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

https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-has-a-problem-nobody-wants-to-buy-or-use-its-shoddy-ai

by mohi-kalantari • 8 months ago

427 370 8 months ago

windowscentral.com

jimbob45• 8 months ago

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ...

Helpful chart to draw conclusions

NicoJuicy• 8 months ago

That's 2 years old?

glimshe• 8 months ago

Is Bing now called "Copilot" too?

CoastalCoder• 8 months ago

Or "Watson". I lose track.

stackghost• 8 months ago

Copilot .NET Core, not to be confused with Copilot Core, and Microsoft Core Copilot Plus.

luis_journey• 8 months ago

I don't understand why they name everything Copilot now, it's the most confusing thing in the world. Copilot AI, Copilot 365 Copilot. GitHub Copilot makes the most sense I think because it's Copilot AI but for coding.

remirk• 8 months ago

I doubt it's useful to draw conclusions in today's world. The chart is almost two years old.

PKop3• 8 months ago

Not so helpful, it's too out of date

amai2• 8 months ago

This is from 2025: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-microsoft-makes-its-bil...

Copilot and AI are not on the list anymore.

jpmattia• 8 months ago

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>

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

Aw, that won't matter when management just forces you to use Copilot or else you're fired.

jacquesm4• 8 months ago

Unfortunately that is probably how it will end.

SideburnsOfDoom• 8 months ago

That's how it already is in some companies.

outside12342• 8 months ago

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.

jacquesm4• 8 months ago

The only time they copied something successfully and did not rely on major tie-ins with their existing monopoly was Xbox and that division lost money hand over fist for a long time.

Hasz• 8 months ago

this is just not true. Building great products with average talent is a sign of great management, and it's been done before in both business and sports. moneyball is about this idea at some level.

Plenty of SV is building below average products with exceptional talent.

lateforwork2• 8 months ago

Building great products

This is where they are failing.

Plenty of SV is building below average products with exceptional talent.

Yes, you can hire exceptional talent and give them poor directions, resulting in poor products.

But to hire mediocre talent and still produce competitive products you must have an unfair advantage of some sort. The Windows and Office monopolies gave Microsoft that unfair advantage. But it is becoming clear that this unfair advantage does not extend to AI.

lateforwork2• 8 months ago

That’s exactly what happened. For the past decade, the crème de la crème went to Google and Meta, which offered nearly double what Microsoft paid new graduates. Microsoft hired the next tier, after the top talent had already been skimmed off by Google and Meta.

Der_Einzige2• 8 months ago

Intel/AMD hired 2 tiers below MS. Intel's "great place to work" corporate propaganda was known as "Great place to leetcode" by engineers there.

Marsymars4• 8 months ago

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.

That's only if you're only looking at the top 10% or w/e of the market in the first place. New grad software engineer salaries at MS are higher than the median software engineer salary in the US.

lll-o-lll3• 8 months ago

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.

This is such a BS attitude. A person’s ability doesn’t map directly with their salary.

The very best developers I’ve ever worked with? Small companies outside of major cities (for life style reasons). Not everyone is trying to max their income; some want a good job doing something they love.

Small companies can offer more meaningful impact, if you’re not the type who likes being a tiny cog or commanding armies.

rcxdude4• 8 months ago

Sure, but Microsoft isn't attracting those devs either.

Der_Einzige2• 8 months ago

You are coping. Overwhelmingly the quality of developers is reflected in their pay packages. Overwhelmingly most people are motivated by money/benefits/QOL/GPUs.

This attitude is how you maximize your TC.

this_user• 8 months ago

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.

janlukacs• 8 months ago

I find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap software.

drcongo3• 8 months ago

My theory is that they deliberately make Windows so shit to filter out anyone with taste. Once you have a userbase of people who don't know better, you can sell them any old crap. Like Teams.

falcor842• 8 months ago

It's the oldest trick in the IT book - focus on the buyer persona and ignore the user persona.

esskay• 8 months ago

Ditto. The more interesting part is how many people will defend it. Presumably some mix of post-purchase rationalisation and inherited assumptions about what's "standard" even when those assumptions stopped being true ages ago.

Draiken4• 8 months ago

I find it infuriating, but that's how the system's supposed to work. It's the definition of a monopoly and they're in the extraction phase. When there's no competition (and eventually there's always going to be a winner) you don't need to make good products anymore.

They've successfully indoctrinated whole generations to use Windows/Office. Here in Brazil using a computer was (probably still is) synonymous to using Windows/Office. Everyone had their pirated version of Windows and many don't even know that alternatives exist. When those people open companies they'll use what they know.

Software companies have to build for the most popular OSes and most can't justify anything else. Which then means most software only works on Windows and people can't leave it even if there are better alternatives (see Adobe). Finally, any non-closed computer comes with Windows so the cycle continues forever.

dugidugout• 8 months ago

I'm guessing the broader demographic of users simply don't think the software is crap. My buddy working in water transportation was just raving about Teams to me the other day. His praise basically boiled down to being integrated with his organization, providing him easy access to his department-resources. I suppose it does serve my buddy well.

afavour• 8 months ago

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

stackskipton2• 8 months ago

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

dylan6042• 8 months ago

And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too

You say this like it was a mystery to start with. When you own 90+% of the user base, you can create trends with any changes implemented

llm_nerd• 8 months ago

Microsoft's entire business model has been tying. Countless millions are forced to use Copilot because their IT department has contracts with Microsoft, and those same contracts are why they use Office, Teams, and so on. Their developers use Visual Studio, deploy to Azure, and run it all against SQL Server. Their email comes from Exchange.

It has been an incredibly lucrative strategy. We all herald some CEO's prowess in growing revenue when they've been doing the same playbook for decades now, and have been running on the inertia of Windows dominance on the desktop. Every new entrant is pushed out through countless incredibly lazy IT departments that just adopt whatever Microsoft shits out.

