scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these pictures. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
You don’t know what you want, you ungrateful shit.
true, I always forget that
On my work laptop, Notepad used to have Copilot built in but now it doesn’t. So that’s a little scaling back
“Guys, we’re scaling back on AI! Honest! Isn’t this great publicity?!”
“Also, totally unrelated… but today we’re launching SchmoPilot Assistant for Notepad!”
That little floating copilot icon in excel is the devil’s work. I’m not a violent person but whoever came up with that should be flogged (IDK what flogging is but it sounds appropriate lol).
Flogging is a form of punishment where you get whipped.
Conversely, being forced to use Excel with Copilot is the traditional punishment for unwarrantedly flogging somebody (you need to get consent first, mmkay?).
I like AI, but I think that Microsoft’s approach was all wrong for handling it. Instead, they should have made a completely new Windows built from the ground up to be AI-oriented, and kept Windows 1X as mainline.
Once the AI Windows was fully cooked, Microsoft could have either released it as Windows 20, or give it an entirely new name when the time to start pushing it out to the public has arrived. This would give time for suitable hardware to arrive and to sort out teething issues, along with just having a platform that is free of legacy spaghetti code.
The " AI Wave" is just a fiction. The whole idea is just an attempt to get investments for companies that don’t and cant really produce any value. I’ve tried many of these “AI” tools and none of them can really do anything useful.
There are many fields that are kind of forcing workers to use AI. Then their logic is: well, if you use AI, then I’ll either cut your wages or hire cheaper workers.
That being said, do you really (and by “you” I mean all the lurkers as well) think this whole thing will backfire in the long run? I only see companies using more and more AI and being fine with laying off people and rehiring people who are 25% cheaper.
i do think its mostly about an excuse for workforce reduction rather than pull some other bullshit excuse from their ass they can use this one,for a time at least.
An example is here in Australia our biggest bank, CBA, crowed they reduced their workforce and saved a bunch from AI, turned out they just literally offshored and hired in India
Eventually customers will get super frustrated with telling the chatbot that this didn’t solve the problem.
Companies’ pretense that they don’t need skilled workers is a bluff move in the struggle between labor and capital. It is an attempt to devalue workers and lower their wages. The bluff cant be sustained for long.
Relying on a chatbot to do work for you that isn’t bulk writing or giving your customers the runaround is a recipe for disaster. Now, I’ll grant you that this is a very advanced chatbot, but just because it can fool the average CEO, doesn’t mean it can do much of anything truly useful.
Companies seek to monopolise skill and knowledge within these AI and encourage people to know nothing and pay them for skills/knowledge instead. This can only end poorly when it becomes uneconomical to provide this service to consumers but has also made those consumers devoid of skills/knowledge.
That being said, do you really (and by “you” I mean all the lurkers as well) think this whole thing will backfire in the long run?
It’s backfiring now by deleting databases, overwriting important configuration files, and leaving sensitive information in the wild.
Now, I agree, AI isn’t going away: Like any other kind of massive fuck-up, by the time the current crop of suckers learn their lessons, there’ll be a new crop ready to make the same mistakes again.
Without some major breakthrough that actually results in real artificial intelligence, I don’t see how any of this is sustainable long term. Things feel just like they did back in 2007 when everyone and their mom was buying a house to flip using an adjustable rate mortgage and you’d be stupid not to join them.
From what I’ve seen programmers are using Claude a lot. It may still cause problems in the medium to long term by squeezing out junior developers or atrophying the skills of senior developers, but in the meantime it is speeding up production of code.
It’s also making scams a lot easier by simulating real human communication, up to and including video chat.
I’m not sure what will cool down the hype. It’s almost exclusively driven by c-suite morons who find AI very useful for writing unclear emails and inaccurate notes. The sort of things they’d do themselves before. Even programmer who adopt it are mostly quietly muddling along.
First off, copilot is just ChatGPT.
Second off, their implantation of ChatGPT is so bad it actually makes the original look good. And that is a damn low bar to reach for and miss.
I didn’t know that. So they can’t even rebrand well.
Aah, remember how good Visio used to be - when it had those green corner boxes, and a nice grid.was done
Those guys actually made a decent app to run on win 95 - so I guess MS had to try to disembowel them to find out how it such a thing was possible.
