10 ms·

Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don’t have a horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes w

Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don’t have a horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. There’s a massive paradigm shift we’re just at the beginning of and Microsoft has been putting pieces in place for the last couple of years. Nadella has really turned things around for them. Google and meta are scrambling. Things should get interesting.

bredren 4y ago
If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a wee bit caught out as well. I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.
- gonehome 4y ago
  Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated). Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. It’s always been what they’re weakest at, I’m not sure LLMs will be different for them. The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.
  - zer00eyz 4y ago
    > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"
    - gonehome 4y ago
      Siri still sucks?
      - shagie 4y ago
        Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into. The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included). However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much. Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone. This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.
        gonehome 4y ago
        That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted. We'll see if that changes.
        shagie 4y ago
        The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?" When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications. Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while). Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple. Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs. If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
  - bredren 4y ago
    AI in support of user interface has been downright awful. IIRC, Siri has the lowest customer satisfaction out of any other product at Apple. However, the company has deployed machine learning in support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready to do gen AI at the edge. The company has focused largely on STT and image processing but has worked to support use of the chip for general ML, via transformer. [1] I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like behavior to Xcode. When will this occur? [1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-transformers https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
    - pantulis 4y ago
      > I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. This is so true that now the only differentiating capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is excelling here in an unexpected way.
  - eitland 4y ago
    > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years ago: Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its unsolicited suggestions. Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense, like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning. One single time I can remember Google actually getting a suggestion correct. This probably works better today than four years ago and maybe it always worked better if you were in a US timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri setting timers at least works and a few times a year it comes up with smart suggestions. (Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.)
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    Really surprised Apple didn't buy OpenAI; they will regret that MSFT did so.
    - bredren 4y ago
      I think apple made a choice a while back to yield software engineering workflows outside Swift to Microsoft. I had expected Apple to produce its own version of GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy. The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad answers or questions about legality of what the models produce. None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require expertise the company doesn’t have.
    - ugh123 4y ago
      OpenAI was already in bed with MSFT when they started working on Codex/Copilot together a year or so back. So the synergies were already there when OpenAI needed to scale up ChatGPT for the masses using Azure infra
    - trympet 4y ago
      According to MSFT [1], its a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment", not an acquisition. Do they have an exclusivity deal? [1] - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...
- endtime 4y ago
  I don't get the impression Apple ever caught up with Alexa or Google Assistant. That said, this is a bit different, since the AI tech is a bit more commoditized than with those voice assistants, and the product problem is the hard part. On the other hand, Apple has positioned themselves as extremely privacy-respecting - I wonder if that will affect their ability to use their users' data to train models. It'll be interesting to see, anyway.
- newaccount2023 4y ago
  for now, Apple is in a different league if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at the same time" and everyone will comply
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    And that's why I don't use their products.
- pxoe 4y ago
  a headset is not a suit of AI products. it's kinda...irrelevant. meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually". well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope for much.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    > meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails, too, we' ll see another in 20 years.
- listless 4y ago
  I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net. Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute happens - which is likely in Azure.
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    Siri isn't a language model, AFAIK. I'm sure it's using machine learning on the back end, but it's doing something very different. The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system) --- User: Show me hotels near Mars Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”) User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two) User: Honeymoon Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week) User: change the astronauts to 4 Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed) User: Yes Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info) --- Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something. Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.
passion__desire 4y ago
As a young developer, I always wondered why Google didn't buy Java from Sun. Wouldn't it be a strategic buy?
- mistrial9 4y ago
  google is literally the next generation Sun, many of the same people were involved.. the Sun Micro company was scrapped for (valuable) parts, with a lot of internal competitive moments
- airstrike 4y ago
  Not sure what to make of that, but I'm just glad we don't live in a world in which Google + Java is the winning horse
  - nunobrito 4y ago
    cough Android coughh +2.5 billion Google Android devices running their apps overwhelmingly in Java. Wasn't a coincidence this was chosen that way.
- letsdothisagain 4y ago
  Google wasn't a big player when Oracle bought sun. Don't ever underestimate them. There is a reason Oracle of all companies is the government's pick to annex Tiktoc.
hbn 4y ago
I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big breadwinner software is still abysmal to use. I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad serving platform that happens to run the applications you need, and they still constantly break basic system functions. For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear, jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default, built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is so clunky and prone to breaking.