It's actually surprising that the one and only area where this really failed was as they tried to lever tying to the mobile market. A couple of missteps along the way are the only reason every office drone isn't rocking their Lumia ExchangeLive! CoDevice.

dboreham2• 8 months ago

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

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

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

larkost2• 8 months ago

No the original Microsoft business model was to get the incumbent (IBM) to bundle your product (DOS, bought from someone else) onto their product so that you had a near-monopoly, then use that to sell your other software onto that, occasionally making technical changes to make it difficult for your competitors.

htrp• 8 months ago

the original Microsoft business model

From 1981

Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer,[9][10] hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and bought 86-DOS 1.10 for US$25,000 that July

jeremyjh3• 8 months ago

Its all about Excel. It really is the best spreadsheet, and everyone knows how to use it. But that comes in an Office bundle that includes Teams. And that is why we must suffer.

SoftTalker4• 8 months ago

Was certainly the case in the early years of Google Sheets. For me, the gap is entirely closed. I'm willing to believe that Excel still has the better platform for extreme power users but I've done some pretty slick stuff with Google Sheets and that was four or five years ago. It must be even better today (though I'm not currenlty doing much with spreadsheets).

RajT882• 8 months ago

I agree with it, but it's a wild world we live in when the best spreadsheet has default behaviors which will fuck your data pasted into it when you're not paying attention.

FpUser• 8 months ago

"Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats."

I remember this one. In the 90s MS reps would come to our company and sing about how their Visual Basic was superior to Delphi. When pointed to countless features that proved the opposite all they were able to say is that the MS has bigger dick.

Their recommendation was to have 2 developers instead of one we had. One would code GUI / front end in Visual Basic and the other write DLLs that would do all the meat.

72deluxe7• 8 months ago

I once worked at a company that wrote their UI in Delphi but then wrote their logic in C++ using boatloads of COM and MFC (for non-gui elements; the std library with containers was "new" at the time) so they ended up with 20 years of development baggage to talk to SQL Server over ODBC whilst implementing their logic on a repeated basis in C++ (COM loves you implementing interface functions you can't remove), calling from Delphi.

They were trying to port it to a "modern" system and modern compiler so had millions of lines of code to fix, and their UI was MFC-based (so another shot in the foot).

"Fun" times.

72deluxe7• 8 months ago

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.

neilalexander• 8 months ago

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.

jacquesm4• 8 months ago

Because they so much want to be a service business than a software business. Microsoft execs are losing sleep over becoming the next IBM, not realizing they are already there and have been for a long time.

Their main problem is that they never really learned how to compete on merit, just on first-to-market and all kinds of legal (and illegal) tricks.

morkalork• 8 months ago

To be pedantic, IBM is a service company

toomuchtodo• 8 months ago

I’m actually somewhat stoked about generative AI from a “good enough” perspective, because at this inflection point where a lot of countries and organizations are looking for Microsoft alternatives (digital sovereignty, etc), this is the best time to be able to build and deploy alternatives with the productivity advantages (if any) AI might provide.

Big Tech thinks they have a moat, when it’s really diffuse power being made available via genAI to build software good enough to replace them.

mrweasel2• 8 months ago

As long as companies, and consumers, still pick Windows and Office, then why spend the resources. Making Windows better won't move the sales number significantly, but removing the ads and the potential AI upsell is a direct hit to revenue.

The sad reality seems to be that Microsoft do not care about the majority of their products anymore. Only Azure, Microsoft 365 CoPilot, CoPilot and maybe CoPilot.

falcor842• 8 months ago

I'm not familiar with many "consumers" who still pick a Windows and Office, and in this generation, there are very few consumers picking xbox. Outside of enterprises, they seem to be losing market share everywhere, and at this rate they'll be akin to IBM or Oracle in a few years.

Spivak• 8 months ago

I will say that with enough group policy and sysinternals turning absolutely everything off, turning all of the settings to maximum performance lowest flashiness, no web results, killing Cortana with reckless abandon my Windows installation is actually what I would consider to be snappy. I was surprised.

It doesn't make it any better that Microsoft does this, but as a piece of practical advice, it seems like it can be done. There does still exist a core of Windows under all that garbage that is fast.

samrus• 8 months ago

All that tinkering is getting you dangerously close to daily driving linux. And the advantage there is that the maker isnt actively trying to get in your way

coldpie5• 8 months ago

Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock. Selling products & services can be an advertisement for their stock, but there are other methods of convincing people to buy their stock, too. Currently the stock market only wants stocks that have "AI" associated with them. It doesn't matter whether users like it or not, because having a viable business is not what the stock market is currently focused on. So, Microsoft is doing what they need to do to sell their primary product: shove AI into everything.

saubeidl5• 8 months ago

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

watwut2• 8 months ago

That is not what stock market is. A company does not have to focus on stock price and stock price is not its primary product.

nolok2• 8 months ago

It's basically the reason this bubble not only exists but has a chance not to pop : there is so much stock value in it that the big tech all want to keep feeding it, and they're sitting on so much cashflow they can afford to do it

It's absurd, but that's where it is. And a company like OpenAI basically hangs on it, because they have obligation almost ten time their revenue and the only way this does not deflate quickly is if others keep feeding it cash.

brookst3• 8 months ago

Are you saying they would rather double stock price than double revenue?

hvb22• 8 months ago

Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock.

Yeah that's a great business idea, ask Boeing how that's going

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Exactly, even those of us that like Windows have a hard time talking about it when Microsoft treats it so badly, I really miss Balmer era in regards to Windows.

The only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the Windows Terminal and WSL.

theiz• 8 months ago

Or do things that actually work. Why, for example, can I not translate a PowerPoint using Copilot in Powerpoint? Why do I need to save it, then upload it into ChatGPT, translate it, then download it again, and open it in PowerPoint for further editing. But at the same time get all kind off nonsense I don't want pushed at me in Windows, like that MSN news clickbait crap.

dboreham2• 8 months ago

Nobody gets a bonus and a new boat doing that.

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

But "we're fixing Windows and Office" doesn't get you a fat bonus, and it doesn't get investors a double-digit growth quarter. Anyone who tries to do the right thing will be disposed of. Why don't people understand this?

outside12342• 8 months ago

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.

delaminator2• 8 months ago

That’s the joy of not having to compete, your stuff is just there.

ChicagoDave• 8 months ago

Still wonder why the OneDrive mobile can’t find a file and the photo backup has been broken for months. But I have a copilot button in notepad.

