Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products — as Google's AI growth begins to outpace Copilot products
Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants its poor AI products
Microsoft has nothing worth using. Microsoft hasn't made anything that's even worth talking about. Anyone with an OpenAI key and an afternoon to kill could make something every bit as good as what Microsoft has done. They put the absolute bare minimum of effort into everything they've done with AI.
The only advantage they have is customer lock-in. Historically, that's usually enough for them. I hope it's not this time.
Eventually Microsoft will probably buy a company with people who know what the fuck they're doing. I think that's their only way forward because it looks like the brain drain has finally caught up with them.
Microsoft has nothing worth using.
Mostly agree. However, Excel remains the exception. I refuse to buy/subscribe to whatever subscription they are currently peddling, but I do consider my stand alone Excel license to be worth it. And if the next version of Excel is still offered as a stand alone perpetual license and does not force AI, I’ll buy that too.
For basic usage, just use LibreOffice.
For any serious data storage, get PostgreSQL.
SQLite perchance, as a treat.
Yeah, I meant for AI stuff specifically. Their main products are...well I wouldn't say "good" but they successfully choked out all competition in the 90s so...
I feel like Google sheets is a better experience than Excel, at least for my personal usage. I'm not enterprise though, and not trying to run it like a database or anything crazy.
Well, no. Microsoft has good products, to me specially in development area. That said I moved away from Windows and office as well, because of the crap they are putting into them.
Not fair!
Microsoft has made a lot worth talking about in the last few years.
You just have to talk it in the same way you would talk about touching the tip of a soldering iron.
To Microsoft’s credit, phi3/4 were both pretty good models for their size, for a brief period before they were comely outclassed.
I'm surprised one of these companies hasn't bid against the AI bubble yet. Like have they considered going against the grain when there's obvious push back could actually increase profits?
Could you imagine a world where Microsoft went back to a windows 7 Era where shit just worked how it was supposed to and was super solid? I feel like people would appreciate and buy into a product that just works.
Maybe I'm completely off base here but in my mind having a product that... y'know...actually works and does what it says it does is valuable.
That is unless there's just so much money being thrown at them to force AI into their products that they seemingly cannot refuse, which could very well be the case. But it just feels weird
Problem is that they've completely bent over to shareholders and shareholders are both A) non tech people and B) believe AI will print money for them.
A company with a backbone would say "No you know what, this is insane and it's clear customers aren't biting. We will win long run if we make quality products people want". Instead they bend over to shareholders and, from my understanding they say something like "deeper plz"
Oh, you just know someone's shorting this. It just doesn't seem to get reported on.
Both are owned by the same corporations (Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, Geode...), who'll win either way. Until the bubble bursts, that is.
Vanguard and Fidelity don't really own that stuff. They're managing the wealth of customers. The funds they have are almost entirely or entirely owned by customers.
Vanguard and Fidelity make money so long as people hold money in their funds. They win pretty much no matter what. The bubble bursting will mean they make less money, but they can't really lose money because they don't own the underlying equities.
Same for BlackRock which I maintain gets a lot more heat than the significantly worse Blackstone. BlackRock manages a bunch of index funds and was renounced by several red states for being too woke (the CEO apparently believes in ESG). Blackstone however buys entire neighbourhoods to jack up rent in an area.
At the end of the day they're all capitalists and none should exist, but I'm still fairly sure Blackrock has gotten a lot of the heat because the CEO is Jewish and a dem supporter. That gets the conspiracy theories flowing from the right. Doesn't mean he's a good person, I just think BR gets singled out suspiciously much in a world full of similar companies with even worse leadership.
Point still stands; the same "customers" of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.
If I could turn off the Google one at work, my usage for both would drop to zero
lol today I tried to resolve an issue with Gemini chat in Google cloud console.
It gave me advice that just hid an error, so technically the task succeeded but the results were garbage.
It was my mistake for trying.
That reminds me of copilot in the azure portal.
On every page, theres a header section with some recommended actions you can do there and with a click on it, you can task copilot to do them for you.
Today, everything I got was to the extend of "decommission this Kubernetes cluster" and other destructive things you do not want to accidentally click on.
It just lies like crazy whenever I make quick searches for scientific info. Like, beyond wrong and unhelpful, it cites literature that definitively does not show what it claims. Very unhelp for when I need to know, say, what are all the known ligands for a given receptor or whether a certain cell line expresses a specific cytokine. Things that should be super easy for an "advanced" search system.
It's internet explorer vs Netscape navigator. Even Safari. Gemini gets pushed by Android phones. MS lost the smartphone OS war. Also lost TVs. Also lost home assistant speaker/mics. Microsoft and every other company without a major mobile OS under their unbrella is fighting a battle with a major handicap against Google
I'm typing this on a Surface, so I'm not inherently anti-MS, but they've very clearly given up on the consumer side, which is an industrywide trend.
AI is sort of like having a plug. If you know you want it, it's easy enough to find.
Competition is actually a good thing. Nobody wants a single giant corporation to control the majority of a technology. However I am not sure if this is really a good thing, because this means Microsoft will invest more into Ai, buy more graphics cards, fire real engineers and so on. Is competition a bad thing for once?
When the competition is replacing workers en masse, yes.
Rare to see an AI-positive article getting so many upvotes on @technology@beehaw.org.
According to the chart in the article every AI is seeing stronger growth than Copilot, on a percentage gain basis. Gemini's just the one that looks like it's about to surpass Copilot in total market share.
Hint: nobody wants to use Google's either.
Ohhh I get it. So MS should make the AI use mandatory and compulsory!
I have never seen an AI more consistently wrong on everything. It's the Apple Maps of AI.
Amazon AI has been wrong 3 out of 3 times I have asked it about products. Confidently incorrect about features.
I was going to say, you can remove “its” and “shoddy” and the title is still accurate.
I wanted to use Assistant but now they're butchering that to force people onto Gemini, which is functionally dogshit.
So not only are people not reading the articles any more, they're not even finishing reading the headlines all the way through?
You realize these companies can force growth via cramming it in to every channel they own, right? You realize growth on paper is not public endorsement, right?