1] _ https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion

if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse.

the 'new' ai mode routinely creates these silly categories that are not what i was looking for and my screen is filled with repetitive ai summaries of articles. it will ingest a source as fact, and then use that fact to create confirmation bias across other articles. it will even use words like "confirm" when it finds a source saying something, even if the source is junk or seo spam. it becomes somewhat impossible to escape the assumptions the model has made, and i have to resort to traditional web search to get diversity in my results.

and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.

I don't use it often, but at least now I can get an answer. I swear in early 2023 I would just get completely irrelevant, borderline spammy results to the point I gave up and felt helpless because there was no real alternative at that time for how I used google. It felt like the internet broke for a window of time and Bing (very briefly) brought me out of that hell. To this day I still can't believe they didnt capitalize on it.

It cost them (as a guess) -1T of market cap..

In other words they still got rewarded by the market despite all the missteps. I don’t agree with this reality but here we are.

Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.

One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"

Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.

Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.

Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.

I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage

It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.

PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.

There certainly other examples that I failed to address.

This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.

And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-notch.)

Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977

https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...

I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv being the strongest technical organization at MS than its provenance.

I STILL REMEMBER WHEN SOME MARKETING IDIOT DECIDED THAT VISUAL STUDIO NEEDED TO SHOUT AT YOU. IT TOOK THREE MAJOR VERISONS BEFORE VISUAL STUDIO STOPPED LOOKING LIKE THIS COMMENT. OF COURSE THERE WASN'T A SETTING TO MAKE IT NORMAL AGAIN.

Damn, I got frustrated just by reading this comment :D

Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer experience in Visual Studio.

Also VS 2026 was released with a hard milestone, thus while there is a new settings experience, many options show a dialog from VS 2022, because the new UI is still not implemented for the new experience.

Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality.

Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.

I think after the failure of Metro, I think Microsoft gave up on native apps entirely and now the story is web or Electron.

It appears the problem is more deep than that.

From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.

Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place.

I might be wrong, this is more my perception than anything else.

I would say the web took over as the primary application platform and Unix-likes provided convenient low cost license-free foundations to build them on.

No excuse for not having trainings in place for Windows native development, for those new hires.

You don't see Apple and Google doing the same Webviews all over the place on their OSes, with exception of ChromeOS, which appears to be on the death row to be replaced with Android anyway.

In fact, at WWDC 2025 Apple executives even spoke publicly on the matter against that approach.

> nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.

So, in other words, the kids grow up learning and using Linux, right?

More like macOS and Chromebooks, developing mobile apps and Web.

Developers, at least. And Macs.

Ah, thanks. That must be the link with Simon Peyton Jones as well. Seems to be another case of a marketing machine running away with foundational research coming from Europe.*

* no hard feelings

But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive

It has more to do with Microsoft's size and long history. If you are big and have been doing the same thing for many years, naturally you'll want to expand, some of which do succeed.

Google and Facebook have failed to do this, so why is that?

Failed to do what?

I'm sure you can find good analysis of why specific products failed.

And both Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta have a bunch of side projects that are reasonably successful.

They have failed to diversify, is what I meant, despite being around for approx 2 decades

Lets look at diversification of revenue:

meta $164b revenue in 2024: 98% advertising

google $350b revenue in 2024: 76% advertising, 12% google cloud, 12% other

apple $391b revenue in 2024: 66% hardware (iphone, ipad, mac), 25% services (app store etc), 9% other

amazon $638b revenue in 2024: 64% amazon store+associated services, 17% AWS, 9% ads, 11% other

microsoft $245b revenue in 2024: 40% azure/server products, 22% office, 10% windows, 9% gaming, 7% linkedin, 5% search+ads, 8% other

I'm not particularly a microsoft fan, just making this point because I think MS is poorly understood by the HN crowd

Only because they have enough money in the bank.

Thrive, or just muddle through?

Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole:

> “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote.

