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

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336 points mohi-kalantari | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.195s | source
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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??

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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".
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1. burningChrome ◴[08 Dec 25 18:42 UTC] No.46196018[source]▶
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.