Satya’s days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very costly and painful lesson.

raw_anon_1111• 8 months ago

And photo back up has never included metadata like locations when backing up to OneDrive making it usekdss

guluarte3• 8 months ago

Onedrive, that useless app that creates a mess in the desktop if you have a laptop and a desktop like most users

IcyWindows• 8 months ago

Most users do not own two computers.

PKop3• 8 months ago

This is what's so amazing to me, a primary feature of cloud storage is multi-device usage. But by default this ridiculous product causes a mess if you use it on 2 or more computers, and many apps save app data to my documents so you have useless (at best) or conflicting at worst bloat being copied between computers. I want to use it but Microsoft makes it a huge pain if I do.

72deluxe7• 8 months ago

The new broken Briefcase model from Windows 95, only far far far worse!

What progress.

voidfunc• 8 months ago

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.

72deluxe7• 8 months ago

Perhaps they could replace the leader with a LLM trained exclusively on the MSDN documentation. It'd be technical-focused.

IAmBroom• 8 months ago

So... Clippy?

johnyzee• 8 months ago

MS Bob -> Clippy -> Copilot -> ?

Perz1val• 8 months ago

You have forgotten Cortana

tartuffe78• 8 months ago

So did Microsoft

SoftTalker4• 8 months ago

Cortana... ah yes, that thing that I immediately disabled. I had forgotten its name.

yks• 8 months ago

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.

Sevii• 8 months ago

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

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

72deluxe7• 8 months ago

It's sad that the "gold rush" on social media just means "using the Internet" is a depressing experience of being tracked incessantly and sold to, constantly. A lot of the content isn't to educate or delight, but to build a following exclusively so that you can sell to said following.

It's more like the "poo rush", where you are the one getting pooped on.

eviks• 8 months ago

The AI beating will continue untill the buying improves. And the use will be forсed by changing the OS.

ripvanwinkle2• 8 months ago

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

big-and-small• 8 months ago

I trust Google ad monopoly to keep my data actually secure. They have a great track record of not sharing their datasets with anyone because this gives them an edge pushing ads down people throats. Google is honest about what they doing. Google also not going away anytime soon so they also not going to sell off their datasets to highest bidder.

And I don't trust Sam Altman and AI.com at all since their whole thing was built on lies. They could start regaining the trust by changing their company name.

jofla_net2• 8 months ago

I trust Google...

Yup, yeah, sure. The company that attempts to open your password-protected zip files. Let us not give it a free pass either.

There is no good incumbent.

ripvanwinkle2• 8 months ago

It's not just about protecting data in the old sense - typically from other corporate entities. It would suck if your information somehow made it into a generally available model that then leaked some of that anyone asking a question

zubiaur• 8 months ago

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.

dylan6042• 8 months ago

Their <snip> stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed with marketing slop on top of an under-performing product.

Updated as it was almost close to being a generic comment about AI overall.

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

See WinUI after Project Reunion announcement 5 years ago, unfortunately fits exactly the same description, and we are way past COVID to use that as an excuse.

orev• 8 months ago

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.

andy99• 8 months ago

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.

HarHarVeryFunny5• 8 months ago

Big corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons that some committee decided solved a problem.

Or not even .. maybe someone said all products need to be AI enabled, so now they are. Just append "AI" to the product name, add bolt-on to call an LLM to do something, and declare mission accomplished.

akomtu• 8 months ago

Big corpos have reached the stage where they can hire ex-politburo apparatchiks from the soviets or china, straight into C-suite roles, and nothing will materially change.

ChrisArchitect• 8 months ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748

guluarte3• 8 months ago

Anyone remember Cortana? It seems like MS doesnt learn

diego_sandoval• 8 months ago

Wait, Cortana doesn't exist anymore?

Elfener• 8 months ago

It doesn't (but it seems pretty much every Windows install has it installed, and if you try to open it, it just tells you that there's no Cortana anymore.)

6thbit• 8 months ago

Who are the likely successors if Satya steps down?

burnte2• 8 months ago

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.

Xiol• 8 months ago

So, you're saying it's a Bad Dragon?

burnte2• 8 months ago

Indeed!

nolok2• 8 months ago

I mean have you tried them ? I did and they're beyond terrible, of course they're not the one I pay for

elpakal• 8 months ago

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.

devinprater• 8 months ago

Lol the Copilot app isn't even that useful on iOS for a blind person. On Android, you type something in, hit sent, and the app pipes the pure output of the AI, Markdown formatting and citation markup included, to the screen reader. That's at least something. I mean it's crumbs, yes, but we blind people are very, very used to crumbs.

On iOS, you type a message and send, and... nothing.

delaminator2• 8 months ago

Open VSCode, close co-pilot again.

That monkey face simply won’t go away.

ZeroConcerns5• 8 months ago

Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average, which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them.

Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.

I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to make that button actually do something, ending the conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"...

Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.

So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??

throw3108222• 8 months ago

The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".

ZeroConcerns5• 8 months ago

Absolutely! There are so many scenarios where they could actually add some value, and they're fulfilling, like, exactly none of those?

Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we are.

And, again, it's fine with me: I'll just use Claude Code, but if I were a Microsoft VP-or-above, the lack of execution would sort-of, well concern me? But maybe I'm just focused on the wrong things. I mean, Cloudflare brought down, like, half the Internet twice in the past two weeks, and they're still a tech darling, so possibly incompetence is the new hotness now?

HarHarVeryFunny5• 8 months ago

Sounds like Siri - unable to control much of anything on the iPhone outside of reading/sending text messages and setting alarms.

burningChrome• 8 months ago

I've fooled around with some vibe coding on several LLM's like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT with some pretty decent results.

Since I have a full Copilot license at my corporate day gig, I figured I would try using Copilot for a basic static site. Nothing too hard, and something that's been handled easily with the other LLM's.

The prompt was pretty basic just to get something to start working with. "Build a four page template. With a home or index page, two pages of content and a contact page with a responsive slide out menu from the left hand side of the page."

