Maybe they could add a helpful paper clip to improve sales.
Edit: Or better still, convince all of their customers to throw away perfectly good hardware and upgrade to one with a single extra chip, creating a hazardous waste epidemic for landfills as a nice side effect. It's especially important to do this in the middle of a RAM and HDD shortage.
Really, I'll just never be half the great business strategist that these guys are. <sigh>
Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive.
But this also means they end up with average products. They don't have the talent to do something exceptional.
This has worked well for them when they can just come in and copy something (say AWS in Azure) and not pay the innovation cost, but AI seems different for some reason, perhaps in the same way search was. You need the top 20% in order to really be successful.
Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.
I think the expectation of software quality in consumers has completely evaporated, and so people expect appallingly bad software and think it's normal. This isn't just the case for Microsoft - look at the baby-ification of macOS UI (let's make it like a children's iPad), any Google software offering (very poor performance) and the majority acceptance of web-browser-in-a-window-is-a-desktop-application software development. They accept things like Slack and Teams (awful software) but also put up with Skype getting worse in the decades before.
Office 2003 and prior were quite good, but then people think Google Docs is somehow equivalent to the functionality of Word.
Admittedly, Active Directory was afflicted by impossibly tiny windows for the management tabs, but the functionality worked (and you could write your own extensions to the LDAP tree and COM-based UI interface for them) as proven by the rehashing of part of the functionality into Google's "organisational" offerings (sign into Chrome and receive restrictions from your organisational (company) overlord, the new Group Policy).
It's a real pity. If we showed software today via a time machine to ourselves 25+ years ago, we'd be shocked at how slow and ineffectual it was and deeply distressed that this was the norm worldwide.
I would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find installed programs or local files.
Gemini is really great now. Fast is insanely fast and handles 90% of queries. Deep Research works better than OpenAI's deep research given their search expertise.
It is going to be very hard for OpenAI or Microsoft to compete with this now that Google has gotten their act together.
IMO, it's time for leadership change at Microsoft. Satya revitalized the company but now it needs a Product person that knows how to rebuild the quality of it's products.
AI assistance is a gold rush — promotions are to be made and huge complex system to be over-engineered in Big Tech. The race to stake out the future empires is underway, and there is no time to think about the quality control, UX etc. But who am I kidding though, there is no time to think about those things during the chillest of times either, as any user of Power Automate can concur.
I see mentions of Gemini as a fast growing alternative to ChatGPT. Isn't anyone troubled by the fact that for consumers there is no way to keep your data from being used for model training if you want to maintain history of your Gemini chats.
ChatGPT respects privacy and allows for maintaining history while also opting out of using ones data for model training
Their copilot stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed with marketing slop on top of an under-performing product.
However; their azure offerings are somewhat decent. AI Search is getting quite decent, access to Open AI models served through foundry is quite the differentiator (although the rate limits are an issue), their reference architectures are very helpful and their ancillary services, like document intelligence integrate well.
I'm a bit worried that their marketing dept has gotten their crappifying and obfuscating eyes set on those services though, given the recent rebranding of Foundry and what not, but the underlying services are decent.
It doesn’t matter. Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and they have no qualms using it to displace competing products. They did it with Teams, and they’ll keep doing it because they know there’s no appetite for anti-trust prosecution anymore (or maybe they feel comfortable arguing they’re no longer a monopoly because they have no presence in mobile).
Every procurement team is going to point to copilot, saying it’s included with the other Microsoft services a company is already paying for, so duplicate AI products won’t be approved for purchase.
Microsoft is laying claim to the desktop real estate, so in a few more generations of the technology, they’ll have the customers and competitors will already be starved out.
Big corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons that some committee decided solved a problem.
When the internet came out, did many legacy companies lead the way with online experiences, figuring out what the real killer apps now that everyone was connected were? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it, I think it gave rise to some of the present crop of big tech, and others reinvented themselves after the use cases were discovered.
All that to say, I expect the same here. In 10 years there will be AI uses we take for granted, built by companies we haven’t heard of yet (plus the coding apps) and nobody will talk about stupid “rephrase with AI” and other mindless crap that legacy companies tried to push.
They bought Dragon a few years ago, and 2 years ago they debuted the Dragon Ambient Experience, then renamed to Dragon Copilot. We had dozens of doctors try it, after a handful of months most had quit, it was a bad product. We switched to a competitor at literally 1/6th the price, and we don't even have to offer it, the doctors tell each other about it and they ask for it.
Nadella has done a lot of listening through is CEO reign but it looks like MS is back in a "don't listen to customers, tell them what they'll get" phase.
Not just about the products imho. I do some consulting for law firms who typically use the MSFT stack, and I was excited about the private ChatGPT services in Azure, because from my (admittedly limited) sample of law firms, nobody likes using Copilot and LLMs need to be private/secure. The amount of outdated and poor quality documentation for Azure services is amazing given how nascent these services are.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadHelpful chart to draw conclusions
Copilot and AI are not on the list anymore.
Edit: Or better still, convince all of their customers to throw away perfectly good hardware and upgrade to one with a single extra chip, creating a hazardous waste epidemic for landfills as a nice side effect. It's especially important to do this in the middle of a RAM and HDD shortage.
Really, I'll just never be half the great business strategist that these guys are. <sigh>
But this also means they end up with average products. They don't have the talent to do something exceptional.
This has worked well for them when they can just come in and copy something (say AWS in Azure) and not pay the innovation cost, but AI seems different for some reason, perhaps in the same way search was. You need the top 20% in order to really be successful.
Office 2003 and prior were quite good, but then people think Google Docs is somehow equivalent to the functionality of Word.
Admittedly, Active Directory was afflicted by impossibly tiny windows for the management tabs, but the functionality worked (and you could write your own extensions to the LDAP tree and COM-based UI interface for them) as proven by the rehashing of part of the functionality into Google's "organisational" offerings (sign into Chrome and receive restrictions from your organisational (company) overlord, the new Group Policy).
It's a real pity. If we showed software today via a time machine to ourselves 25+ years ago, we'd be shocked at how slow and ineffectual it was and deeply distressed that this was the norm worldwide.
It is going to be very hard for OpenAI or Microsoft to compete with this now that Google has gotten their act together.
Satya’s days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very costly and painful lesson.
ChatGPT respects privacy and allows for maintaining history while also opting out of using ones data for model training
However; their azure offerings are somewhat decent. AI Search is getting quite decent, access to Open AI models served through foundry is quite the differentiator (although the rate limits are an issue), their reference architectures are very helpful and their ancillary services, like document intelligence integrate well.
I'm a bit worried that their marketing dept has gotten their crappifying and obfuscating eyes set on those services though, given the recent rebranding of Foundry and what not, but the underlying services are decent.
Every procurement team is going to point to copilot, saying it’s included with the other Microsoft services a company is already paying for, so duplicate AI products won’t be approved for purchase.
Microsoft is laying claim to the desktop real estate, so in a few more generations of the technology, they’ll have the customers and competitors will already be starved out.
When the internet came out, did many legacy companies lead the way with online experiences, figuring out what the real killer apps now that everyone was connected were? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it, I think it gave rise to some of the present crop of big tech, and others reinvented themselves after the use cases were discovered.
All that to say, I expect the same here. In 10 years there will be AI uses we take for granted, built by companies we haven’t heard of yet (plus the coding apps) and nobody will talk about stupid “rephrase with AI” and other mindless crap that legacy companies tried to push.
Nadella has done a lot of listening through is CEO reign but it looks like MS is back in a "don't listen to customers, tell them what they'll get" phase.