Hacker News

points by boringg 2 days ago | 0 comments

Seems like the smartest move. Microsoft went all in and have really not got much out of their efforts.

> Microsoft went all in and have really not got much out of their efforts.

The problem was rather that Microsoft had no real plan what they wanted to get out of AI. If they had a plan, they could have laser-focused their all-in on AI.

Instead, Microsoft just AI-slopped a lot of their bread-and-butter products, making them much worse than before. If AI is as revolutionizing and beloved by users as Microsoft believes, Microsoft could easily have created an offering like "Windows AI Pack" or "Microsoft AI" that should sell like hot cakes.

On the other hand, if you have to force AI functionality onto the users, it should be considered as a strong sign that perhaps it is not something that the users want.

[–] trimethylpurine 1 day ago

They forced Teams on everyone and it played out well for them. Users not wanting it might not itself be a sign that it's bad for business.

[–] ngc248 1 day ago

Regular ppl i.e non-techies love the copilot integration into all office products. Since techies know better, they think microsoft messed up with the AI integration everywhere.

[–] charlieyu1 1 day ago

Regular people don’t even upgrade to Win 10/11 unless they are forced to.

[–] aleph_minus_one 21 hours ago

> Regular people don’t even upgrade to Win 10/11 unless they are forced to.

In consideration how much spying functionality was added with Windows 10 (which worsened even more with Windows 11), and that Microsoft made it insanely hard to install Windows 11 without creating some Microsoft account, it is actually very sensible that people don't want to upgrade to Windows 10/11, despite the technological improvements that these versions provide.

[–] roryirvine 1 day ago

Even tech-adjacent folk in areas like product, user research and enterprise architecture seem to love it.

The bulk of the hands-on-keyboard time for those disciplines now seems to be using Copilot 365 as "fancy autocomplete" and "make this presentation better", Copilot Notebooks for deeper work, and coming up with all sorts of Copilot integrations and agents for managing email, Teams meetings and chats.

It's almost as if "copilot" has already become the generic term for "professional LLM", and many genuinely can't understand why us techies find it so limiting.

[–] watwut 1 day ago

> Regular ppl i.e non-techies love the copilot integration into all office products.

Do they, actually?

[–] red-iron-pine 1 day ago

no regular person i have met loves AI integration with anything

3 of the 4 orgs I consult with have actively warned people not to use it, and/or to only use their approved AI tool (OpenAI/Claude/Gemini)

clippy 2.0 is not selling well

[–] mancerayder 1 day ago

I, for one am very thankful for what Microsoft did with Windows 11. It has exactly the feature set, and AI value-add ... to inspire me to take the plunge to Fedora Workstation and I've never been happier. Even Steam games (kind of) work. More importantly dnf update -y becomes exciting.

Windows (and increasingly Apple) updates are more of a sigh and lip biting experience than an exciting one.

I'm really happy not to have touched Windows recently at all.

At work Microsoft's updates are buggy - Outlook and Teams are pretty awful on corporate Macs. Teams especially, it has a bunch of papercut type annoyances. And updates torture Corp IT.