They didn’t miss shit, they just competed and lost to like the four other AI companies that executed much better than them.
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Yeah but you’d expect they could make copilot the best at working with excel and it’s just not as good as the competition in that specialization
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Why would you expect that? When was the last time Micro$lop made the best anything? Or even something good? Or at least decent? Or at the very least not openly hostile to the user?
The vast majority of people who have stuck with Microsoft did so because it’s the “default” OS.
They probably are using chatGPT for their ai (as it’s the default AI in the news/society).
People who have heard of copilot are probably people with enough tech knowledge to find an alternate OS or AI tool with higher standards.
ah, today will be a good day lads
They also probably realized providing free Copilot in Windows would get very expensive quickly, and that not enough users would pay for it.
Basically yeah
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
They’re spending billions to get millions.
Peak capitalism!
Haahaha, yeah they missed it… Like missing a barn with a shot gun, it’s literally still right there with new people coming in all the time to full their pockets with venture cap and delivery nothing of value.
All they had to do was not fuck over the consumer.
They could have put a new icon in to apply unique snapchat style webcam filters in, watch for priority emails and give them to you in rank order, remind you of things owed and files that were sent to you.
They could have give you a smart todo list and quitely built a new product with it that people would use.
Noooo they had capture your screen, store it unencrypted, try to hide/downplay they were doing it, fuck over notepad, fuck over paint.
It was the easiest wave to ride that dozens of other companies are relatively successful at.
“Missed” they didn’t even take a serious shot with any of them
You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
We were lucky and dodged that future enshitification bullet.
They tried; it must’ve been 4 times. But unless it’s a sure thing, they’ll give up.
I worry they don’t know how to compete on a level ground, slowly building trust and business on success after success.
I used a Windows Mobile PDA (Dell Axim X50v) for years before the iPhone came out. It was great at the time. Few other things could provide video, games, music, and a web browser in your pocket at the time but WM2003 with the Opera browser and some other apps did quite well. I kept using that thing even into the Android and iPhone era.
It also didn’t help that they did a complete rebuild of Windows Phone OS 3 times, making old apps incompatible and forcing the very little support of app developers to get alienated from the platform. Why would you completely rebuild your app 3 times for a super low market share product.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
They were not good, they were dogshit. I had one and it was like a decade behind android.
That’s the nokia hardware they installed win mobile on?
I was looking forward to a good nokia candybar phone, but gave up when they were bought and the hardware went under a win OS.
Agreed I have been a Linux Stan since the 90s and even I thought windows phone was pretty good.
The windows phones were fucking magical
They freaking gave up on anything quickly if they are not immediately the leader in the market.
Microsoft are the present day IBM, complete with supporting the present day version of the NAZIs whilst they commit their very own version of the Holocaust.
Satya may have grown the company share price but he’s absolutely killed everything that made Microslop even remotely interesting before he became CEO.
this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a “m$ sux lol” rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
Yeah good read. I don’t agree that Microsoft isn’t dying though. They are, because people and companies alike are tired of other corporations throwing them under the bus. So many people are realizing that the companies don’t want what they want, and it kills their business or happiness.
I think they will become like IBM, once dominant, not dead today but pretty much irrelevant compared to what they once were.
ibm is still huge, but mostly because their shitty tactics in the past means that all their customers are completely dependent on them.
seems like microsoft is taking inspiration.
MS should be more vulnerable, due to everything but Excel being toilet blockages.
TLDR; MS already got big by being like IBM, lots of dumb corpo procurement cash is already keeping them afloat for about as long as qwerty keyboards - because some people got really good at/dependent on excel.
Their dominance of corpo-procurement (and using ‘security’ to block out alternative tooling) means that vast amounts of the corpo world is based on highly specialised and over-stretched excel.
Even in databases, where my organisation (large public sector) should be having a genuine competition to administer postGRESQL for us or something, has been loss-led into into a big new ms fabric contract by them appearing to undercut the incumbent (Oracle - ok not hard to undercut), but not actuall . . . [rant deleted]
However, crap MS is at software, they’re extremely good at getting dumb corpos to sign on the dotted line.