- gonehome 4y ago
  They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space. Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not really representative. Even Windows itself isn’t that important (that was one of the big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took over). You’re right about edge though (which is why Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit). Microsoft also ships (something Google can’t do very well). I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued because people have not properly updated from outdated historical sentiment.
  - adzm 4y ago
    Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.
    - gonehome 4y ago
daydream 4y ago
> When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership and the GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now. Google in particular should be very afraid. [1] Though quite long. Very, very long. But it's well worth reading all of it. There's untold numbers gems in there.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition. They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft, including their XBox division.
  - siva7 4y ago
    Google competed but they weren't willing to pay the price tag. Microsoft understood better how powerful Githubs potential was at the time. Github was likely Microsofts best acquisition in the last two decades.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    > That said, except for OS and Browsers Windows is not negligible.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like MS can. If anything, this is where they should both be afraid because an upstart with a browser extension could replace them.
  - daydream 4y ago
neom 4y ago
Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is back on top.
- dathinab 4y ago
  - lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS - more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers - trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only through the Windows app store - maybe retrying mobile if Google doesn't do that well - probably even more anticompetive email nonsense in the sense of "who needs emails providers beside a few giants (like gmail)" - probably trying to make proper (by then) modern 2FA not work on linux due patend or drm issues, trying to make it hard to log in anywhere in the web with a native linux system
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    Do you honestly think that Microsoft is scared of Linux taking over the desktop?
    - dathinab 4y ago
      It never was about emotional things like being scared. It's about eliminating competition and especially preventing potential future competition, it's about maximizing control and power to the most you can without losing otherwise (due to e.g. law regulations lost consumer trust etc.). It's just a game of numbers and future prospect. Just the fact alone that Valve has Linux as a form of "escape hatch" if Microsoft locks things down more. With a bit of "future potential" (Valve Gaming console which is more then "just" the Steam Deck) is enough for Microsoft to take actions like that from a purely calculative perspective. And Linux Desktop _has_ future prospect, maybe not in context of how currently most Linux desktops are but prospect anyway. I mean Linux desktop has a lot of additional challenges: - like _massive_ fragmentation through every layer of components and users, often with a lot of more emotional then technical opinions - much smaller financial resources etc. (the companies which invest are either small (e.g. System76) or are not focused on desktop Linux (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat, Valve)) - a lot of money is flowing into server Linux hence all decisions tend to be focused on the server aspect thing things which are negative for desktop Linux and can not be configured away. (Through also a lot of "accidental" improvements and maintenance.) but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then Windows. The main problem is normally not missing functionality or hardware support but fragmentation. Fragmentation making it a bad deal to support Linux as a software vendor (getting better through Valve, Flatpack and Snap), fragmentation wasting dev resources, fragmentation making system management/hardware support harder, etc. As well as there not currently being too much monetary reason to invest into 1st party desktop Linux support (Valve is a special case, System76 is small). But non of the reasons which make people not use Desktop Linux are fundamental, and under the right conditions _one specific_ Linux Desktop could become highly successful. It's very unlikely but it's still possible, hence there is reason to make sure it's not possible.
quijoteuniv 4y ago
Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux distribution that runs legacy windows software within containers :D
- withinboredom 4y ago
  If only they could get ipv6 working in WSL so that shenanigans[1] aren't required. [1]: https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl
  - quijoteuniv 4y ago
    Shenanigans?! Do not get me started, i have for a year remember to close any WSL session before put pc to sleep, command line or VSC because on waking VMEM process will eat up the CPU. So had to restart or do a weird workaround, but Linux session was gone anyway. There is a github case 2-3 years old
- wankle 4y ago
  I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux, and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10 in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with Microsoft.
  - ajolly 4y ago
    That's no longer the case for Windows 11, or if I remember correctly later versions for Windows 10.
    - wankle 4y ago
      I just checked, Windows 10 in a VM (running on KVM on Linux), refuses to upgrade to Windows 11. I only keep it around in case a contract requires something regarding Windows. 10 goes out of support next year, I will delete the VM. I can reject any clients that would need me to touch windows.
dathinab 4y ago
[flagged]
boringuser1 4y ago
[dead]
intelVISA 4y ago
I'm first to crap on MS but they've really pulled it together recently with a lot of big plays coming to fruition. I don't use any of their tech but I can respect what they've done as a business.
mattferderer 4y ago
Not saying Ballmer was great or bad but it could be argued that the US Government handicapped Microsoft more than Ballmer was a bad CEO. To my understanding Gates was also very active with the company during those years as well. Ballmer inherited a company at the top with everyone wanting to crush it & make it dissolve. Nadella inherited an underdog. I think this should be considered when thinking about the legacy of the CEO.
- gonehome 4y ago
  I don't buy these excuses for Ballmer. - Massive miss on mobile - Delayed cloud stuff because of obsession with windows - Delayed cross platform apps because of obsession with windows for same reason https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ > "That memo prompted me to write a post entitled Services, Not Devices that argued that Ballmer’s strategic priorities were exactly backwards: Microsoft’s services should be businesses in their own right, not Windows’ differentiators. Ballmer, though, followed-through on his memo by buying Nokia; it speaks to Microsoft’s dysfunction that he was allowed to spend billions on a deal that allegedly played a large role in his ouster." I think he ultimately held them back actively with bad strategy and things only started getting better when he was finally gone. Nadella inherited an underdog because the previous decade's decisions caused them to become one.
computerex 4y ago
No one is talking about how they quietly acquired Nuance. If it weren't for Google, Microsoft would have a complete monopoly on AI.

