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Of course the skeptic tradition is strong here at HN and the article title invites this. But I think he could possibly be right. Windows is in a terrible spot
by dougmwne 3y ago
Of course the skeptic tradition is strong here at HN and the article title invites this.
But I think he could possibly be right.
Windows is in a terrible spot. IOS brought a clearly superior computing paradigm that brought billions to the market. Microsoft missed the mobile revolution almost entirely. And while the company still dominates the workplace and has been successfully iterating its decades old products, it’s been clear that gen z, raised on apps, iPads, and chromebooks isn’t blessed with the computer savvy of the millennials.
At the same time, the information overload has hit the workplace too, with mountains of emails, endless Teams meetings, Sharepoint sites packed with decades of files, and databases packed with terabyte of data.
I think increasingly, the human mind is the bottleneck. I personally don’t think LLMs are on a path to AGI, but I do suspect they are going to simulate one, because the thing they are so good at predicting is not what token comes next, but what the human does next. A masterful human predicting machine could be AGIish just enough for Microsoft.
And at any rate, it’s been impressive to watch Bill’s old dog being to learn new tricks at a frantic pace. I have to give them points for risk taking and execution.
- Dylan16807 3y agoFor the claim to be right, not only do AI assistants need to be revolutionary, it has to be microsoft's version that is the breakout star. And that's a lot to get right all at once.
- dagw 3y agoFor better or worse most companies keep a lot of their very important data stored in Microsoft formats on Microsoft services. As long as that remains true, Microsoft will have a clear advantage building AI assistants that are trained and tuned on that data.
- flohofwoe 3y agoSo you're saying that we should just let AI write and read our emails, attend our team meetings, instead of, you know, doing less of those things in the first place? ;)
- akira2501 3y ago> it’s been clear that gen z, raised on apps, iPads, and chromebooks isn’t blessed with the computer savvy of the millennials. I assumed that was the reason they have an gaming arm. > I think increasingly, the human mind is the bottleneck. I think increasingly, the over monopolization of our economy is the bottleneck. Didn't their gaming wing just get much larger? > but what the human does next. Our lives are not a linear sequence of purely isolated events. Although, I'm sure middle managers wished they were.
- thefz 3y ago> Windows is in a terrible spot. IOS brought a clearly superior computing paradigm that brought billions to the market. ... for home consumers... and maybe. IOS is nonexistent in corporate, at any size. It's all Linux and Windows.
- spdif899 3y agoMany companies in the web space operate almost entirely via MacBook
- eindiran 3y agoiOS is a smartphone/tablet OS, I'm not sure how you think it should be used in corporate environments. If you're talking about macOS and the fact that there are no servers running it, that is fair enough, but OP was talking about iOS specifically.
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago> “Windows is in a terrible spot. IOS brought a clearly superior computing paradigm that brought billions to the market.” No it’s not. IMO, iOS is a superior media consumption platform, but a laughably bad computing platform.