This is true in almost every large organization, and will affect every enterprise AI product out there. There was a relevant subthread just a couple of days ago recounting this exact, same dynamic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209

In fact, Palantir's secret sauce may not be their tech, but their "Forward Deployed Engineers" model (i.e. a rebranding of "partner engineers embedded within their customers' organizations"). Because it turns out that's a lot of what they do is navigating these bureaucratic and political hurdles to unlock access to the data: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir

It gets even worse if you consider this data is going to be extremely messy, with multiple bespoke, partially-duplicate / overlapping, potentially conflicting versions of the data with varying levels of out-of-datedness, scattered across these silos. (I would know, in a past life, I worked on a months-long project called, self-explanatorily enough, "Stale Docs".)

Yeah, untangling these bureaucratic webs and data horrors is not a quarter-long or year-long project, so investors are gonna be waiting a long time for the impact of AI to be visible. On the bright side, as TFA also hints at, AI providers themselves have been severely capacity-constrained. So hopefully by the time these issues get sorted out enough new capacity would be coming online to actually serve that traffic.

In the meantime, I expect a prolonged period of AI companies feverishly splurging on AI CapEx spend even as Wall Street punishes them repeatedly for the lack of impact of AI being reflected anywhere.

> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company

Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.

Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.

Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone.

I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.

Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to? What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system?

It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of users that will continue to find ways to use their computer the way they want to.

This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough. MS should be happy to retain any end user they can at this point and not continue to piss of some nerds that still use your operating system under the one condition that they get to do so the way they see fit.

It makes more sense if you replace the person buying with "company" and replace "local user" with "employee".

MS wants control and they will figure out some way to monetize that control. Whether it is using the data stored in the cloud for AI training or something else.

If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.

Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft.

But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.

It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.

You mean Munich, and Microsoft bribed them millions of dollars and a HQ relocation to put Microsoft Office back.

The unironic use of "off brand office suite" here is hysterically tragic.

Also, the productivity suite formerly known as Office is these days called "365 Copilot".

Most people are just highly resistant to change, even change for the better.

Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.

We have OnlyOffice as an alternative today. Personally I find the UI quite pleasing. But lately I haven't had any need to use office suite at home so I don't really use it so I have yet to find anything to complain (meanwhile, LibreOffice was horrible, while Office 365 was bearable until you stuff too many things in the equation editor).

Doesn't sound fair at all. What's so "terrible" about it in its current form?

Its really not that bad. I used to use it at work all the time. I did word processing, spreadsheets and presentations all the time with it. Maybe not as powerful as Excel, but I was never really a power user. But then again I never saw any spreadsheets that anybody used that were particularly complex.

At this point, LibreOffice is much better than whatever Microsoft now sells as an office suite.

Which one did they switch to?

Here's a case of a recent one which is early in the cycle

https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft...

LibreOffice isn't bad at all.

LibreOffice is catastrophically bad. It is slow, buggy, and everything it does is either pointlessly emulating a bad product, or pointlessly going against expectations.

It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.

I'm with wolvoleo. I'm forced to use MS Office at work but install only LO on my personal machines. It may lack features or pizzazz but as a reliable, unfussy authoring tool, it serves my needs very well.

> pointlessly going against expectations

If you're referring to the ribbon, I'm not sold on its superiority. The vast majority of other software still uses the familiar menu structure, which is what LO uses too.

Granted, well meaning educational programs expose students to MS Office and its paradigm, from an early age. For their sake, I eagerly await a coding assistant AI powerful enough to reskin LibreOffice to look just MS Office, ribbon and all.

I started my wife on LibreOffice, putting it on her Mac when her 365 subscription lapsed. She loves it. Her needs aren't fancy, though, and she can create her own or open others' documents and spreadsheets just fine.

I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.

I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.

In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.

I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.

Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.

What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.

But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.

So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.

I recently began using markdown readers/writers like Typora and they’ve blown me away— what LibreOffice Writer could have been. Competing directly with MS Word was a trap.

You have to consider the origins, going back to Star Office in the days where most people were on really slow Dialup if they had internet at all. And even a lot of businesses were almost worse, sharing a single dialup or ISDN connection.

How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.

There was a conspiracy theory in my company that M$ had plants in my company to turn everything into M$. "If it doesnt have the word M$ in it, we aren't using it."

I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.

As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.

My company recently decided to move away from Power Automate after having trained lots of people on this 'no code' platform and then having to hire expensive consultants to support or flesh out the apps those users had actually written.