bredren 4y ago

If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a wee bit caught out as well. I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.

gonehome 4y ago
Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated). Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. It’s always been what they’re weakest at, I’m not sure LLMs will be different for them. The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.
- zer00eyz 4y ago
  > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"
  - gonehome 4y ago
    Siri still sucks?
    - shagie 4y ago
      Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into. The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included). However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much. Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone. This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.
      - gonehome 4y ago
        That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted. We'll see if that changes.
        shagie 4y ago
        The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?" When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications. Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while). Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple. Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs. If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
- bredren 4y ago
  AI in support of user interface has been downright awful. IIRC, Siri has the lowest customer satisfaction out of any other product at Apple. However, the company has deployed machine learning in support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready to do gen AI at the edge. The company has focused largely on STT and image processing but has worked to support use of the chip for general ML, via transformer. [1] I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like behavior to Xcode. When will this occur? [1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-transformers https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
  - pantulis 4y ago
    > I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. This is so true that now the only differentiating capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is excelling here in an unexpected way.
- eitland 4y ago
  > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years ago: Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its unsolicited suggestions. Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense, like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning. One single time I can remember Google actually getting a suggestion correct. This probably works better today than four years ago and maybe it always worked better if you were in a US timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri setting timers at least works and a few times a year it comes up with smart suggestions. (Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.)
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Really surprised Apple didn't buy OpenAI; they will regret that MSFT did so.
  - bredren 4y ago
    I think apple made a choice a while back to yield software engineering workflows outside Swift to Microsoft. I had expected Apple to produce its own version of GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy. The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad answers or questions about legality of what the models produce. None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require expertise the company doesn’t have.
  - ugh123 4y ago
    OpenAI was already in bed with MSFT when they started working on Codex/Copilot together a year or so back. So the synergies were already there when OpenAI needed to scale up ChatGPT for the masses using Azure infra
  - trympet 4y ago
    According to MSFT [1], its a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment", not an acquisition. Do they have an exclusivity deal? [1] - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...
endtime 4y ago
I don't get the impression Apple ever caught up with Alexa or Google Assistant. That said, this is a bit different, since the AI tech is a bit more commoditized than with those voice assistants, and the product problem is the hard part. On the other hand, Apple has positioned themselves as extremely privacy-respecting - I wonder if that will affect their ability to use their users' data to train models. It'll be interesting to see, anyway.
newaccount2023 4y ago
for now, Apple is in a different league if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at the same time" and everyone will comply
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  And that's why I don't use their products.
pxoe 4y ago
a headset is not a suit of AI products. it's kinda...irrelevant. meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually". well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope for much.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  > meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails, too, we' ll see another in 20 years.
listless 4y ago
I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net. Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute happens - which is likely in Azure.
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  Siri isn't a language model, AFAIK. I'm sure it's using machine learning on the back end, but it's doing something very different. The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system) --- User: Show me hotels near Mars Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”) User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two) User: Honeymoon Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week) User: change the astronauts to 4 Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed) User: Yes Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info) --- Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something. Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.