It ran and put everything in a folder. I open the home page and everything was broken. I opened the files in VS Code and saw this:

    <ul class="drawer__list">
      <li>index.htmlHome</a></li>
      <li>services.htmlServices</a></li>
      <li><a class="nav-linkeduling</a></li>
      <li>contact.htmlContact</a></li>
    </ul>

And then this:

    <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
    <title>Home · Acme Web</title>
    <meta name="description" content="Accessible, responsive starter template with a slide-out menu."/>
    <linkts/css/styles.css
    /assets/css/styles.css
    </head>

I mean, if you can't even this right, I don't have much hope it can do anything more complicated. To say this was pretty sad is an understatement and clarified how far Microsoft is behind other LLM's.

estetlinus2• 8 months ago

Kudos to you. I never use new buttons out of fear of something irreversible happening, like sending a random email or deleting something. I still feel uncomfortable with the Gmail UX, I would _never_ use a ”hello iz magic ai”-button.

outside2344• 8 months ago

I asked Microsoft 365 Copilot to create a new word document for me (since they have hidden the link on office.com) and... it refused to do that.

Edit: Just tried again. It refused to do it. I mean WTF.

artrockalter• 8 months ago

It's so easy to ship completely broken AI features because you can't really unit test them and unit tests have been the main standard for whether code is working for a long time now.

The most successful AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor) are all dogfooding their products as far as I can tell, and I don't really see any other reliable way to make sure the AI feature you ship actually works.

flkiwi2• 8 months ago

Me: Can you access my inbox and Teams messages?

Copilot: Yep!

Me: Please find any items in my inbox or sent items indicating (a) that I have agreed to take on a task or (b) identifying me as the person responsible for a task, removing duplicates and any items that I have unambiguously replied to via email or Teams. Time window is preceding 7 days.

Copilot: Prints a list with, at best, 5% accuracy

I know some folks have the peculiar idea that search is dead in favor of AI, but if AI can't accurately find information, it is useless. As near as I can tell, Copilot finds 3-4 items (but rarely the SAME 3-4 items across runs) and calls it a day. It just seems like nobody is actually testing any of this stuff. Microsoft is actively destroying its credibility because it's offering a tool with a party trick but is utterly unreliable. I will, therefore, not rely on it.

Wojtkie• 8 months ago

I bet c-suite uses Mac

ZeroConcerns5• 8 months ago

Yeah, and I also bet their Outlook 'Copilot' button has more-than-zero options in its dropdown menu.

But I'd actually love to know how to achieve that, and so far Microsoft AI is awfully silent on the subject...

shiandow• 8 months ago

And everything aimed at developers assumes you're using Unix.

mikkupikku• 8 months ago

I bet they use iphones and leave computers to their underlings/assistants.

furyofantares• 8 months ago

Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.

I guess that's worse than the Gemini button in Google Sheets that asks me to subscribe to AI services. I have multiple times been in a sheet and thought "asking an LLM how to do this thing I want to do right here in this product would actually be great if it works", remembered there was an AI-looking button in the top right, clicked it, and nope'd out of the subscription.

I just want to know if it works or not before I buy it.

fodkodrasz2• 8 months ago

Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.

How did you manage this? Probably some company-wide group policy saves you. It keeps starting copilot for me, drives me crazy.

ZeroConcerns5• 8 months ago

How did you manage this?

I did absolutely nothing special, other than running the latest-and-greatest Windows 11 Enterprise, which is what we put on most of our laptops without any customizations other than "require 2FA and some antivirus and firewalling" via Intune.

And I just went into our Azure admin portal, looking for any AI goodies to enable, and... there just doesn't seem to be anything there? And we have an Enterprise P2 subscription, which is usually where all the good stuff is, but, yeah...

spaniard892772• 8 months ago

There's AI in Teams to. I wanted to use it to recolect info from my chats but apparently it's unable to do so.

transcriptase2• 8 months ago

So it’s like Copilot in Excel, that can’t interact with or seemingly even see the contents of the spreadsheet that’s in focus.

jsheard• 8 months ago

So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling?

Satya Nadella insists that Bing365Pilot has supercharged his productivity, but determining if he's high on his own supply or lying through his teeth is an exercise for the reader.

Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...

rynn• 8 months ago

Nadella has to have his own custom agents. It isn't even possible for an enterprise like MSFT to not have custom agents that are still remotely useful.

So, his experience with Copilot agents != Average Customer's experience

joshstrange• 8 months ago

He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond.

I remember reading that when it first came out and all I can think is: No, he doesn't like podcasts, if you like podcasts you listen to them.

That's like saying "He loves food, but instead of eating it he feeds it to an analyzer that tells him what elements were detected in it".

I have to assume it's all BS/lies because if that's a truthful statement (about podcasts and the other things) then I really question wtf they are doing over there. None of that sounds like "the future", it sounds like hell. I cannot imagine how shitty it would be to have all my emails/messages to the CEO being filtered through an AI and getting AI slop back in return.

jandrese3• 8 months ago

This is just him aping every other AI CEO. Every single one has to act like the agents are super-geniuses mere moments away from achieving the singularity like people can't try them out themselves and be disappointed. Some of it is "we think this will work soon so it's ok if we pretend like it's working now", but I think a lot is just needing to constantly shove hot air into the balloon before it pops.

themafia• 8 months ago

he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond.

What a dorky thing to do. Does the CEO have some concept he's living a life that precisely _zero_ of his customers do? Who would even think to do this?

“I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job

Yea, I have actual work to do, perhaps you should familiarize yourself with this?

TheOtherHobbes3• 8 months ago

I've always suspected Microsoft is a front for an ineffable cosmic evil that is trying to crush the human spirit into bewildered, abject despair.

How else do you explain Teams and the Hotmail UI?

thfuran• 8 months ago

You're thinking of Larry Ellison.

verzali• 8 months ago

That would certainly explain the Loop UI

kuerbel• 8 months ago

That would make an interesting SCP...

motoboi• 8 months ago

This is what move fast and break things looks like in a enterprise the size of microsoft.

It's mostly break things and little moving fast.

But the idea is that it's AI or death, so some broken buttons seems of less importances than the buttons itself being there, because the button working is a problem involving several teams, so no one is actually responsible, but the button being there is some team problem, and hell yeah they solved in the first sprint.

danudey6• 8 months ago

"Move fast and break things" is fine if you're a social networking site and breaking things means people can't get their racist memes or browse marketplace for twenty minutes until you push a change.