From the article, "its productivity software is used by hundreds of millions of corporate users, a captive audience to whom it can easily promote new AI products."

Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.

weirdly enough, we asked microsoft to help us build these reports and give us insights into these numbers. The ones in our country were utterly incapable and just send screenshots of powerbi reports from the US team.

So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane

Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions.

Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.

If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.

I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.

I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is that.

No, they were all-in on Blockchain-as-a-service on Azure for a hot minute, and it's still included in their supply chain protection stack (which in fairness is one of the few use cases that makes a lot of sense)

This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.

[dead]

It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop.

It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and this also surprised me, more than one billion devices run on Win11. That's also strange - AI is not a big reason for most of these folks then, right? Probably neither positive or negative (or they may not even know about it).

It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get what you get, even if it sucks.

Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.

It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.

Most gamers rather chose PlayStation, Nintendo and XBox instead of Windows PC.

I believe it was only a year or two ago that a study showed PC gaming surpassed all consoles combined by a small amount by MaU

If we are going by the numbers, then casual gaming on mobile phones and tablets is even higher.

> Mobile gaming generated USD 140.53 billion in 2025, accounting for 48.50% of the video game market share. Console revenue followed at USD 56.2 billion, slightly ahead of PC’s USD 46.3 billion. Cloud-gaming services are the fastest-rising category; the segment’s video game market size is projected to reach USD 24.68 billion by 2029 on a 26.25% CAGR. Wider 5G rollout and aggressive platform bundling are converting non-traditional gamers who do not own dedicated hardware. Source: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/video-ga...

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/video-ga...

while I agree there probably are more users on mobile (which notably is not a console), market size is not the same thing as number of people.

Which is kind of irrelevant in the context of ditching Windows for Linux in gaming, in numbers relevant for game studios to care about.

I think PC gaming has some advantage because it casts a huge net over a lot of factors: games big and small, lots of genres, lots of input types, ancient weak hardware to the latest extreme can all be viable, can be tinkered with, developers of all types can produce on it, shared with non-gaming usages. The only way I could see console claiming more of that is if it standardized something similar to a CD/DVD/BD player device, under a consortium and not 'owned' by a single company (or at least easier to license).

If I didn't need to use Power BI or connect to various data sources in Excel I would have requested a MacBook at work years ago.

If you want games, you want Windows. Though Valve is finally chipping away at that.

But mostly it’s cost. It’s simply far cheaper to buy a Windows computer than a Mac if you just want a computer. There are no sub-$300 Macs brand new.

In so many ways, for so many reasons, people “must” use Windows.

It's cheaper to buy a Linux machine compared to a Windows machine by roughly the cost of the Windows license

     irm https://get.activated.win | iex

Maybe in theory, or for power-users, or a couple niche company. In practice for the vast majority of people if it's not a Chromebook, then they're either buying a laptop or a pre-built tower, and it comes with Windows. It should be cheaper to buy a linux machine, but try and find a computer without an OS at Walmart.

Right. I was thinking what I expect most people to do. Walk into Walmart or Best Buy and just grab whatever looks nice to them at the price point they’re willing to pay.

Chromebooks I forgot about. But every time I’ve seen them at a store they’re not mixed in with the “computers“, they’re “othered” into their own little section of the computer area. A bit like Macs in the late ‘90s or early 2000s.

> It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI.

Yeah. Right now the <title> of office.com is:

> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI

Microsoft 365 Copilot... what a product name.

> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI

That's some insight into Microsoft's brain rot, isn't it? "Imagine spending every day for the next year dealing with robot office software."

I spend most work days with robot dev software (claude code). If Copilot had a similar ability to do useful work with meaningful oversight I wouldn't mind spending time with it. Sadly it does not

Putting "AI integrations" on Windows 11 is like layering surstromming on a turd.

innovators dilemma.

they see that the future is AI, but AI doesnt need Microsoft.

But also while the future may be AI (this is debateable), I live and work in the present.

I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept asking me for the spreadsheet like it's open in a browser window.

I always find myself recalibrating if copilot understands what I am doing. I get mixed results. cannot seem to come up with a consistent rule of thumb.

