7 ms·
Microsoft's Nadella is building an AI empire
- muhblah 2y agohttps://archive.ph/ZR7h4 https://archive.ph/ZR7h4
- archerx 2y agoAt the same time more people have never been more ready to move on from windows, I don’t want A.I. jammed into every nook and crany just the sake of raising stock prices. I want to use A.I. When I want and not have it constantly pushed in my face.
- wdh505 2y agoI read the last sentence as "ai constantly punched in my face"
- SeanAnderson 2y agoFortunately Operating Systems is only 10% of MSFTs revenue. I'm sure MSFT cares about getting money out of Windows, but it's not really do-or-die. I think that's kind of why it feels like the OS is languishing - MSFT has found lots of other ways to monetize.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoWindows is the base that they use to get buy in on all their other products though. If everyone was on linux why not switch to google workspace at a third the cost?
- SeanAnderson 2y agoYou're not wrong. It would be more challenging, but I think the bundle of services Microsoft offers to companies is easy to get entrenched into? If you get some Azure credits for using their stuff then maybe you don't want to deal with egress fees. Maybe you get LinkedIn Premium for free for all your in-house recruiters. Microsoft Teams isn't great, but at least it comes free instead of paying a ton to run your organization on Slack, etc.
- throwAGIway 2y agoGoogle Workspace is not comparable. Every large enterprise seems to run on Mac and MS 365.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoI mean theyre definitely comparable. I agree office sees wider use but worse decisions have been made to save however many millions large corporations are spending here. I think you need to get out of tech if you think every large enterprise runs on mac
- throwAGIway 2y agoNo, the enterprise features of Azure AD, InTune etc really are not comparable. A large enterprise can't run on Google. Sure - smaller firms can and maybe should, it's much simpler.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago2 of the 5 companies Ive worked for have been on google workspaces. Both fortune 500 companies
- throwAGIway 2y agoInteresting... I worked for a much smaller company that used it and it was a terrible experience. I was really glad to go back to Teams...
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoI've never worked at an enterprise primarily (or even significantly) using mac computers. Are you in creative arts? Many digital art software only run on Mac.
- throwAGIway 2y agoSoftware engineering. Never had to be forced to a Windows computer, fortunately. Past 5 years mostly everyone seems to have switched.
- tallanvor 2y agoA third of the cost? Their lowest tiers start at the same price, and pricing is similar at least up until the enterprise tiers, at which point pricing isn't transparent for either company.
- archerx 2y agoOffice sucks, Azure sucks, Windows sucks, xbox sucks and etc. Everything modern microsoft touches turns to crap. The only good thing they have is VScode and even that is getting bloated.
- vletal 2y agoI'm in my 30' so I remember office 97 and 2000. I still believe that was the peak of their UX.
- DeathArrow 2y ago>Office sucks, Azure sucks, Windows sucks, xbox sucks and etc. Everything modern microsoft touches turns to crap. That might be true, but judging from desktop OS market share, what the competition is doing, sucks more.
- chii 2y agolinux is more usable today than ever before. The only chokehold that microsoft have on windows is legacy business apps, and office (and various compliance requirements for gov't software that opensource tend not to have, like FEDRAMP). MacOS is gaining ground, but because their hardware is legitimately superior. I imagine commodity laptops to be a dying breed in a few more years. Gaming on a windows PC is the last bastion that macs tend not to compete in at all, and on that front there's SteamOS. Microsoft signed their own OS death warrant when they switched from being backward-compatibility oriented way back in the Vista days. It might take another 2 decades for it all to play out, but from what i can see, it's one straight road down to obsoletion.
- tonynator 2y agoIt's all forward looking with MacOS and Linux. Windows is the only OS that can do everything anyone asks of it right now, which is in my book what a computer should do. If games work via Proton/Wine they will have worse performance. Many do not work at all due to requiring anticheat. Windows, as a certain group loves to say, just works.
- 2y ago
- jstummbillig 2y agoNobody want's that – it happens, as part of a trade-off to improve rapidly and dial it in early into something that's good, before it is so good, that absolutely everyone will want/need it.
- okasaki 2y ago1. Nobody chooses Microsoft - it's rammed down their throats by corp IT or gaming addiction. 2. Alternatives are $3000 macs with 1% of the ecosystem, or an enthusiast OS that doesn't work with the most popular graphics card vendor and constantly breaks.