It's less fine if the things you're breaking are your core operating systems and the office suite that makes you most of your money and it takes you months to get the relevant teams aligned to push out a fix for the bad idea your execs pushed.

bigbuppo• 8 months ago

The only good feature about copilot in Microsoft 365 is that if you ask it to delete itself enough times eventually some other app will eventually be promoted to the most prominent when you first login.

IlikeKitties• 8 months ago

So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??

They all use Macs lol.

vladvasiliu2• 8 months ago

On new-outlook-on-Windows there’s an option to disable the copilot button. Wanna take a guess what that does?

danudey6• 8 months ago

Honestly, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic and it actually does disable the button, or if you're being jaded and cynical and it just hides it for six hours then it comes back. Either option seems equally likely at this point.

adolph• 8 months ago

At what point does Charlie Brown not kick at the ball Lucy offers?

It's been 19 years since "Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging". [0] Is the disconnect displayed in this message thread that there's always 10,000 new people discovering a fact? [1]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

1. https://xkcd.com/1053/

BizarroLand2• 8 months ago

The other thing is that they're FORCING it on the users. Its invasive and creepy and assaulty and it has multiplied my loathing of Microsoft infinitely.

Someone in Microsoft needs to watch a lecture on affirmative consent.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing with AI, both local and online. If you tell me its available if I want it, I might come dabble a bit.

But cram AI into every facet of my machine? That's a 1 way ticket to never being installed on any system I ever own in the future ever again.

Companies should treat AI like a madam treats the workers in a whorehouse. You don't make them go door to door. You let the johns come to you.

andybee• 8 months ago

What do you mean 0 items? When you expand it gives you options to write a message or interact with search. Seems like its a you problem.

mr_toad• 8 months ago

I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing!

A physical button? So it’s like a mechanical placebo? If you have AI FOMO you can keep pressing it to calm the anxiety.

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Competition could as well in the past, I only switched from Borland compilers into Microsoft ones, after Borland decided to focus on enterprise customers.

And we all know the OEM deals preventing them to ship OS/2, BeOS, or whatever else they would like to.

The problem is that in modern computing landscape they cannot play that strategy, even when owning plenty of FOSS projects, there are plenty alternatives.

theshrike792• 8 months ago

There are SO MANY Copilots

There's the Copilot cli, then we have the Copilot built in to VSCode, then we have the Copilot that's in Github, then we have th M365 Copilot and the Windows Copilot and maybe a few more.

All work very differently and have different skillsets.

robotnikman• 8 months ago

Don't forget copilot in notepad.exe

Havoc• 8 months ago

I suspect the issues are deeper for Microsoft, who have worked tirelessly under Satya Nadella to create doubt around its products

This reads more like a hit piece than good faith article

(But yeah the MS AI products especially on consumer level are pretty terrible)

BiteCode_dev• 8 months ago

Microsoft has this problem with most of its products.

It's not just AI, it's a market fit and quality problem.

They don't need to solve it, however.

Their strategy has been quite clear: make it barely usable so that is passes muster to auditors, integrate it with systems that corporations need, and sell them on the integrations.

Teams and Azure suck?

So what?

Big companies will pay for that, because it's integrated with their ldap, has an audit trail, gives them the ISO-whatever stamp, and lets them worry about something else.

That the users are miserable is almost never the question for the ones signing the checks.

In a world where box-checking is paramount, this approach is a winning strategy.

thm• 8 months ago

Just remember what SPJ said what the problem with Microsoft is.

quchen• 8 months ago

Which is what?

SoftTalker4• 8 months ago

... they have no taste.

windex• 8 months ago

Between the RAM shortage and the forced migration to Win11 along with a forced HW upgrade, I'd start shorting MS asap. This bit about lack of adoption of Copilot is just icing on the cake.

belval• 8 months ago

I feel like the case for Microsoft inability to execute in a lot of verticals should really be studied, not saying this as a sound bite, I'd genuinely like to know how that is possible.

Their investment in OpenAI, giving them what was, at least ~1-2 year ago if not now, the best possible LLM to integrate in the office suite yet they are unable to deliver value with it.

Their ownership of Xbox and Windows should have allowed them to get a much better foothold in gaming yet their marketplace is still, to this very day, a broken experience with multiple account types. It's been 10 years.

The counter point is Azure obviously which still has great growth numbers, but that's a different org.

From the outside, it just seems like they should be doing better than they are. They have much better business integration than Google and Amazon. The fit is obvious and people are borderline hooked on excel. Why aren't they dominating completely?

kayhantolga• 8 months ago

As a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer—and honestly, it might overtake it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got.

If you haven’t seen how bad it is, here’s one example: Copilot Terminal. In theory, it should help you with terminal commands. Sounds great. In practice, it installs a chat panel on the right side of your terminal that has zero integration with the terminal itself. It can’t read what’s written, it can’t send commands, it has no context, and the model response time is awful. What’s the point of a “terminal assistant” that can’t actually assist the terminal?

This lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid them, good for you. If your company forces you to use them because they’re bundled with a Microsoft license, I genuinely feel your pain.

jandrese3• 8 months ago

The crazy thing is Microsoft was so early with an AI product but was burned pretty badly when it instantly turned into a Nazi. Funny how the constant complaint on Twitter is how the modern AI agents are too "woke" and how Elon has to keep fighting his own AI model to conform with his viewpoints.

486sx33• 8 months ago

Context “ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot... “

mlrtime2• 8 months ago

WTH Are you talking about?

ivape• 8 months ago

Try to think about it like a bunch of merchants running to line up in front of you as fast as possible with anything that resembles a product you might buy. The only thing they were successful at thus far was recognizing that something needs to be in your terminal, and they ran as fast as possible to your terminal with anything to beat others to the front of the line. I suppose they are doing this with all their efforts. A universe where a C-exec said in no uncertain terms, "get anything out there", is the very universe we're in.

Apple is the only merchant not running to line up with anything at the moment.

IMHO, one company needs to make the bold move and make a fork of their OS that is AI native with AI native apps/workflow and phase out the old paradigm. It'll have to be two product lines, but I think the new OS will have uptake like we've never seen before.

TeMPOraL3• 8 months ago

There's a problem with this theory.

