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Does anybody else have the feeling "Microsoft is back"? With GitHub and OpenAI the have put their finger on two pretty significant new projects. What new thi
by TekMol 4y ago
Does anybody else have the feeling "Microsoft is back"?
With GitHub and OpenAI the have put their finger on two pretty significant new projects.
What new things has Google come up with over the last 5 years?
- Kukumber 4y agoHow are they back when the only thing they manage to do is "pump money into already successful things" To me this is a sign they are no longer able to compete and are failing back, the only growth they expect is from acquisitions This is not looking good
- TekMol 4y agoHow does it matter if a company buys or builds new projects? Betting on the right things is a hugely valuable skill. See Android, Youtube, Instagram, Tesla ... All projects that someone believed in, bought them, put money in, and then they became huge.
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago> See Android, Youtube, Instagram, Tesla All of the examples grew by 100x after being bought. Which of the Microsoft's acquisition grew by even 10x? Which of them even achieved breakeven in term of money spent?
- LegitShady 4y ago>How does it matter if a company buys or builds new projects? How does it not matter? It's like convincing yourself that since you can order delivery food you're a chef. Being able to produce new ideas that appeal to people is the sought after skill Microsoft is literally paying for with money from their entrenched positions that are failing to make anything new and appealing. Buying things is a skill all companies have and Microsoft is not skilled for spending money to buy ideas they can't come up with
- Kukumber 4y agoThere is a difference between investing into a good idea to make it successful and investing into a good idea that is already successful It is called "Opportunism" "Look they are doing great things lately with AI", when they just pumped money into an already successful AI project That's a short term vision, a sign of lack of capabilities in a specific domain, "let's buy our way in, nobody gonna notice"
- endisneigh 4y agoIronic you say this given that Google is the one to invent language models to begin with and GitHub was an acquisition. I personally don’t think there have been any amazing consumer tech breakthroughs by any big tech in the last 5 years.
- visarga 4y agoLanguage models predate Google by 10+ years. I found references dating as far as 1987. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22language+model%22+&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=1980&as_yhi=1990 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22language+model%22+&h...
- fzimmermann 4y agoReading the parent in the most favorable light: "Attention is all you need" can be seen as a fundamental paper for the current LLM generation, which indeed came out of google brain..
- visarga 4y agoOk, so you restrict the definition to transformers. The people who invented the transformers left Google years ago, making their own startups. Only one still works at Google. That means Google doesn't have the most creative researchers anymore.
- wodenokoto 4y agoOkay, by that logic they also invented search.
- ben_w 4y agoIf you like. (Larry) PageRank being so much better than the previous best is why Google became the megacorp it is today.
- norswap 4y agoSome of Google's biggest successes are YouTube and Android, which were both acquisitions.
- MildlySerious 4y agoVSCode, Minecraft, Teams. They have renewed their grip on several audiences.
- agentwiggles 4y agoI guess two out of three ain't bad. Minecraft and Code are both awesome, but Teams is probably the most annoying piece of software on my work laptop.
- DoctorOW 4y ago"But you have heard of me..."
- leokennis 4y agoTeams has all the features one could wish for (purchasing managers are happy), all tunable to an incredible degree (IT departments are happy) but all implemented in the least performant manner imaginable (users cry).
- fleddr 4y agoTeams is software that makes laptop fans sing, how can you be against that?
- qbasic_forever 4y agoKids have moved on to Roblox, Minecraft is the old thing now. Roblox has far better monetized its game than Minecraft too (some might say Roblox has gone too far monetizing it). Minecraft has gone the way of every Microsoft acquisition--stagnated and bled talent while competitors continued to innovate.
- zwily 4y agoThe kids I see are done with Roblox and actually gone back to Minecraft.
- 4y ago
- spaceman_2020 4y agoSundar Pichai is easily one of the least visionary big tech CEOs
- turbobooster 4y agoAgree...nothing cool being done over there.
- ben_w 4y agoDeepMind, and by extension AlphaGo, AlphaFold, AlphaStar, AlphaCode. Google Brain, and by extension the Transformer model (~which is the T in GPT~ my bad, it's Generative PreTraining, not General Purpose Transformer), and TensorFlow. Waymo, which is rolling out robotaxis in a few places. Not sure which department or subsidiary is responsible for their TPUs, the Sycamore 53-qbit quantum processor, or LaMDA.
- TekMol 4y agoI have not used any of those. Waymo, ok, I don't live in that area. How can I try any of the other projects you listed?
- jacooper 4y agoThat's the difference, google is shy to open any of their AI projects.
- pxue 4y agoProbably for a good reason? I was browsing thru their AI responsibilities page and was pleasantly surprised how comprehensive and well thought out it is. Not sure if OpenAI and with the release of chatgpt has fully implemented their own call for responsible ai
- thatguy0900 4y agoChatGPT seems to just take the approach of manually selecting topics that the bot doesn't like to talk about. I doubt that approach will be a good one long term, especially when you can just find creative ways to ask the bot to pretend there isn't any rules and it will ignore the bans anyway
- ben_w 4y agoFor example, pip install tensorflow and https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/tpus https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/tpus Most of what I listed is groundbreaking research, not consumer stuff. For the consumer stuff, try e.g. searching images by description in the default Android app, or Google Translate, or the automated transcriptions on YouTube. Apple also does similar things, as stuff like that is what consumer AI looks like these days.
