Quokk.auMicrosoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products
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Hint: nobody wants to use Google’s either.
Butterbee (She/Her)Ohhh I get it. So MS should make the AI use mandatory and compulsory!
I have never seen an AI more consistently wrong on everything. It’s the Apple Maps of AI.
Amazon AI has been wrong 3 out of 3 times I have asked it about products. Confidently incorrect about features.
FartsWithAnAccentI wanted to use Assistant but now they’re butchering that to force people onto Gemini, which is functionally dogshit.
FaceDeerSo not only are people not reading the articles any more, they’re not even finishing reading the headlines all the way through?
You realize these companies can force growth via cramming it in to every channel they own, right? You realize growth on paper is not public endorsement, right?
BlisterexeBut also, for people who do want to use ai, google’s ai is just better. Nano banana is genuinely impressive.
So why aren’t Microsoft’s numbers going up? Everyone’s faking it except them?
Because they’re easier to ignore and disable than the biggest advertiser and search platform on the planet that gets their grubby hands in everything? MS doesn’t have nearly as much of an online presence, and that’s exactly where these “AI” are getting used.
On top of that, Google gets to feed search queries into their AI and generate results for most searches. Copilot does not get to arbitrarily answer every search someone types in to Windows.
So… yea, in a way, everyone else is more capable of forcing engagement than MS. Would you be more likely to try something that’s merely available on a website, or more likely to enable a technology that could extract all of your personal information from your computer on accident?
Google Search being replaced by Gemini makes it easy for Google to have big AI numbers. Bing never got over its reputation of having bad result quality, and it’s only the default search engine on Windows PCs that don’t have Chrome or Firefox installed. My friend uses Windows and iOS and always sends me links to Gemini results, which normally are only slightly worse than “I’m feeling lucky.”
And yet beating out both of them by a very wide margin, with 61.30% of the AI search share, is ChatGPT. Which didn’t have any established reputation or pre-installed userbase or anything at all that either Microsoft or Google started out with.
Your friend uses Gemini, presumably willingly. That’s not “faked.” This narrative of “nobody wants AI” is false, it’s just popular among social media bubbles where people want it to be true.
They’ve got 70% of the desktop operating system share. Seems like every other thread about them around these parts is how they’re “shoving AI down everyones’ throats.” I’m dubious that they’re “easier to ignore.”
Read my last paragraph, then. It’s not how much MS gets in everyones’ face. It’s the specific avenues in which these companies are exposed. Google is everywhere on a platform that people don’t have to install to try things out, or have it automatically execute without permission.
MS is not. Do you not remember the MASSIVE outcry when MS said they were turning on Copilot for everyone? They tried to shove it everyones’ faces ala google, but their avenues for forcing shit are plainly different.
Microsoft has nothing worth using. Microsoft hasn’t made anything that’s even worth talking about. Anyone with an OpenAI key and an afternoon to kill could make something every bit as good as what Microsoft has done. They put the absolute bare minimum of effort into everything they’ve done with AI.
The only advantage they have is customer lock-in. Historically, that’s usually enough for them. I hope it’s not this time.
Eventually Microsoft will probably buy a company with people who know what the fuck they’re doing. I think that’s their only way forward because it looks like the brain drain has finally caught up with them.
blitzenMicrosoft has nothing worth using.
Mostly agree. However, Excel remains the exception. I refuse to buy/subscribe to whatever subscription they are currently peddling, but I do consider my stand alone Excel license to be worth it. And if the next version of Excel is still offered as a stand alone perpetual license and does not force AI, I’ll buy that too.
Yeah, I meant for AI stuff specifically. Their main products are…well I wouldn’t say “good” but they successfully choked out all competition in the 90s so…
For basic usage, just use LibreOffice.
For any serious data storage, get PostgreSQL.
SQLite perchance, as a treat.
I feel like Google sheets is a better experience than Excel, at least for my personal usage. I’m not enterprise though, and not trying to run it like a database or anything crazy.
If I’m using it in browser, sure. But as a standalone application, no comparison IMO.
I’ve tried both. I think part of it is friction from little behaviors that I expect to be like Google sheets but aren’t. I don’t even know what they are until I hit some keys and excel does the “wrong” (but probably reasonable) thing.
I have the reverse, I am so used to Excel from work that using Google sheets can be really annoying.
Yeah there truly is no comparison to Excel (derogatory).
(I’m just bitter because of VBA okay?)
Not fair!
Microsoft has made a lot worth talking about in the last few years.
You just have to talk it in the same way you would talk about touching the tip of a soldering iron.
To Microsoft’s credit, phi3/4 were both pretty good models for their size, for a brief period before they were comely outclassed.