passion__desire 4y ago

As a young developer, I always wondered why Google didn't buy Java from Sun. Wouldn't it be a strategic buy?

mistrial9 4y ago
google is literally the next generation Sun, many of the same people were involved.. the Sun Micro company was scrapped for (valuable) parts, with a lot of internal competitive moments
airstrike 4y ago
Not sure what to make of that, but I'm just glad we don't live in a world in which Google + Java is the winning horse
- nunobrito 4y ago
  cough Android coughh +2.5 billion Google Android devices running their apps overwhelmingly in Java. Wasn't a coincidence this was chosen that way.
letsdothisagain 4y ago
Google wasn't a big player when Oracle bought sun. Don't ever underestimate them. There is a reason Oracle of all companies is the government's pick to annex Tiktoc.

hbn 4y ago

I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big breadwinner software is still abysmal to use. I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad serving platform that happens to run the applications you need, and they still constantly break basic system functions. For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear, jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default, built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is so clunky and prone to breaking.

gonehome 4y ago
They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space. Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not really representative. Even Windows itself isn’t that important (that was one of the big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took over). You’re right about edge though (which is why Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit). Microsoft also ships (something Google can’t do very well). I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued because people have not properly updated from outdated historical sentiment.
- adzm 4y ago
  Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.
  - gonehome 4y ago

daydream 4y ago

> When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership and the GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now. Google in particular should be very afraid. [1] Though quite long. Very, very long. But it's well worth reading all of it. There's untold numbers gems in there.

ignoramous 4y ago
> GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition. They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft, including their XBox division.
- siva7 4y ago
  Google competed but they weren't willing to pay the price tag. Microsoft understood better how powerful Githubs potential was at the time. Github was likely Microsofts best acquisition in the last two decades.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  > That said, except for OS and Browsers Windows is not negligible.
LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like MS can. If anything, this is where they should both be afraid because an upstart with a browser extension could replace them.
- daydream 4y ago

neom 4y ago

Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is back on top.

