←back to thread

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

(www.windowscentral.com)
296 points mohi-kalantari | 5 comments | 08 Dec 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
ZeroConcerns ◴[08 Dec 25 17:40 UTC] No.46195233[source]▶
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??

replies(12): >>46195308 #>>46195429 #>>46195463 #>>46195557 #>>46195648 #>>46195673 #>>46196109 #>>46196188 #>>46196233 #>>46196367 #>>46196502 #>>46196573 #
throw310822 ◴[08 Dec 25 17:46 UTC] No.46195308[source]▶
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".
replies(7): >>46195481 #>>46195920 #>>46196018 #>>46196178 #>>46196184 #>>46196430 #>>46196505 #
1. ZeroConcerns ◴[08 Dec 25 17:59 UTC] No.46195481[source]▶
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?

replies(4): >>46195798 #>>46196321 #>>46196572 #>>46196628 #
2. Sanzig ◴[08 Dec 25 18:25 UTC] No.46195798[source]▶
I have Copilot at work, it feels so useless sometimes. As an example, I had a report which I needed to make some batch edits to. I figured why not let the robot take a crack at it, so I clicked the Copilot button and spent a couple minutes describing what I needed changed.

Copilot tells me it can't edit my current document, but it can create a new one. I figured okay, Microsoft doesn't want to set it loose on the original, guess it makes sense that it requires a copy. So I said yes.

Nope. Instead of creating a copy of my document and editing it, it created an entirely new document which excised basically everything in the original report and replaced it with a very short summary - I'm talking 5000 words down to 500. All my tables and figures were gone, as was the standard report template my employer uses.

What utter garbage. Office productivity is a major use case for LLMs, and here the largest vendor of productivity software on the planet is happy to fuck it up.

3. Angostura ◴[08 Dec 25 19:09 UTC] No.46196321[source]▶
I’ve found it fairly useful in Excel. The suggestions to clean up data are pretty good and it’s spat out some quite gnarly formula on request
4. danudey ◴[08 Dec 25 19:32 UTC] No.46196572[source]▶
Imagine a circumstance where Windows Search was as good as Apple's Spotlight, and could integrate with cloud services to index documents, browser bookmarks, web history, maybe podcasts, etc.)

Hey Copilot, where is that document I was reading about the new network diagramming software Jacob is testing out?

Or Hey Copilot, my disk is getting pretty full. What software is taking up a lot of space that I haven't used for a while? Or are there any files I can move to cloud storage to free up space?

But no, instead it's just 'we're going to take screenshots of all your windows, OCR it, and index it, so that when someone infects your machine they can see your credit card numbers and pornography habits.'

5. rickydroll ◴[08 Dec 25 19:38 UTC] No.46196628[source]▶
> I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review.

Maybe it's a fifth column group working to destroy Microsoft.