(‘always has been’ meme). And many humans being forced to use the only tool available, have built vast intricate systems on the foundation of that excel, many of them masterworks of skill in the face of those constraints. Hopefully they don’t last as long as one of the old Egyptian dynasties.Also PowerPoint lol. I like PowerPoint. The latest versions a bit less, but the versions from like 2019-2022 were pretty solid. They also have full on mobile-looking side panel ads in the office apps if you aren’t subscribed to M365 now…
They are dying because they have horrible leadership. They are solely focused on subscription revenue now, and everything else is just left to rot. They’ve pretty much lost any urge to do anything creative with their money and manpower.
If Microsoft wasn’t run by tools, they’d see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we’ll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won’t, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that’s just a skin of chrome…
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
It isn’t just ineptitude. Of course executives at Microsoft know that they could be good and be successful with consumers. But they don’t need to please consumers, they have far more important customers: the surveillance state, and the military industrial complex.
Once corporations have a near-monopoly position, they do not need to make good products anymore. Microsoft has enough money already to completely fail at everything for centuries and they’d be just fine. So they can focus on other goals, such as dismantling online anonymity for the benefit of the ruling class, who owns and controls Microsoft.
they have far more important customers: the surveillance state,
Except Microsoft is also losing the whole EU market because of Trump
Trump is letting them steal by the billions with insider trading, they dont give a fuck about european markets
To me, these reeks of “We have learned AI is bad press for users so ot failed, but it was good press for investors at the time. How do we appease both?”
Great, can I now buy RAM, SSDs, and HDDs on a cheaper price?
Unfortunately, like GPUs during the cryptomining era, consumers have shown their hand as to just-how-many-people will pay insane exorbitant prices. Remember when you could pay $200-300 every 2 years and get about double the GPU power? (It was only 5 years ago…) Nvidia & AMD learned that they no longer had to offer that anymore.
RAM prices have quadrupled in a year. Yet 25% of gamers still plan to upgrade this year, and 40% in the next 2 years. Even if we make believe that the previous status-quo was “everyone upgrades every year” (which is obviously a gross overestimation), this is a huge “line-going-up” scenario for the RAM manufacturers.
Why would they even bother lowering prices until forced to do so?
The amount of consumers who get a chub for overpaying is way too high. “Look at how much money I have! I can pay $3000 for a $400 product and not bat an eye!” Absolute schmucks.
The “AI wave” is a scam. Everyone missed the AI wave because it sucks at everything except making slop.
That’s why I embraced the Dagothwave.
Context for all you n’wahs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M
I was going to say. If such a wave existed, Microsoft (which has considerable leverage over, and integration with, OpenAI) rode it better than almost every other company.
Oh no no, they have NOT been riding this wave well.
Microsoft and Google have each invested like 200 billion into AI crap and Google wound up with a MUCH better product.
Apple has invested like 10% of that, choosing instead to outsource. IMO they are the real winners here (of the previously-established tech giants)
My prediction is that Anthropic will “win” the AI arms race in the US but it won’t really matter because Deepseek continues to one-up them and OpenAI’s bankruptcy will destroy the economy anyway
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Why the fuck would we want to help? Every AI product I’ve encountered has been dogshit. There is no “actual AI”. Just slop machines shitting slop into each other and poisoning any data they are able to alter.
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Microsoft isn’t working on those things. Consumer facing shit is what people are talking about when we bitch about AI. We’re not going to add an annotation with the few exceptions every time we post about how terrible it is. Besides that there’s plenty of LLM shit being put into medicine and science where it doesn’t belong too. People are going to die because of this crap if they haven’t already. For the vast majority of people there is no distinction and that’s dangerous as fuck. Better to conflate it all as shit and let the useful products rebrand behind the scenes than to keep shoving LLMs into everything because they’re riding on the coattails of a handful of good applications.
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actual AI
Doesn’t exist, so there is the only one statement we can make about it, and it will have to be a blanket one.
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This comment is also bullshit. ML products that sometimes are useful isn’t “AI”, they don’t have anything in common but some group of algorithms that we called “learning” back then when we thought it’s cute to do this skeuomorphic naming.
AI doesn’t exist because the term AI doesn’t mean anything anymore. It barely meant anything back then when computers were the size of a room, and it means less now.
So when you’re trying to smuggly “y’all rubes and peasants, you know nothing of actual magic, only I know actual magic”, you’re starting with the wrong premise, where AI is actually a thing, while it isn’t, no matter how much marketing is throwing around.Removed by mod