AI works. It's actually useful. Since GPT-4, tool calling capability is good enough. It's trivial to do a better job than Copilot on any task using any current model of the major LLM providers. I'm not talking API, even with basic chat frontend, regular users easily beat Copilot by simply copy-pasting between Word/Excel and the chat frontend.

If a twelve year old can one-shot a better product for any given use case than Microsoft Copilot, then it's not just "merchants running to line up in front of you", something more basic must be broken.

adabyron• 8 months ago

When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated well with each other?

I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain.

Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when even slightly pushed.

* Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.

ThrowawayB72• 8 months ago

I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.

There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Not really.

You are right if talking about the efforts improving C# and CLR, taking the lessons out of Midori, Blazor and Aspire.

Regarding F#, VB, and C++/CLI, the poor souls are on a lifeline that makes CLR nowadays stand out for C# Language Runtime, instead of the original Common.

And the chaos that reigns on Windows Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI certainly isn't helping.

Finally they are constrained in what they can put into C# DevKit as means to not canibalize Visual Studio and Windows sales, it can only be good enough, not great and feature parity.

Also regardless of the reasoning behind it, having TypeScript rewriten into C# instead of Go would have been a great opportunity to make C# more relevant outside Microsoft shops, instead anyone looking to contribute to TypeScript compiler will be learning Go instead.

btbuildem2• 8 months ago

lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products

I would wager a month's wages that this is the doing of some internal Security Review, wherein a bunch of out-of-touchers decided that the customers will want to prefer to be Safe and Secure instead of getting some actual value from integrating copilot into shell workflows.

Meanwhile people are yolo'ing it with various janky DIY wires and duct-tape githobbits that mash together whatever open weights model and user-level access to the system (or worse).

isodev• 8 months ago

a bunch of out-of-touchers decided that the customers will want to prefer to be Safe

You mean the other way around, right? Because what could possibly go wrong when we let a language model hallucinate its way through which terminal command rhymes best with your prompt according to that SO comment from training data.

mkehrt• 8 months ago

Wow a thing I really want is an AI I didn't install to read all my terminal commands and ship them off to MS for analysis.

Thank god for this security team.

pjc503• 8 months ago

You'd be hearing a few more hair raising failure stories if they hadn't done that. And possibly a few big customers institute Win11 or Copilot site wide bans. Or just straight up going out of business. In businesses other than software, it's possible to be legally liable for mistakes.

lll-o-lll3• 8 months ago

Works good in Teams. Summarises meetings, collects action items. It’s pretty great actually.

I don’t know how many forests we are burning to have a digital secretary, but surely the environment can take one more for the team?

ares623• 8 months ago

“It’s just like your toaster”

wpm• 8 months ago

"Summarises meetings, collects action items"

Yes, but...does it? How do you know it isn't missing key points raised in the meeting? Not collecting actionable items?

Summarising seems like the absolute lamest thing an LLM could do for me. Like I want a Reader's Digest of my life, written but a word guessing machine.

KurSix5• 8 months ago

This is arguably the only use case where a chat interface (or just text) actually works, because it's an information compression task. But building a $50 billion business strategy just on the fact that AI can recap a meeting is risky. If this is the only feature that works well, then the business ROI is questionable

chasd002• 8 months ago

This lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products.

I think they're scared of the very real security issues with LLMs that may be unsolvable. It's not wise to give an llm free reign, at best maybe across your local computer but to be fully integrated into every application and every file it needs root. That would be the front door to many privilege escalation incidents in an enterprise managed laptop/desktop.

brandensilva• 8 months ago

Useless Clippy all over again. At least Clippy stayed in his lane and could be turned off.

collinmanderson• 8 months ago

worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer

IE6 was a really good browser when it shipped in 2001, especially compared to Netscape 6.

The problem was it didn't improve for the next 5 years.

pseudosavant• 8 months ago

I was hoping for a real look at weaknesses in Microsoft’s AI products. They ship lots of “AI features,” but only Copilot and Azure’s ChatGPT hosting see broad use. Instead, the article mostly reads as anti-MS/OpenAI without much detail.

From my experience, Microsoft’s GPT-5 integrations in Word, PowerPoint, and their ChatGPT clone struggle with basic tasks. Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better.

To be fair, building solid AI features is hard when model capabilities change so quickly. Reasoning and tool use only became reliable in the latest models, and when these Office features were planned, GPT-5 didn’t exist.

darknavi• 8 months ago

Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better.

Side tangent: Copy/pasting from the Windows Copilot app is absolute dogshit. It makes no sense that the simple action of "copy this text" is this broken.

72deluxe7• 8 months ago

I have found it copies the markdown that is used for the formatting?

Perhaps this hopeless implementation is a wonderful microcosm and accurate barometer of the usefulness of AI-assisted development and tools.

t1234s• 8 months ago

Is there an excellent "AI Free" linux distro that one can escape to when AI is inescapable from both Windows/MacOS

treyd• 8 months ago

All of them? I know of no Linux distros that do anything in particular to integrate AI.

Although knowing Canonical they might add something to Ubuntu sooner or later.

mritchie712• 8 months ago

I just had a sales call with someone from Microsoft who was looking for an AI tool to automate some Excel work they were doing. I doubt they'll buy our product, but it gave me a good laugh.

artingent• 8 months ago

Microsoft doesn't just have a shoddy AI problem. Microsoft has a direction problem. I'm no fan of Ballmer, but his Microsoft seemed like they knew what they were doing, and were actually trying to be good at it. Nadella seems extremely clueless and seems happy to just ignore and later axe consumer products that don't generate immediate revenue.

And noone should actually be shocked about his ineffectiveness. Covid was a great example of how clueless his leadership has been. Skype used to be a verb people used in common parlance, and yet they dropped the ball and let Zoom take over both consumer and enterprise segments while focusing on "restructuring" Skype into Teams for no reason whatsoever.

Prior to Covid, he was ready to let Windows run its course and axe that too. The sudden demand for sub-$500 laptops during the pandemic showed him that people still liked Windows and wanted a good OS from Microsoft. But instead of capitalizing on it to give customers what they wanted, he just gave us an ad-filled spyware with AI slop.