I wanted to do something complex in google sheets. We had just gotten Gemini in gsheet. I assumed they'd have used some fancy mcp and enabled us to do a lot of things but all gemini in gsheet could do was summarize

I think the difference with Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, and where it's being pushed. Because Copilot is bundled with software people need, it's going to get a lot more scrutiny compared to AI products that aren't built into the OS/built into Office, etc. In a way, being an "agentic OS" isn't that different from say Moltbot (conceptually), but one of those ideas seems to have gotten quite a bit of excitement, and the other a lot of anger, because Moltbot isn't being forced on you.

> Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us,

AI demand goes though. AI investments numbers good. Numbers up. Not because people choose, because corporations are fomo-ing it and we don't have a choise.

True. Let's not forget that they are rebranding Office 364 as Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Don't worry, after a decade or two of having Windows reinstall and re-enable it every couple weeks against their users' wishes I'm sure they'll get the market penetration they're looking for...

This is repeated endlessly by non-Windows fans I assume, because I disabled AI and other annoyances in Windows long ago and they haven't come back. I even used to worry about updating Windows because I saw this warning so many times, but then I did and it just never came to pass.

Microsoft has a long and well documented history of resetting user preferences.

Multiple times I've disabled the cortana taskbar search widget, only to have a windows update turn it back on and proudly gives me a popup telling me they noticed it was disabled and turned it back on for me.

Microsoft will forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.

Starting when you selected "don't install Windows 10" and it asked you a few times and you kept selecting that and then you woke up one day and your computer was running Windows 10, and blue screened when you logged in

Microsoft has pinned a Copilot shortcut to my taskbar after an update multiple times.

One time they replaced my "show desktop" button in the bottom right with a Copilot button.

That's called malware. Like that's literally malware by any reasonable definition. The fact that it's branded by and distributed by a multi trillion dollar corporation does not make it not malware. Your PC has been compromised, and it would be wise to solve your problem instead of trying to make the best of running malware.

AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.

People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)

I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.

It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.

If what they are getting is "not much, plus a side order of hallucination", then connecting the dots is exactly what they DON'T want to do.

> I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.

Confusion and fear are much better for stock prices than clarity

Which copilot?

github copilot? bing copilot? office365 copilot? office365 copilot chat? windows copilot? or one of those clippy like copilots in dev environments that can't do anything but point you to the wrong documentation?

I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.

When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.

For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.

I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.

You know things are running bad when they've lost even the likes of WSJ. And yet Satya and his ilk (across the LLM space) keep pushing it. It does not matter that this technologically on its own can never reach what they kept promising. Is the pride and ego of a couple of CEOs so important that we'll all just watch them bringing the whole market down ?

The 3.3% paid conversion is not great.

Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.

People who paid are leaving.

That's a churn problem.

The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and Gemini at higher rates.

Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but won't share the numbers.

That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.

This is the Ballmer story all over again.

  - Massive distribution advantage
  - Captive enterprise base

Windows Phone had carrier deals too.

The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight.

This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:

  > "About a year ago, Nadella sent a frustrated email to Rajesh Jha, 
  > executive vice president of experiences and devices, detailing an incident in which 
  > Nadella had asked the enterprise version of Copilot on the Edge browser 
  > to help with a public webpage he was on, 
  > but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"

Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.

> Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.

I audibly winced

There are in fact almost 30 products with Copilot in the name now. Though they've seem to have cut a few recently like the sales version

  > but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"

Another reason to use ChatGPT.

> unlike anything we've seen before

They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…

> growth is "unlike anything we've seen before"

This says nothing about where the growth is going

Does anyone know why microsoft thought it would be a good idea to alter the right-click menu in a folder to hide all the important choices behind a second, "Show more options" click? Just making the user click once more where previously they didnt have to?

I use StartAllBack to replace the Start menu with more or less the Windows 7 one, and it also has features to restore file explorer to the more sensible Windows 7/8 versions.

God, it's so dumb. And these 2 menues have 2 different looks, because I guess for Windows 11 they reimplemented it in whatever fancy fucking UI framework they decided to make, but they didn't complete the implementation so they still had to offer the "legacy" version of the menu.

