> it's hard to believe we're going to see a version of Windows that isn't bloated with AI functionality most people didn't ask for.
All the leadership need to do is read these types of articles and they’ll see what’s going on outside the walls. One wonders how the internal incentives can be so wrong.
The investors want AI because they believe it will replace all intellectual work, and so the company with the best AI will get all the money from several other sectors.
The execs want AI to show to the investors to improve their job security and compensation packages.
The middle managers want AI to show execs to improve their promotion causes.
The customers only get to talk to the day to day employees of the company, so their opinion doesn’t matter to the rest of the hierarchy
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted.
"Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on.
I'm less weary of people not giving a shit about it than people making llms/generative ai their whole personality
Grown adults spamming the web about this new model from Megacorp X, being all giggly about the new PeLiCaN On A BiCyClE being 0.000017% more realistic than the previous version... get a life
No one gives a shit outside of these nerds, all people want is less work and more free time, they don't give a shit about your generated "art", or how fast this new model solved a problem they didn't know existed 12 seconds ago
On top of that: it seems like Microsoft (and Google too) is doing its best at alienating customers with those measures.
Everything is now either accessing your data directly and you have to opt-out or you can't even opt out at all.
This AI rush/push is also permeating every line and product: from the office suite, to github, to vscode, and even open source tools are getting AI shoved in, like Playwright, and it feels everything else is an afterthought.
It seems Nadya is making a Ballmer-level play. Ballmer had the right intuition: that Microsoft had to move its focus from the desktop to the cloud. But the execution was poor. Now history's repeating.
Agree - argue with customers at your own peril ... moreover sophisticated devs and companies want freedom from corporate control and the underlying attitude of entitlement ... a kind of campish behavior where customers buy-in to the corporate hustle which corps think customers are obligated to play along with.
Nah ah ...
I'll say the same thing another way: customers tell suppliers whether or not they're satisfied. They don't tell me. I tell them if I think the price is worth it. They don't tell me. Argue with me and they'll lose
All they have to do is sell regular "windows" and "windowsAI" as a separate product and everyone would be fine with it... but no FUCK YOU ads in your fucking start menu you stupid bitch customer.
(sorry for big words, but this is how i feel they are talking to me when the base operating system I am suppose to put absolute trust in my privacy in treats me like an idiot)
It’s really becoming desperate and counterproductive.
I’ve had an Alfred command since 2013 where I type `wiki something` which then opens Confluence and searches for `something`. I use this to quickly search our company wiki for terms without breaking my concentration and flow.
Atlassian decided to add an AI summary at the top and intentionally disable the rest of the results until the AI summary has finished rendering fully. It’s insane. How is this making me more productive? It’s just shearing off one other layer of familiarity and value I’ve enjoyed for 12 years and pushing me away from their product.
Forced adoption rarely works out unless people really want the feature and don’t know that they want it. At the very least, let us disable it.
Super smart is a dilution to the word "smart". The ongoing dilution of the word "smart" and "intelligence" is going to haunt us for centuries. LLMs are better seen as the Chinese Room human in the cell combining symbols it doesn't understand
AI failed at Microsoft because they already lost the consumer trust. I doubt they would have this issue with AI integration if people didn’t feel that installing windows is a hostile corporate takeover of your computer.
He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?
Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.
At this particular moment in time, the old quote about "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" feels relevant on a couple of levels. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst and for these executives to be forced into finally confronting the realities of this technology, but it is taking a very long time indeed.
"Why aren't you impressed we installed a real live trained dancing grizzly bear in your bathroom!? Yes, I know nobody asked for that bear. Yes, I know the toilet still doesn't flush. Yes, I know the bear sometimes eats people trying to take a shower. Don't you understand?! I grew up using an OUTHOUSE! Have you seen the bear's colorful hat? That bear literally dances the macarena, you ingrates!"
Windows has just become too bloated trying to do to many things. I like CoPilot, but all the “Clippy” style integrations of crap in Windows directly is just poor design. Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
People are crying out for an intelligent Clippy to help them through the day. (Or maybe that little dog they used for a while, though don't know its name)
There's nothing underwhelming about AI. It's how Microsoft damages anything it touches, and lies to users about it. They force a stupid "copilot" key into computers and encourage the waste of resources into "chips with AI capabilities", only to push your data to the cloud, deceitfully, and with very poor safety guarantees.
Also, people have a Windows backlash in general, and Microsoft ignores it, as usual.
> It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.
This is your business. It should "make you curious." Saying it "cracks you up" is ridiculous behavior from someone in your position. I will never do business with someone like this.
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!
Because you were bored? Or because you literally set time aside every day to play it because it was just that good? What is this nonsense?
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation
I have "fluent conversations" already. With people. About recent and relevant things. The fact that a computer can pretend to do this is not impressive. Press on it hard enough and you'll immediately see the cracks. We've had weak chat bots since forever.
> with a super smart AI
That's trained on existing data. It cannot synthesize new perspectives or prerogatives. It often fails to know anything that recently occurred. It often presents data as if it is absolutely true and that it could not possibly be wrong. It's the opposite of smart in every way.
> that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It can make copies. It cannot generate anything novel. There was no part of my life that was hampered by the fact I couldn't generate images or videos. This is an amusement, not anything that adds to my bottom line.
Look, GPT-3 was pretty magical. DALL-E was amazing.
Everything since then has not really pushed too far passed that "impressive tech demo" state. I like using AI to help me with coding. That's... about it.