I have zero hope in any product with a Copilot in its name (including GitHub). At this point, unless there's a change in leadership, it's only a matter of time before XBox faces the axe.

sylens3• 8 months ago

I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.

Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.

The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.

vezuchyy• 8 months ago

I don't have data to support it and I know AD was a gamechanger but I feel like Microsoft pumping free software to educational institutions was the main driver for it's adoption in the corporate world. When every person who kind of knows how to use the computer, can use MS windows and office and has to be retrained to use anything else, it's a no brainer to just give users what they know.

sylens3• 8 months ago

Don't you think this is why alarm bells should be going off right now about Google's complete domination of primary school systems? Google Classroom and Chromebooks are everywhere. Google Docs is the lingua franca, not Microsoft Word

paxys• 8 months ago

Three years? Try 20.

sylens3• 8 months ago

There was a honeymoon period after Nadella took the reigns where it looked like they were putting out good products - Edge before enshittification, VS Code, buying GitHub.

ThrowawayB72• 8 months ago

We've been hearing empty punditry like that for the last several decades all while they've been a poster child for "number go up": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...

These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSFT and then maybe there's something to discuss.

gigel82• 8 months ago

By that time, it will already be too late. I'd argue it's probably already too late... dead man walking kind of situation. Definitely true for consumers, it might survive out of inertia in the corporate environment for decades.

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Just as Proton running Windows binaries is "Linux Gaming", WSL is the "Year of Linux on the Desktop".

salt-thrower• 8 months ago

Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether.

Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with the online console gaming experience. Halo was an untouchable juggernaut of a series for the first 3 titles.

It's mind boggling that Microsoft just let all that die without a fight. Worse, they seem to have actively shot themselves in the foot and then given up.

avrionov• 8 months ago

Xbox was never the leader. They were always the challenger from the begging, but it looks like things are not getting better.

cwbriscoe• 8 months ago

Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago

Maybe in the US, but not overall.

awithrow• 8 months ago

Playstation/Sony always a contender? They were the clear leader. The PS2 is still the best selling console of all time. 160M units to Xbox's 24M. Xbox360 caught up but the PS3 still sold more units. PS4 sold twice as many as Xbox One. The console wars has been mostly Sony vs Nintendo for a long time.

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

In US, XBox was never first in the rest of the world.

pjmlp8• 8 months ago

Yes, I miss the Windows developer experience from Balmer era, "Developers, Developers, Developers" certainly doesn't apply to Windows native development experience.

The only thing good from Satya era on Windows development experience, is the improved terminal, and that now I don't have to install VMWare Workstation any longer.

eric-burel• 8 months ago

Microsoft is using the deep penetration of SharePoint in companies to sell Copilot license. At least in France it's well and alive and I see much more Copilot licenses than actual OpenAI uses.

epolanski• 8 months ago

Satya is doing with AI what Ballmer did with cloud.

Right direction, wrong execution.

davesque• 8 months ago

Or is it that nobody wants to use integrated (i.e. force fed) AI products?

btbuildem2• 8 months ago

FirstPageSage AI Chatbot Usage Chart (December 3, 2025)

What a bizarre way to organize the chart. Clearly Anthropic is leading -- their early bet on "programming" as the main use case is paying off.

The recent report from Openrouter [1] confirms as much: coding is the number one use case, with role playing / fantasy writing in second place.

I have a feeling the remaining use cases will never dominate, instead they will slowly mature into acceptable practices across the various industries. That will probably take longer than the investment bubble can hold though.

1: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai

thinkling• 8 months ago

Claude Code usage probably isn't counted as "chatbot" use. Also, I think you're overestimating how many people program vs. how many people are using AI chatbots as the new websearch. Orders of magnitude more of the latter.

HarHarVeryFunny5• 8 months ago

Sure - US has 1M developers vs 300M pop. At least the Claude Code developers are paying for it though, vs only 5% of users paying for ChatGPT.

smetannik• 8 months ago

The more MS pushing a product - the less people want to use it.

danielmarkbruce• 8 months ago

Counter: I use various co-pilot features at work, they are very helpful, save me hours, and many folks in my team do to.

observationist• 8 months ago

Mustafa is a side-character, he's the friend of a brother of someone who knows what they're doing. Competence isn't something that people pick up through proximity, and Microsoft is finding that out in real-time.

mannanj• 8 months ago

Isn’t the problem more so that nobody wants to buy it and Microsoft is leveraging its power and influence to successfully coerce and pressure people into buying them?

You using OpenAI’s products? Aren’t Microsoft getting cuts as owners?

ptdorf• 8 months ago

Nobody sane wants to use their shoddy products.

Their office products can't even agree having the same menu options for the same functionality.

People use them out of corporate inertia: Windows laptops are cheaper than Macs and that brings the whole office suite in.

jsbisviewtiful• 8 months ago

People use them out of corporate inertia

And now with how things are going with the American gov, foreign companies see security flaws on two fronts: Microsoft's AI's unreliability+invasiveness and the US gov's unreliability+invasiveness relating to its stateside companies.

Findecanor2• 8 months ago

BTW. Feeding that AI boom, that is driving up the cost of hardware... while at the same time asking people to buy new computers only to run the next version of their OS.

Not a great plan.

Scubabear68• 8 months ago

I moved largely away from Microsoft products in 2010 personally, and 2015 or so professionally. Just came back to them last year for a client.

What I am seeing are two really disturbing patterns: 1) really, really bad stuff that has been there for decades is still there, weighing everything down, for "backwards compatibility", and 2) a lot of horrible fluff and nonsense everywhere.

#1 is pretty self-explanatory, as I am editing docs in Word I am finding my muscle memory circa 1999 or so still works with it due to all of the formatting bugs that still exist.

#2 I saw with Windows 11 and the crazy adverts everywhere, seemingly random UI choices, half-broken or implemented tools and applications, and now random UI buttons thrown everywhere.

The 1-2 punch is devastating and makes using Microsoft products 10x more depressing than it was 10-15 years ago, and it wasn't a happy fest then either for me.