Well, no. Microsoft has good products, to me specially in development area. That said I moved away from Windows and office as well, because of the crap they are putting into them.
I’m surprised one of these companies hasn’t bid against the AI bubble yet. Like have they considered going against the grain when there’s obvious push back could actually increase profits?
Could you imagine a world where Microsoft went back to a windows 7 Era where shit just worked how it was supposed to and was super solid? I feel like people would appreciate and buy into a product that just works.
Maybe I’m completely off base here but in my mind having a product that… y’know…actually works and does what it says it does is valuable.
That is unless there’s just so much money being thrown at them to force AI into their products that they seemingly cannot refuse, which could very well be the case. But it just feels weird
I feel like people would appreciate and buy into a product that just works.
The general public are no longer the market, but rather the product. Most of us have been demoted from customer to cattle. They don’t care what we want. We’re here to generate data for them to sell.
ScrubblesProblem is that they’ve completely bent over to shareholders and shareholders are both A) non tech people and B) believe AI will print money for them.
A company with a backbone would say “No you know what, this is insane and it’s clear customers aren’t biting. We will win long run if we make quality products people want”. Instead they bend over to shareholders and, from my understanding they say something like “deeper plz”
PowderhornOh, you just know someone’s shorting this. It just doesn’t seem to get reported on.
The problem with shorting is you have to guess when the bubble pops. Call it too early, and you don’t get the short at all. Call it too late, and any possible earnings may get wiped out by rebounds and/or new bubbles.
You also usually short with leverage not actual full capital. To hold a short position for a long requires solvency and hopefully you don’t hit your stop loss and just lose.
While I grant these things are true, there’s no way in hell multiple people aren’t trying this bet.
“multiple people” doesn’t mean much unless it’s one of the top twenty people that own most of the stock market.
Sure, but contrarian investment and bets are built into the system. Everyone wants to think they’re the genius.
Right, but this is about the noteworthiness of talking about someone shorting AI. Who cares if joe schmoe from accounting shorted their six shares? It’d only be newsworthy if it’s someone with significant investment or supposed insider knowledge shorting it.
If I could turn off the Google one at work, my usage for both would drop to zero
lol today I tried to resolve an issue with Gemini chat in Google cloud console.
It gave me advice that just hid an error, so technically the task succeeded but the results were garbage.
It was my mistake for trying.
It just lies like crazy whenever I make quick searches for scientific info. Like, beyond wrong and unhelpful, it cites literature that definitively does not show what it claims. Very unhelp for when I need to know, say, what are all the known ligands for a given receptor or whether a certain cell line expresses a specific cytokine. Things that should be super easy for an “advanced” search system.
Lvxferre [he/him]Both are owned by the same corporations (Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, Geode…), who’ll win either way. Until the bubble bursts, that is.
Vanguard and Fidelity don’t really own that stuff. They’re managing the wealth of customers. The funds they have are almost entirely or entirely owned by customers.
Vanguard and Fidelity make money so long as people hold money in their funds. They win pretty much no matter what. The bubble bursting will mean they make less money, but they can’t really lose money because they don’t own the underlying equities.
Same for BlackRock which I maintain gets a lot more heat than the significantly worse Blackstone. BlackRock manages a bunch of index funds and was renounced by several red states for being too woke (the CEO apparently believes in ESG). Blackstone however buys entire neighbourhoods to jack up rent in an area.
At the end of the day they’re all capitalists and none should exist, but I’m still fairly sure Blackrock has gotten a lot of the heat because the CEO is Jewish and a dem supporter. That gets the conspiracy theories flowing from the right. Doesn’t mean he’s a good person, I just think BR gets singled out suspiciously much in a world full of similar companies with even worse leadership.
I think it’s literally because rock and stone occupy the same place in people’s brain so they think they’re the same company.
Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.
I’m typing this on a Surface, so I’m not inherently anti-MS, but they’ve very clearly given up on the consumer side, which is an industrywide trend.
AI is sort of like having a plug. If you know you want it, it’s easy enough to find.
It’s internet explorer vs Netscape navigator. Even Safari. Gemini gets pushed by Android phones. MS lost the smartphone OS war. Also lost TVs. Also lost home assistant speaker/mics. Microsoft and every other company without a major mobile OS under their unbrella is fighting a battle with a major handicap against Google
thingsiplayCompetition is actually a good thing. Nobody wants a single giant corporation to control the majority of a technology. However I am not sure if this is really a good thing, because this means Microsoft will invest more into Ai, buy more graphics cards, fire real engineers and so on. Is competition a bad thing for once?
Rare to see an AI-positive article getting so many upvotes on @technology@beehaw.org.