For a long while "Settings" had 2 interfaces, 1 that looks like it's from the iPhone, and the other which is from "Control Panel"...

I forgot that there are three different, separate, different-looking settings menus for the mouse, which show three layers of legacy OS implementation.

Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.

My work computer's Win 11 install is originally French, I'm using the English UI. Searching for "Display" in the start menu shows me Display-related settings... in English and French. Looking at it closely, the English results point to settings available via the Control Panel, and the French ones point to settings in the "Settings" app. Picking a French result opens the Settings app, in English.

But yeah, Microsoft competency means it's also fine to show some search results in the language which isn't the user's preferred UI language.

Microsoft's focus was making it so that AI could allow unskilled workers to replace skilled workers. The hope was that everyone but sales/management could be offshored to SEA/India/etc and AI would somehow make up for the skill differential.

The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.

Yeah, my experience is currently pointing towards AI replacing the cheap workers instead of the expensive ones.

> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race. But data shows that it is losing ground with users.

This explains perfectly the annoying behavior when you search for ChatGPT using Edge. The top thing that appear to you is, well, Copilot and not ChatGPT! Tagged as "Promoted by Microsoft" and labeled as "Your Copilot is here", is clearly a weak move from MS to push Copilot as possible as it can despite its limitations in what it can do compared to its competitors.

At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...

Text-only, no Javascript:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf...

I am building Agents for a long while now. The problem with Copilot is that it gets in the way too many times without being useful. Examples: When I open an email with 3 short lines of text, why do I need a "summary by copilot" button?

When I open a meeting invote from someone else the first 1/3rd of the screen is occupied with "Prepare for your meeting" nonsense. The "insights" button just provides general knowledge akin to "read the documentation".

Absolutely. And trying to be invasive by adding Copilot buttons everywhere. It's reminiscent of "free toolbar" adware.

Solution: Add MCP to MS applications, then isolate Copilot to its own app.

Make MCP as pervasive as OLE Automation once was

In some ways this reminds me of the .NET marketing debacle Microsoft pulled where every product suddenly was ".NET" and nobody could explain what that meant or what it did that was helpful.

Similarly Copilot is everywhere, but why I would want it there or use it there is unknown.

Microsoft has access to all the OpenAI/ChatGPT tech. How is their chatbot so awful? Seems like they are trying their hardest to screw this up.

I think it comes down to..not every product in the world is improved by AI. but shareholders believe they all should be. So its crammed into all of them, instead of the few that would really benefit.

The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.

MS Copilot for Android has some annoying UI bugs which they seemingly refuse to fix. The biggest is that the chat area sometimes gets randomly resized so that you can hardly read anything. There is also no way to search past chats. For all the billions they are spending on AI, their chat interface seems inexplicably half-assed.

They seemingly forgot to ask their "almost-agi-future-of-economics-the-best-thing-ever" to fix the UI...

Is anyone surprised? Windows can't even open and close file explorer reliably without lagging or refusing to respond. How could they possibly rival these models?

They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year.

When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash.

I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.

It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the company to open source, naturally not without their own intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer branding, anything related to Windows.

Just because Satya is bald and Indian, doesn't make him Gandhi. Ballmer was Bill's bulldog, but he couldn't direct the company's strategy nearly as effectively as his predecessor; Nadella is craftier. Microsoft has been Microsofting harder than ever lately, and their open source strategy is very subtly embrace-extend-extinguish. I honestly think that by 2030 they will have begun executing a plan to disallow Linux (or any other OS) from running on new PCs without a Windows hypervisor underneath it.

Luckily you can use "Linux" on Google's products, or Amazon for that matter. /s

In what concerns EEE in open source, there are plenty of candidates, expecially everyone that has contributed for the detriment of GPL based licenses in favour of business friendly licenses.

> ...they are down ~12% for the year.

Given how unstable stock prices typically are over the short term, and given that we're currently something like thirty-five days into the year, I don't consider that fact to mean much.

Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.

I mean, Apple is at ATH from basically waiting out and picking the winner from its throne. Everyone clowned them, but it also made them not waste money until things are a bit more clear.

The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.

Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.

However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.

Copilot should not have been released. A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.