So to me, AI is just "more of the same" with Microsoft. It is more random shit thrown on the wall to see what will stick.

kevinrineer• 8 months ago

Backwards compatibility has always been a Microsoft staple. What used to be a huge selling point - depending on the audience - is now clearly a crutch. Right now, it seems that the tech debt has finally started making the whole stack lean like the Tower of Pisa.

estetlinus2• 8 months ago

Nothing an ad carousel full of AI-slop, embedded in the OS won’t fix

WhyOhWhyQ• 8 months ago

I personally never found Microsoft software anything but shoddy: Microsoft word, internet explorer, power shell, outlook, powerpoint... these all make me shudder... I'll give them visual studio, that one is pretty good. I think Excel is fine. Skype was okay I guess. Anyway, I think the shoddiness can't really be the actual threat to Microsoft given their track record.

SoftTalker4• 8 months ago

Skype was an acquisition.

s1mplicissimus2• 8 months ago

And became pretty bad afterwards

tialaramex• 8 months ago

When I joined my current employer, a few years ago, one of the things I thought might be good was that for the first time in a fairly long career I'd be using Visual Studio.

Previously I'm a vi or vim user for everything, for many years.

But I can say after a few years experience I'm not really impressed. It's too big and too slow. It has a few things I kinda like, a lot of half-working things I'd love if they worked consistently (e.g. some things I work on can be debugged, some can't, experts might know why but I don't) but as they are they're too unreliable to really change how I do things - but overall it's not enough to e.g. miss VS when I'm writing my own stuff, still in vim on Linux.

Actually all of the Microsoft technologies I've run into were disappointing with only two exceptions which I'll get to. Powershell felt like they hadn't really learned the right lessons from the Unix shells for example, and Entra ID (called "Azure Active Directory" when I started caring) is a confusing mess.

Two exceptions: 1. C# is a pretty good language. Mostly it's a better Java. Is that amazing? Not really, but it's still pretty good, it delivers reasonable performance, there's a large ecosystem, I don't hate writing it.

2. Azure itself has to have a way to "cut off" payments because Microsoft sold a product where students can get a limited amount of credit. The student doesn't have any money, so if they had $50 of Azure credit and Microsoft lets them spend $85 before turning off all the Azure systems that credit was funding, well, too fucking bad - Microsoft eats the $35 loss. Accordingly Microsoft are better (not perfect, but better) than AWS or Google's thing at actually turning stuff off when it exceeds what you asked to spend.

chung8123• 8 months ago

I am honestly struggling to figure out Microsoft's licensing system. We have it here and there are some on my team that want to try "CoPilot" (not even sure what that means now) but there is no licenses option for me to enable them to do that. I am sure they are targeting the larger places than my 50 person shop but it is so confusing I don't have the time in my day to figure out how to enable copilot for my team.

mv4• 8 months ago

What fascinates me is how someone at MSFT managed to get their own button (the Copilot) button approved. Having your own button or tab is a big deal (I remember we debated having our own shopping tab on the Instagram app while I was at Meta - and we had to abandon it when it didn't get the traction we were hoping for).

These people have a UI button AND a hardware button on actual consumer devices, and it doesn't do anything. How?

dudneet2• 8 months ago

It seems to me that America is a great big nomenclature butchering machine. If they can butcher what words like crypto or AI mean, they’re willing to put their whole economy behind that. I need to rethink my investment strategies.

s1mplicissimus2• 8 months ago

I'm always glad to see others notice this too. cheers

Beijinger2• 8 months ago

Would you be so kind to elaborate this?

72deluxe7• 8 months ago

This is true. Just look at what selling of products with "memory" means - "the tablet has 256GB memory"; no it doesn't. It has 8GB RAM and 256GB non-volatile storage.

I suppose "AI" is easier to say than "word-guessing non-deterministic instruction transformer", but it does carry "intelligence" into the hearer, when the truth is that "AI" is not intelligent - it is a great mimicker of everything it has read.

Beijinger2• 8 months ago

I have not used Windows in ages. But I use Visual Studio under Linux that has some AI included. Does this count?

pch00• 8 months ago

Microsoft’s early/rushed attempt at AI (the various things called “Copilot”) does start to feel like how they lost the mobile wars. They had a tech fairly early (Windows Mobile) but utterly failed to execute on it and ultimately, allowed a competitor to dominate with a better product.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. With the sums of money involved it could end up being make or break?

stahop01• 8 months ago

because it is absolute shit and forcefeeding customers it will only make them resent it or use it less

gaigalas• 8 months ago

When you're on the internet for a while, you develop an intuition for the average level of Microsoft hate that is supposed to exist at any given time. It's a rather stable measure.

I'm seeing an unusual increase in that, and after some thought, I think the only plausible reason is that another company is afraid of them and creating anti-MS editorialized buzz.

My gut feeling tells me this is all related to long-term sustainability of AI products, and both GitHub and VSCode are major points of anxiety for other AI coding platforms.

We will eventually know if I'm right or not. If we see moves that point to other companies trying to decouple from GitHub and VSCode, then it's probably what is actually happening here.

quitit• 8 months ago

My first experience of copilot was learning that my Microsoft Office subscription was increasing in price.

Then I dug a little deeper and saw that I could exclude it and go back to my old price.

For what I do with office, I have no use for copilot so you can guess what I did.

An unfortunate reality that software makers need to grasp is that a lot of people don’t use their software properly to begin with, meaning the addition of AI doesn’t push the needle - it’s just yet another “time saving feature” that the user won’t touch.

KurSix5• 8 months ago

Microsoft's problem isn't bad AI, but a fundamentally wrong UX pattern. They're trying to shoehorn Copilot into linear workflows - Word, Excel, Outlook - but chat is a terrible interface for editing documents or analyzing tables. Google with Gemini is winning not because their model is better (though it is good), but because they integrate AI better as a tool, not as a conversational partner. This difference in mental model defines utility

theshrike792• 8 months ago

I've used Copilot ih VSCode quite extensively, using both GPT-5(.1) and Sonnet 3.7 and Sonnet 4.5 as the LLM backend. (Before our company got the deals in place for OpenAI and Anthropic to use their tooling directly)

The results are measurably worse every time vs. doing the exact same operation with Codex Cli or Claude Code.

There's something in the Microsoft AI framework that makes the worse and more "stupid" than the competition.

amai2• 8 months ago

Maybe Microsoft should go all in and replace the CEO by an AI?

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

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