According to the chart in the article every AI is seeing stronger growth than Copilot, on a percentage gain basis. Gemini’s just the one that looks like it’s about to surpass Copilot in total market share.
The only reason Google is doing better in this space is because they already had a whole range of smart appliances, iot devices, and a suite of apps with helpful smart features before they injected AI into everything. They already had people using the tech with an AI before it became a Generative AI LLM.
They aren’t any better than MS. But a lot of people were already drinking their Kool aid.
And no one wants Teams either.
I disagree. Microsoft products get decided because middle management who want software support after they outsource their IT dept.
Yet everyone uses it.
It because it’s great, it’s the absofuckinglutely worst of the worst, but they got key players to use it, the rest is forced into it with their closed off ecosystem.
There is a reason why Microsoft web products work so much worse oninix than they do on windows, and it’s exactly what you think: sabotage. Word drops half of the text you type? Must be a Firefox issue, no? Yeah no, change the user agent to say you’re edge on windows and all of the sudden it works. Still shittily, but it works as shittily as it does on windows.
When you feel the need to sabotage your already badly working products just to force your customers to stay with you, it really does show that you’re just full of shit
Fuck Microsoft
OK guys, I want to share my Microsoft windows desktop using my Microsoft teams. In it I will share a PowerPoint and a spreadsheet. Can you guys see the microscopic text? Nope? But what if the big ass squares representing various people who are not even going to participate were slightly bigger? Could you read the smaller font then? Hey! What if we just showed one active pixel from the apps you want to share? Just make AI do it!
Like Facebook chasing the metaverse pie in the sky, but now with multiple giant corporations.
When will they chase innovation with the consumers benefit being the goal, instead of finding ways to extract money from us at the highest margine possible.
Totally - the whole ‘AI is going to replace you’ is a miserable pitch to consumers. I’ll consider subscribing when they find the time to make an AI something with the goal of making my life better.
It’s their pitch to businesses. They haven’t thought about how that sounds to users though.
Fortunately it’s not true. I could turn up to work drunk and do a better job than the AI if only because the AI doesn’t know all of the idiosyncrasies of our system. It’s just a generic “one size doesn’t fit anyone” general solution database. Unless the company wants to train its own AI on its own knowledge base articles (Which of course are out of date) then Microsoft, and others, generic solutions are never going to work.
Even then, an LLM isn’t going to be able to actually diagnose a problem. It’s just very sophisticated word prediction, it doesn’t actually THINK, even if it looks like it does.
Absolutely. LLMs are the antithesis of innovation.
No thinking outside the box, just rehashing old ideas.
They simply won’t. They have been about getting as many businesses into their ecosystem for a while now, that’s all they care about. Pack as many “features” as possible, then extract value as much as they can.
any ai products really
From the article:
I’d disagree with hat sentiment. I’d put it as Microsoft is finally giving people the final push they needed to break the Microsoft chain they had around their ankles.
Nobody uses Microsoft products because they’re the best, they never were, they never will be. Microsoft is the VHS of the video tapes, it is as big as it is due to deception, marketing, and force. L
Let this be the obligatory “install Linux already” post, but I’m saying it as “switch everything away from US vendors to open source” as they all have turned evil and corrupt. Open source software is the only software left that can still give users what they need in a fair way.
Install Linux, setup some nextcloud instance, break that fucking Microsoft chain
I mean, people aren’t really thrilled about Microsoft’s non-AI products either. They spend money to churn out new versions of programs that are worse than the old ones. It’s baffling to me. Just don’t spend the money and don’t make you’re existing products worse.
Hear me out… Just add more AI and run it in a basement somewhere and leave me out of it.
Not a problem, we’ll just ram it down people’s throats.
Lots of people jizzing over Google in the last weeks. But Copilot and ChatGPT are by far and away the leaders in the space currently, both coupled to Microsoft.
Sure their own tools suck, but when wasn’t that the case in the last 15years?
I use Claude and Cursor to help program all the time, but I made the mistake of helping my wife try to use work-supplied Copilot and it was an utter failure at generating procedure documentation. After a couple hours of pissing around getting nothing useful, I fed the prompts to claude and had what she needed in a few minutes.
If this trash is what Microsoft is pinning it’s future on, they’re fucked.
Its awful yeah. But Microsoft have all that enterprise licence money coming in anyway. They will still be here in 50 years. In my mind they are more certain to be here than Google.
They are awful but they have their software on almost any pc in the world. If pc’s disappear and nobody needs personal computers anymore, that would be a lethal strike. But doesnt seem likely even with Ai coming in everything.
Have you tried codex? It’s pretty good… for AI
Claude models and all the rest are available in copilot from the selection box…
If you’re using free model from github on GPT4 then yeah I would think it’s no where near Claude 4.5