This Microsoft response reminds me of the 2018 Blizzcon event, where the Diablo Immortal developer challenged the audience with "Do you guys not have phones?" when the audience asked if the game was coming to PC.
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
At the time I got the feeling that the presenter got the genuine impression that players would at least not be completely disappointed by the announcement.
Here it's hard to understand Microsoft's surprise when almost everything Windows has done for the last ten years was despised by mostly everyone. I was thinking that decision makers knew they were making unpopular moves but did not care since there's no way Windows can lose market share. I assume he must be faking surprise, but I am not sure for what purpose since staying silent and going forward would have had less press. Well I guess bad publicity is still publicity.
My local state representatives just attempted this at our latest "town hall meeting" [i.e. to participate: scan the 8.5"x11" QR code, taped upon each chair].
I do not carry a phone, let alone one that scans QR codes... so instead I just provided 300 pound union dude commentary throughout our entire meeting. I definitely participated.
The endgame is obvious: make people train agents and models that will replace them. Executives at MS must think this is subtle and a genius move, but it is obvious and low effort. They don't see that making crappy products in the short term will strengthen their competition, even from small contenders, which might disrupt their core. I doubt MS will out execute others in this race. Let's wait and see :)
127 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 95.0 ms ] threadAll the leadership need to do is read these types of articles and they’ll see what’s going on outside the walls. One wonders how the internal incentives can be so wrong.
The execs want AI to show to the investors to improve their job security and compensation packages.
The middle managers want AI to show execs to improve their promotion causes.
The customers only get to talk to the day to day employees of the company, so their opinion doesn’t matter to the rest of the hierarchy
It is the same reason every app (be they web or mobile) gets a redesign every year.
It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted. "Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on.
Grown adults spamming the web about this new model from Megacorp X, being all giggly about the new PeLiCaN On A BiCyClE being 0.000017% more realistic than the previous version... get a life
No one gives a shit outside of these nerds, all people want is less work and more free time, they don't give a shit about your generated "art", or how fast this new model solved a problem they didn't know existed 12 seconds ago
No. Go away.
Everything is now either accessing your data directly and you have to opt-out or you can't even opt out at all.
This AI rush/push is also permeating every line and product: from the office suite, to github, to vscode, and even open source tools are getting AI shoved in, like Playwright, and it feels everything else is an afterthought.
It seems Nadya is making a Ballmer-level play. Ballmer had the right intuition: that Microsoft had to move its focus from the desktop to the cloud. But the execution was poor. Now history's repeating.
Even just the remind me later option gives me such a horrible vibe. F off Google and respect my choice.
Nah ah ...
I'll say the same thing another way: customers tell suppliers whether or not they're satisfied. They don't tell me. I tell them if I think the price is worth it. They don't tell me. Argue with me and they'll lose
(sorry for big words, but this is how i feel they are talking to me when the base operating system I am suppose to put absolute trust in my privacy in treats me like an idiot)
I’ve had an Alfred command since 2013 where I type `wiki something` which then opens Confluence and searches for `something`. I use this to quickly search our company wiki for terms without breaking my concentration and flow.
Atlassian decided to add an AI summary at the top and intentionally disable the rest of the results until the AI summary has finished rendering fully. It’s insane. How is this making me more productive? It’s just shearing off one other layer of familiarity and value I’ve enjoyed for 12 years and pushing me away from their product.
Forced adoption rarely works out unless people really want the feature and don’t know that they want it. At the very least, let us disable it.
Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.
Wonder if he calls any of his rejected dates a “cynic” because they said no to him, too.
MSFT reminds me of INTC.
There's nothing underwhelming about AI. It's how Microsoft damages anything it touches, and lies to users about it. They force a stupid "copilot" key into computers and encourage the waste of resources into "chips with AI capabilities", only to push your data to the cloud, deceitfully, and with very poor safety guarantees.
Also, people have a Windows backlash in general, and Microsoft ignores it, as usual.
Jeez there are so many clueless CEOs!
> It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.
This is your business. It should "make you curious." Saying it "cracks you up" is ridiculous behavior from someone in your position. I will never do business with someone like this.
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!
Because you were bored? Or because you literally set time aside every day to play it because it was just that good? What is this nonsense?
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation
I have "fluent conversations" already. With people. About recent and relevant things. The fact that a computer can pretend to do this is not impressive. Press on it hard enough and you'll immediately see the cracks. We've had weak chat bots since forever.
> with a super smart AI
That's trained on existing data. It cannot synthesize new perspectives or prerogatives. It often fails to know anything that recently occurred. It often presents data as if it is absolutely true and that it could not possibly be wrong. It's the opposite of smart in every way.
> that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It can make copies. It cannot generate anything novel. There was no part of my life that was hampered by the fact I couldn't generate images or videos. This is an amusement, not anything that adds to my bottom line.
Everything since then has not really pushed too far passed that "impressive tech demo" state. I like using AI to help me with coding. That's... about it.
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
Here it's hard to understand Microsoft's surprise when almost everything Windows has done for the last ten years was despised by mostly everyone. I was thinking that decision makers knew they were making unpopular moves but did not care since there's no way Windows can lose market share. I assume he must be faking surprise, but I am not sure for what purpose since staying silent and going forward would have had less press. Well I guess bad publicity is still publicity.
My local state representatives just attempted this at our latest "town hall meeting" [i.e. to participate: scan the 8.5"x11" QR code, taped upon each chair].
I do not carry a phone, let alone one that scans QR codes... so instead I just provided 300 pound union dude commentary throughout our entire meeting. I definitely participated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqjVdPtB9lU