For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.

People hate it, and for hood reason.

It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.

Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams

Bah

Copilot is basically ChatGPT after Microsoft hit it on the head with a pipe hard enough and long enough to drop it about 20 IQ points.

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is...

Copilot is such a typical MS product.

It checks all the correct checkboxes on a feature list in comparison to the competition but it just sucks to use.

It's like Sharepoint - the deathpit of all collaborative software

Microsoft Copilot: The Sharepoint of chatbots

I can't imagine a description more likely to give corporate workers the ick.

It's a product that gives system administrators a power trip. Imagine you control every capability of an AI and you're not qualified to have engineered it. You would give more access to your favorite departments, projects, and coworkers while keeping the defaults as restrictive as possible. I've seen this happen in real time across many different companies. I've known people who were reported to HR by them for using HuggingFace.

Product leaders should really measure internal usage as a litmus test for whether or not people actually want these things. It's honestly shocking how much MS's brand has diminished in the last few years because of them pushing the copilot brand into everything.

Microslop can never be a real Ai company if they can't build a frontier model and push the envelope themselves. Today they are completely dependent on 3rd party companies, not a good position to be in.

They own a quarter of openai

Right, they had to buy it, not build it

Nadella is in the position he's is, clearly, and I'm just a nobody. The guy must be onto something, and I'm just a delusional internet commentator.

However.

No-one I know, literally not a single soul, is delighted by using any of the copilot-branded tools. What's more, almost everyone seems to resent these tools due to their hamfisted design, poor performance and seedy marketing.

The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit.

Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base?

I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are.

The mind truly boggles.

Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.

Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.

Can't say Win 11 is really that bad.

Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.

The reason is they’re gearing up to push the AR/VR-first UI/UX.

and it’s definitely got some bad edges right now.

Literally.

  > which "just doesn't work"

  step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
  step 2. download iso
  step 3. flash iso on medium
  step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
  step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
  step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.

>I guess almost anyone can do the following

almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course

theres probably less than 10 people in my entire company that know half of the words you wrote there. whats an "iso"? what is "flashing" the "iso"? how do i "boot medium"? what is "KDE" and why do i want to say yes?

(i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the vast majority of people do not)

You are right, I somehow forgot the word "here" after "anyone". I don't expect the average laymen be able to follow these steps, but I have those expectations from the people here.

According to the CEO peddling AI, software engineers are about to be replaced by AI, how come AI hasn't fixed all of their atrocious software hmmm..

Microsoft's everything is running into problems. Seriously though, it always seems like a dumpster fire over there but the last year is next level with all their Windows 11 problems, Windows update problems, Office365 outages, Copilot issues, Azure outages etc... not to mention the features no one seems to want.

Several people are not happy about the association with Bill Gates, too.

What I find deeply troubling is that, from people I know, Microsoft is making it harder to use any other AI tool in the enterprise. Copilot operates like a computer virus where you can only use it for AI or you will be fired. It's really frustrating to hear about people I know when they can't do basic things with AI and their organizational policy changes it day-by-day in order to get the numbers up for Copilot. Their basic workflows involving PyTorch or Sklearn are being kneecapped and it's getting worse. Microsoft is becoming a huge liability for AI professionals that I know of.

The problem here is attributing “Copilot” as a simple chat bot. This is one of the features, yes- but it exists to make surveillance en masse easier. When copilot is on every device, OS and application- they can correlate so many bits of information on people.

The lobotomized version of Open AI models. It feels worse than small local models I run. Does anyone know what size of models they are running?

The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.

These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.

It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.

Yup, I asked it how long an azure subscription had existed and it could not even tell me that. Literally now() minus the object’s creation date and it had no idea what to do.

Agree. In general, the whole Microsoft "Admin" panel is utter garbage. Messy, slow, with ten different interfaces. Finding something without Googling it first is impossible.

Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.

This still works for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565

Ok, let's put that in the toptext. Thanks!

If you have Apple News, you can open the article in Safari and then "Share" it to the News app.

For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original

Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems

...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems

Oh, but it does.

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Correction: Three tags: 1. <p>, 2. <a> with href attribute and 3. <meta> with charset attribute