- matsz 2y agoSteamOS (via Steam Deck) is surprisingly amazing for gaming. Most of the titles I tried worked perfectly fine without any configuration changes. I haven't felt the need to use Windows for years now thanks to this.
- csomar 2y ago> enthusiast OS that doesn't work with the most popular graphics card vendor It's not exactly there yet (especially that you need some technical knowledge to troubleshoot stuff). But I am getting similar performance playing games on Linux that I would be getting on Windows.
- dyauspitr 2y agoThe consumer never knows what they want. That being said, I would hate an always on AI always watching my actions and phoning back home to Microsoft.
- k8sToGo 2y agoThat's right. Just got a new Macbook Pro for myself last week. Couldn't be happier. My Windows PC has been downgraded to a pure gaming appliance and now is kind of collecting dust.
- simonebrunozzi 2y agoWatch the next few years as people move away from Microsoft and embrace Apple. Lesser of two evils.
- elorant 2y agoThanks but no thanks. I want to choose the hardware myself. I also want hardware that is upgradable if my needs change after a while. Linux is the way for moving off Windows.
- bakuninsbart 2y agoFor notebooks I find apple to deliver exactly what I need, at superior quality. I don't really like the os that much compared to Linux distros, but everything just works 99.9% of the time, which is a major plus when trying to deliver good software and make a good impression at work. My 8 year old MacBook still works without major issues despite being wrought through the wringer, which is impressive. For desktop I agree with you, being able to easily modify individual parts is a major boon, and modern Linux distros offer everything one might want if one is willing to tinker a little bit.
- baxtr 2y agoI’m an Apple fanboy, big time. At the same time I find categories like “god” and “evil” difficult when used in the context of corporates. Maybe Apple can be described as more honest. They sell you extremely expensive hardware so that they don’t need your data to be monetized. I think that’s a fair deal.
- pietro72ohboy 2y agoDon't assume they will never double-dip. The AppStore has ads inspite of Apple being a more "premium" platform.
- baxtr 2y agoYeah sure. They might break their end of the deal. But it will have consequences.
- _giorgio_ 2y agoApple is going to use on every device chatGPT by openAI (effectively Microsoft). So good luck with your battle.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pipeline_peak 2y agoThe empire dependent on a competing product, how does that work?
- belter 2y agoFinally some sanity....
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoWorks where archive.ph is blocked: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/microsoft-s-nadella-is-building-an-ai-empire-openai-was-just-the-first-step/ar-BB1o7AZY https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/microsoft-s-nadella-is... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1o7AZY https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1o7AZY
- 29athrowaway 2y ago1. Copilot makes people 10% more productive 2. Company ranks their employees, lays off the lowest ranking percentage of people responsible for 10% of the productivity 3. Company reduces headcount Rinse and repeat and then most people will be out of a job, unless stacked ranking is outlawed.
- SeanAnderson 2y agoPoint 2 and 3 are identical, no? And it's not like those laid off can't start their own, disruptive ventures. As employees get more efficient, it'll be easier to run small, nimble companies that take on the big leagues. I'm quite optimistic about all of it.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoI am not so optimistic about it. AI will create a large power asymmetry which will inevitably result in large scale abuse with no limits. In almost every economy where the elite does not need the support of the population to be wealthy and to exercise territorial control, the result is almost always a brutal dictatorship where the population is weakened and disarmed so they do not revolt.
- czl 2y agoYes, the general term for this phenomenon is the "resource curse," also known as the "paradox of plenty." This term refers to the situation where countries with an abundance of natural resources (like minerals, oil, or gas) tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. This can happen because the elites who control the resources do not need to rely on the population for economic productivity and can maintain power without public support, often leading to authoritarian regimes and social inequities. The elites in the countries that suffer this rely on countries who are buying from them and if democracies made it illegal to do business with such countries many would not be sustainable. And the curse can be avoided. Norway has successfully avoided the resource curse through creation of a sovereign wealth fund (Government Pension Fund Global) to manage surplus oil revenues but to accomplish this it had a long-standing tradition of democracy and rule of law ensuring government accountability.
