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

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.

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.

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

I've been thinking about this recently. The centrality of the stock market, while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently, might actually be a big weakness for the USA today. A capable adversary, like China, can kill entire strategic sectors in the US using the stock market. If they undercut the US companies and are willing to accept low returns on their investments, then the respective USA competition will be driven out of business by their investors, because there will be other sectors to invest in, with higher RoI. Do this at various points in strategic value chains, and over a decade or so it might kill entire verticals in strategic sectors, leaving the US economy vulnerable to any kinds of shocks.

As someone who is essentially financially illiterate, what does this mean, "allocate resources efficiently?" Nobody's investing in companies that promise to cure world hunger or alleviate childhood suffering. They're investing in technologies that can extract the most wealth from the population, regardless of externalities. Is that desirable?

Then again, I can't fathom what people would be doing with their money if the stock market weren't there. I imagine they might naturally wind up with some sort of...stock market.

That's what's meant by efficiency, it's allocating it to the place that has the highest return on investment.

As you point out, in practice what's efficient is what can capture the highest return, not necessarily the highest return per se. If say investing in education had high returns society wide but those returns couldn't be captured, that's not an efficient use of private capital.

As somebody doesn't consider himself a capitalist, wouldn't it be fair to say it is "the most efficient" in precisely one thing: capital reproducing itself?

And if so, why is that necessarily a good thing? Why should that be our goal as society as opposed to things like minimizing child mortality, increasing literacy rates, making sure we don't have a ton of our fellow humans living on the street in misery etc etc - things that make the lives of our fellow humans better? Why is capital growth the metric we have chosen to optimize for? Surely there's better things to optimize for?

Excuse the polemic, but infinite growth with no regard for anything else is the ideology of a cancer cell - and to me that is increasingly what it feels like when we are wasting all these resources on a dying planet just to make numbers go up.