dathinab 4y ago
- lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS - more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers - trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only through the Windows app store - maybe retrying mobile if Google doesn't do that well - probably even more anticompetive email nonsense in the sense of "who needs emails providers beside a few giants (like gmail)" - probably trying to make proper (by then) modern 2FA not work on linux due patend or drm issues, trying to make it hard to log in anywhere in the web with a native linux system
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  Do you honestly think that Microsoft is scared of Linux taking over the desktop?
  - dathinab 4y ago
    It never was about emotional things like being scared. It's about eliminating competition and especially preventing potential future competition, it's about maximizing control and power to the most you can without losing otherwise (due to e.g. law regulations lost consumer trust etc.). It's just a game of numbers and future prospect. Just the fact alone that Valve has Linux as a form of "escape hatch" if Microsoft locks things down more. With a bit of "future potential" (Valve Gaming console which is more then "just" the Steam Deck) is enough for Microsoft to take actions like that from a purely calculative perspective. And Linux Desktop _has_ future prospect, maybe not in context of how currently most Linux desktops are but prospect anyway. I mean Linux desktop has a lot of additional challenges: - like _massive_ fragmentation through every layer of components and users, often with a lot of more emotional then technical opinions - much smaller financial resources etc. (the companies which invest are either small (e.g. System76) or are not focused on desktop Linux (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat, Valve)) - a lot of money is flowing into server Linux hence all decisions tend to be focused on the server aspect thing things which are negative for desktop Linux and can not be configured away. (Through also a lot of "accidental" improvements and maintenance.) but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then Windows. The main problem is normally not missing functionality or hardware support but fragmentation. Fragmentation making it a bad deal to support Linux as a software vendor (getting better through Valve, Flatpack and Snap), fragmentation wasting dev resources, fragmentation making system management/hardware support harder, etc. As well as there not currently being too much monetary reason to invest into 1st party desktop Linux support (Valve is a special case, System76 is small). But non of the reasons which make people not use Desktop Linux are fundamental, and under the right conditions _one specific_ Linux Desktop could become highly successful. It's very unlikely but it's still possible, hence there is reason to make sure it's not possible.

quijoteuniv 4y ago

Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux distribution that runs legacy windows software within containers :D

withinboredom 4y ago
If only they could get ipv6 working in WSL so that shenanigans[1] aren't required. [1]: https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl
- quijoteuniv 4y ago
  Shenanigans?! Do not get me started, i have for a year remember to close any WSL session before put pc to sleep, command line or VSC because on waking VMEM process will eat up the CPU. So had to restart or do a weird workaround, but Linux session was gone anyway. There is a github case 2-3 years old
wankle 4y ago
I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux, and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10 in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with Microsoft.
- ajolly 4y ago
  That's no longer the case for Windows 11, or if I remember correctly later versions for Windows 10.
  - wankle 4y ago
    I just checked, Windows 10 in a VM (running on KVM on Linux), refuses to upgrade to Windows 11. I only keep it around in case a contract requires something regarding Windows. 10 goes out of support next year, I will delete the VM. I can reject any clients that would need me to touch windows.

dathinab 4y ago

[flagged]

boringuser1 4y ago

[dead]

intelVISA 4y ago

I'm first to crap on MS but they've really pulled it together recently with a lot of big plays coming to fruition. I don't use any of their tech but I can respect what they've done as a business.

mattferderer 4y ago

Not saying Ballmer was great or bad but it could be argued that the US Government handicapped Microsoft more than Ballmer was a bad CEO. To my understanding Gates was also very active with the company during those years as well. Ballmer inherited a company at the top with everyone wanting to crush it & make it dissolve. Nadella inherited an underdog. I think this should be considered when thinking about the legacy of the CEO.

gonehome 4y ago
I don't buy these excuses for Ballmer. - Massive miss on mobile - Delayed cloud stuff because of obsession with windows - Delayed cross platform apps because of obsession with windows for same reason https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ > "That memo prompted me to write a post entitled Services, Not Devices that argued that Ballmer’s strategic priorities were exactly backwards: Microsoft’s services should be businesses in their own right, not Windows’ differentiators. Ballmer, though, followed-through on his memo by buying Nokia; it speaks to Microsoft’s dysfunction that he was allowed to spend billions on a deal that allegedly played a large role in his ouster." I think he ultimately held them back actively with bad strategy and things only started getting better when he was finally gone. Nadella inherited an underdog because the previous decade's decisions caused them to become one.

computerex 4y ago

No one is talking about how they quietly acquired Nuance. If it weren't for Google, Microsoft would have a complete monopoly on AI.