- walterbell 2y agoWSJ article comment: > The LLM bubble will be much bigger than the .com bubble from the 1990s. Its ultimate burst in 2026 will be also epic. Like .com dark fiber, post-bubble dark GPU/TPU/NPUs would eventually find new use cases.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jsemrau 2y ago"We are shifting our focus on GPTs to Commercial and Enterprise scenarios and are stopping GPT efforts in consumer Copilot" https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/gpt-builder-is-being-retired-d1de6c3a-4c7a-4bcd-98ff-2f65f3d23cd1 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/gpt-builder-is-bei...
- cjk2 2y agoThis lines up with my whole theory around AI which I expect extrapolates to the commercial and enterprise scenarios as well based on how quickly I've seen stuff canned already at my org: 1. This is really cool! How amazing! We can do so much with this. 2. User activity drops off fairly quickly. 3. Oh they want money? Lets wait until the trial expires. 4. Not renewed.
- jsemrau 2y agoThat's my Heygen/D-ID story to the T.
- shw1n 2y agoAs someone that builds in the video space myself (https://dopplio.com https://dopplio.com), these pure synthetic tools baffle me (though I do think they're cool) They weren't realistic enough for sales (we tried), and all other use-cases seem a bit forced But hey, they're growing and acquiring revenue (I think?) -- so who am I to question
- cjk2 2y agoThey seem to be used for making cheap shitty music videos for bands I’ve never heard of mostly.
- mrweasel 2y agoThe current AI trend is running per the usual playbook. Before it was mobile apps, social media, crypto-currency and now AI. Like the other trends we'll need for the marketing to die down and see what is actually real and useful. Once we hit that point the money is gone, no more crazy funding. It will also be interesting to see if we get helpful products that makes our lives better or if it's going to be damaging as we've seen with social media or relegated to the backrooms, like crypto-currency. None of the technologies we've seen trending like this is good or bad on their own, but social media has been completely misused and rather than providing value and promoting human interaction it's used to track us and sell us stuff we don't need. Crypto-currency was, in hindsight, never going to be something that could be promoted to the average user, but is really useful as a backend technology. The current generation of LLMs have the possibility of been incredibly harmful, or extremely useful, but they aren't products in their own right. Regarding the marketing hype, I think this video from der8auer at CompuTex was funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45CvTHmt_dI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45CvTHmt_dI basically the AI label is just slapped on EVERY THING.
- Incipient 2y ago>Copilot GPTs created by customers will be deleted. For a technology that's arguably going to be very core to a lot of businesses down the road, vendor lock-in looks to be an unmitigable risk.
- rwmj 2y agoYou can run (and even fine tune) good enough LLMs locally on hardware which for a business is very modestly priced, so the risk looks easy to mitigate.
- qsln 2y agoWhat if LLM and sLLM are just the beginning, and what lies ahead will be a breakthrough on the scale of the steam engine? And it will drive the entire global economy up. Do you think the guys selling horses, in the early 20th century, thought that Ford's cars would be accepted or become widespread ^^?
- djtango 2y agoTruth be told, I feel like we're hitting some diminishing returns on information automation. Most the low hanging fruit is probably done now. With ageing demographics and increased education around the world, I think the next major productivity gains will be in robotics - replacing all the manual labour and care giving that needs doing in one way or another. LLMs may be a stepping stone in that journey but hardware cycles don't move like software and hardware adoption is slow and painful. This is part of the reason why VC doesn't like hardware but loves software
- benfortuna 2y agoI think it's very difficult to predict even the near future with so many changes happening at once. Consider even the previous excitement around the metaverse, that seemed to fizzle due to lack of content. Well now presumably generative AI can (soon) create all the 3D content you like, which could open many new possibilities.
- djtango 2y agoAll the virtual possibilities in the world doesn't reduce our burden to care for a growing number of old people. Nor does it reduce our need for food or other natural resources. These will continue to be the bottleneck especially as we move to a deglobalised world, ageing and shrinking workforces in the developed world with population growth happening in EMs and FMs.
- steve1977 2y agoBut robotics certainly will require more intelligence and better software. I had a Roomba for a while and that thing was just to dumb to be actually usable.
- amai 2y agoWhy should Microsoft build an Apple Intelligence empire?
- almazzz 2y ago[dead]