by ceroxylon
13 subcomments
- As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you".
This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I am doing to something I don't want or didn't intend.
It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails.
by jqpabc123
24 subcomments
- AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising.
It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this.
So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted?
I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made selling the fantasy is simply too good to ignore.
In other words --- pure greed. Over the longer term, this is a weakness, not a strength.
- I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."?
Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App (https://m365.cloud.microsoft/).
Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me? Like, Copilot could watch my daily habits and offer automation for recurring things.
- If you click through to the article shared yesterday[0]:
> Microsoft denies report of lowering targets for AI software sales growth
This Ars Technica article cites the same reporting as that Reuters piece but doesn't (yet) include anything about MSFT's rebuttal.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46135388
- The difference between poison and medicine is the amount. AI is great and very useful, but they want the AI to replace you instead of supporting your needs.
"AI everywhere" is worse than "AI nowhere". What we need is "AI somewhere".
- Even Devblogs and anything related to Java,.NET, C++ and Python out of Redmond seems to be all around AI and anything else are now low priority tickets on their roadmaps.
No wonder there is this exhaustion.
- It's almost a revenge of the engineers. The big players' path to "success" has been to slap together some co-pilot loaded with enterprise bloat and try to compete with startups that solve the same problems in a much cleaner way.
Meanwhile, they believed the market was already theirs—so their logic became: fire the engineers, buy more GPUs.
I have mixed feelings about this. I've interviewed several people who were affected by these layoffs, and honestly, many of them were mediocre engineers by most measures. But that still doesn't make this a path to success.
by rewilder12
1 subcomments
- Anyone who has had the pleasure of being forced to migrate to their new Fabric product can tell you why sales are low. It's terrible not just because it's a rushed buggy pile of garbage they want people to Alpha test on users but because of the "AI First" design they are forcing into it. They hide so much of what's happening in the background it is hard to feel like you can trust any of it. Like agentic "thinking" models with zero way to look into what it did to get to the conclusion.
- A bit tangential and pedantic, but:
> At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual.
"Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".
by derekcheng08
3 subcomments
- Super interesting how this arc has played out for Microsoft. They went from having this massive advantage in being an early OpenAI partner with early access to their models to largely losing the consumer AI space: Copilot is almost never mentioned in the same breath as Claude and ChatGPT. Though I guess their huge stake in OpenAI will still pay out massively from a valuation perspective.
- Hearing similar stories play out elsewhere too with targets being missed left and right.
There’s definitely something there with AI but a giant chasm between reality and the sales expectations on what’s needed to make the current financial engineering on AI make any sense.
- Meanwhile, divisions that make actual products people wants are expected to subsidize the hype department: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/new-report-about-crazy-xbox-pr...
- "after salespeople miss their quotas."
Well.. that's certainly one way to view it. The other is:
"because the company set unrealistic expectations."
I'm sure this will slow down the growth of "AI datacenters." I'm sure of this.
- Too much money being spent on a technology that isnt ready to do what they're saying it can do. It feels like the 3G era all over again. Billion spent on 3G licences which didnt deliver what they expected it would.
by knowitnone3
0 subcomment
- Why do they have salespeople when AI could have done the job?
- What can you even do in the ms enterprise ecosystem with their copilot integration?
Is it just for chatting? Is it a glorified RAG?
Can you tell copilot co to create a presentation? Make a visualisation in a spreadsheet?
- >> The Information notes that much of Microsoft’s AI revenue comes from AI companies themselves renting cloud infrastructure rather than from traditional enterprises adopting AI tools for their own operations.
And MS spends on buying AI hardware. That's a full circle.
- Why wasn't AI able to help them meet their sales targets?
Can't Microsoft supercharge its workflow with these five weird prompts that bring a new layer of intelligence to its productivity:
https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/billionaire-microsoft-ceo-sat...
- Despite having an unlimited warchest I'm not expecting Microsoft to come out as a winner from this AI race whilst having the necessary resources. The easy investment was to throw billions at OpenAI to gain access to their tech, but that puts them in a weird position of not investing heavily in cultivating their own AI talent and being in control of their own destiny by having their own horse in the race with their own SOTA models.
Apple's having a similar issue, unlimited wealth that's outsourcing to external SOTA model providers.
by mayhemducks
0 subcomment
- Hopefully this is the beginning of the trough of disillusionment, and the steady return of rationalism.
by shevy-java
2 subcomments
- Have we finally reached peak AI already? In that event we
will see the falling down phase next.
by tinyhouse
1 subcomments
- Microsoft is strange cause it reports crazy growth numbers for Azure but I never hear about any tech company using Azure (AWS and GCP dominate here). I know it's more popular in big enterprises, banks, pharma, government, etc. and companies like Openai use their GPU offerings. Then there's all the Office stuff (Sharepoint, One Drive, etc). Who knows what they include under Azure numbers. Even Github can be considered "cloud".
My point is, outside of co-pilot, very few consider Microsoft when they are looking for AI solutions, and if you're not already using Azure, why would you even bother check what they offer. At this point, their biggest ticket is their OpenAI stake.
With that being said, I should give them some credit. They do some interesting research and have some useful open source libraries they release and maintain in the AI space. But that's very different than building AI products and solutions for customers.
