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

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??

> So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling?

Satya Nadella insists that Bing365Pilot has supercharged his productivity, but determining if he's high on his own supply or lying through his teeth is an exercise for the reader.

> Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...

This is just him aping every other AI CEO. Every single one has to act like the agents are super-geniuses mere moments away from achieving the singularity like people can't try them out themselves and be disappointed. Some of it is "we think this will work soon so it's ok if we pretend like it's working now", but I think a lot is just needing to constantly shove hot air into the balloon before it pops.