- nso 4y ago.net core, game changer.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoGoogle has built lots of services in the last 5 years, but it has killed them few months after. Instead Microsoft has bought lots of services (GitHub, Skype), but also some stuff that Microsoft has built from scratch hasn’t been very successful, like Cortana or windows for ARM.
- LegitShady 4y agoif acquiring companies means you "are back" what was the value anyways? windows 11 seems like an intentional disaster where basif features are misaing because microsoft decided you didnt need to them. office seems to be getting worse and is now solely about thay subscription money. and many of microsofts acquisitions just languish slowly - linkedin etc. google can buy conpanies too. meh.
- seper8 4y agoLinkedin user count and revenue have doubled since the acquisition. Hardly languishing
- agloeregrets 4y ago> if acquiring companies means you "are back" what was the value anyways? In fairness, this is true of most major companies in the past 20 years. Apple acquired PA Semi to build their A-Series chips, Google just straight up bought the Android OS. Facebook bought Oculus and renamed itself, Tesla's first 3 years of ASDS was just Mobileye's tech and Tesla overselling it's abilities. Windows 11 being a 'disaster' is a vast overstatement of issues. Consumers widely seem to be fine with it by the numbers, and Microsoft found more ways to generate profits. Sadly they are a business. Adding ChatGPT to windows would wildly change the context of the product and would probably be a massive blow to Apple as ChatGPT is a real "I want that" feature if they market it to wide audiences, at the level of the first laser printer or such. A product where you don't have to know anything about how it works to know that the output is wanted. Linkedin makes money, provides direct information of practices, and allows them to own a quiet corner of the majority of US user's life. Just owning and sitting on it is a great investment, even if you forget the whole LinkedIn learning/Certs thing they are doing to own the education corner.
- jwestbury 4y agoGoogle can buy companies, but when is the last time they acquired one which excelled after acquisition -- or even just didn't fail after acquisition?
- lordleft 4y agoI started listening to the Microsoft-centric "Windows Weekly" podcast when I was a teenager 15 years ago. I have been always fascinated by Microsoft as a technology giant and never understood the vibe I got from others in the industry that MS was a musty corp past its heyday. It had gobs of money, a focus on developers and an organization maturity that gives it a serious advantage. This is not to say that MS is perfect, but counting it out like so many others is baffling to me.
- nivenkos 4y agoIt's a company built on fraud and abusive tactics - from QDOS to Mosaic to ActivePlatform and Blackbird. God help us when they get a near monopolistic position in video gaming and large-scale AI.
- maldev 4y ago100% in your camp. Microsoft Research publishes fantastic things, windbg is amazing, and the security ecosystem is really pushing the envelope for an open platform. And as someone working in the Kernel, I enjoy it alot more than Linux. I think there's just not as many influencers working on this side, so they get alot of fake news that's not true. And nobody is there to correct the record. And it's really easy to see that, since alot of the "facts" are hidden in deep documentation, or just plain undocumented to the point you have to work with it daily to know about it.
- ThrowawayR2 4y agoThere are a lot of people whose thinking fossilized (or perhaps I should say FOSS-ilized) in the '80s / '90s when Microsoft was in its growth phase and its products were a lot less stable and secure than what they evolved into (much like everything else; pre-2.0 Linux distros were riddled with problems as well) and Microsoft was aggressively throwing its weight around to defeat competitors (just like its competitors were aggressively doing to them and each other, but they never bring that up since it doesn't jibe with their narrative). As the kids nowadays would joke, "Gates and Ballmer are living in their heads rent-free" except it's been for the past 25-30 years.
- williamcotton 4y agoMicrosoft is killing it these days and Satya Nadella deserves a lot of credit! This is not the same Gates/Ballmer play as the 90s.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoThey're back to wanting to dominate every market possible. They're well into the "extend" stage for Linux. Trying to corner and ultimately monopolise the console gaming market. Now they want to monopolise LLMs as much as possible. Not sure this is a good thing
- flippinburgers 4y agoCertainly doing its darnedest to rope everyone into its walled garden all over again. Business as usual. All of that bluster about the open source "virus" years ago? Yeah well micro$oft has finally figured out how to embrace and extend even that so our once bright future has turned towards dystopia all over again. Makes me a bit sad to be honest.
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoDoes their GitHub division make them profit overall?
- epolanski 4y agoI would be surprised if it doesn't, thousands of companies pay huge fees to GitHub and several new introductions such as Copilot (which I despise) and Codespaces are even bigger money makers. Moreover I think ultimately the GitHub play was to get more devs in the azure ecosystem too by providing first class integration between dev frontend (VSC), dev backend (WSL 2, devcontainers), corporate communication and calculus (Teams and Office365), GitHub, azure. The only thing they are really missing out still is a good chat and videocall application. Teams has good ideas and decent integrations, but it's goodness dies once you have to interact with the core of the application: video calls are mediocre and chat is plain terrible.
- epolanski 4y agoMicrosoft definitely went in the right direction in the last decade and I think it has been the wisest of the big tech corps in US. They struck a bingo if they acquire 49% in chatgpt.
- fleddr 4y agoThe only public consumer-facing product I can think of is Stadia :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 4y agoA) Microsoft never went away. They did not stop being a monster monopoly or a top-level research and tools company. B) Microsoft did not create GitHub or OpenAI. C) Both Google and Microsoft have many significant research and development outcomes and acquisitions over the last five years.