- But is it sold enough to regular Windows Home users? If MS brings an ultimatum: "you need to buy AI services to use Windows", they might get a bunch more clueless subscribers. In the same way as there's no ability to set up Windows without internet connection and MS account they could make it mandatory to subscribe to Copilot.
- I went to Ignite a few weeks ago, and the theme of the event and most talks was "look at how we're leveraging AI in this product to add value".
Separately, the theme from talking to Every. Single. Person on the buy-side was gigantic eye roll yes I cant wait for AI to solve all my problems.
Companies I support are being directed from their presidents to use ai, literally a solution in search of a problem.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Again? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46135388
Not only that but the headline and story changed by the time Ars went to print:
Microsoft denies report of lowering targets for AI software sales growth
by lawlessone
0 subcomment
- People are wondering how we got here when these AI's make so many mistakes.
But the one thing they're really good at is marketing.
That's why it's all over linkedin etc, marketing people see how great it is and think it must be great at everything else too.
- I was playing with copilot in excel the other day, and (not surprisingly) it quickly got into a loop of “that’s not possible… oh yea here is how you do that… oh you are right that didn’t work because it’s not possible” starting from the very first prompt. You can tell it’s being given instructions to always find an answer.
- "They just have no taste" - Steve Jobs
Microsoft had a great start with the exclusive rights over OpenAI tech but they're not capable of really talking with developers within those large companies in the same sense Google and AWS are rapidly catching-up.
- I wonder if it’s because Microsoft is hyper focused on a bunch of crap people don’t want or need?
by KellyCriterion
0 subcomment
- MS365 subscription price rise next year for my area:
25% up :-D
by Bluescreenbuddy
0 subcomment
- Good. Go make your OS useful and stop alienating your enterprise customers.
- Is "The Information" credible? It's the sole source.
by ludicrousdispla
0 subcomment
- Is there something that AI is expected to be exceptionally good at, and that also has value?
- This is annoying because Ars is one of the better tech blogs out there, but it still has instances of biased reporting like this one. It's interesting to decipher this article with an eye on what they said, what they implied, and what they didn't say.
Would be good if a sales person chime could in to keep me honest, but:
1. There is a difference between sales quotas and sales growth targets. The former is a goal, latter is aspirational, a "stretch goal". They were not hitting their stretch goals.
2. The stretch goals were, like, doubling the sales in a year. And they dropped it to 25% or 50% growth. No idea what the adoption of such a product should be, but doubling sounds pretty ambitious? I really can't say, and neither did TFA.
3. Only a fraction met their growth goals, but I guess it's safe to assume most hit their sales quotas, otherwise that's what the story would be about. Also, this implies some DID hit their growth goals, which implies at least some doubled their sales in a year. Could be they started small so doubling was easy, or could be a big deal, we don't know.
4. Sales quotas get revised all the time, especially for new products. Apparently, this was for a single product, Foundry, which was launched a year ago, so I expect some trial and error to figure out the real demand.
5. From the reporting it seems Foundry is having problems connecting to internal data sources... indicating it's a problem with engineering, and not a problem with the AI itself. But TFA focuses on AI issues like hallucinations.
6. No reporting on the dozens of other AI products that MSFT has churned out.
As an aside, it seems data connectivity issues are a stickier problem than most realize (e.g. organizational issues) and I believe Palantir created the FDE role for just this purpose: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir
Maybe without that strategy it would be hard for a product like this to work.
- Have you ever seen a sales target that was achievable? They are always aspirational.
by meindnoch
2 subcomments
- Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.
- It truly looks like they didn’t learn anything from Clippy…
by MajesticWombat
0 subcomment
- turns out ppl dont want to pay astronomical sums for shitty hallucinating ai when it really matters
by cleandreams
1 subcomments
- For the first time I have begun to doubt Microsoft's chosen course. (I am a retired MS principal engineer.) Their integration of copilot shows all the taste and good tradeoff choices of Teams but to far greater consequence. Copilot is irritating.
MS dependence on OpenAI may well become dicey because that company is going to be more impacted by the popping of the AI bubble than any other large player. I've read that MS can "simply" replace ChatGPT by rolling their own -- maybe they can. I wouldn't bet the company on it. Is google going to be eager to license Gemini? Why would they?
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46135388
- They don't give a shit about their users, but their own salespeople are worthy of this morsel of mercy.
- [dead]
- made up story
by justapassenger
1 subcomments
- AI is people looking at EV hype and saying - I'll 100x it.
It has all the same components, just on much higher scale:
1. Billionaire con-man convincing large part of market and industry (Altman in AI vs Musk in EV) that new tech will take over in few years.
2. Insane valuations not supported by an actual ROI.
3. Very interesting and amazing underlying technology.
4. Governments jumping on the hype and enabling it.
by niceworkbuddy
1 subcomments
- I wonder what part of these failed sales is due to GDRP requirements in the IT enterprise industry. I have my own european view, and it seems our governments are treating the matter very seriously. How do you ensure an AI agent won't leak anything? It just so happened that it wiped entire database or cleared a disk and later being very "sorry" about it. Is the risk worth it?