3 ms·

Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.

justonceokay 10mo ago
Blaming slow sales on salespeople is almost always a scapegoat. Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Not saying that sales is useless, far from it. But with an established product that people know about, the sales team is more of a conduit than they are a resource-gathering operation.
- seanw444 10mo ago
  > Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Why do people use this useless phrase template? Yeah, the point is that it's not selling, and it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value.
  - Ylpertnodi 10mo ago
    > it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value. So why are the sales-peops being blamed?
    - jccooper 10mo ago
      I think the point of this headline is that they're not being blamed in this one instance.
- throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
  I worked car sales for years. The same large dealership can have a person anyone would call a decent salesperson, and they made $4k a month. There was also two people at that dealership making $25k+ a month each. If your organization is filled with the $4k type and not the $25k type, you're going to have a bad time. I was #7 in the US while working at a small dealership. I moved the the large dealership mentioned above and instantly that dealership became #1 for that brand in the country, something they had never done before. Because not only did I sell 34 cars a month without just cannibalizing others sales, I showed others that you can show up one day and do well so there weren't many excuses. The output of the entire place went up. So, depending on the pay plan and hiring process, who exactly is working at Microsoft right now selling AI? I honestly have no idea. It could be rock stars and it could be the $4k guys happy they're making $10k at Microsoft.
  - gernigg 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
      No but several women that came to buy cars (some with male coworkers, or so they told me) eventually did over the years. Tbh this wasn't some crazy brag post, as making $250-300k a year working 80 hours a week isn't all that impressive when software devs make more than that easily, and the top guys make many multiples of that.
cosmicgadget 10mo ago
Lol "Microsoft can't make something work ergo the technology is not feasible".
- parliament32 10mo ago
  "The technology is not useful", at least in enterprise contexts, is what this comes out to. Which is really where the money is, because some vibecoder paying $20/mo for Claude really doesn't matter (especially when it costs $100/mo to run inference for his queries in the first place). Enterprise is the only place this could possibly make money. Think about it: MS has a giant advantage over every other AI vendor, that they can directly insert the product into the OS and LOB apps without the business needing to onboard a new vendor. This is best case scenario, and by far the easiest sell for these tools. Given how badly they're failing, yeah, turns out orgs just don't see the value in it. Next year will be interesting too: I suspect a large portion of the meager sales they managed to make will not renew, it'll be a bloodbath.
  - cosmicgadget 10mo ago
    MS has a giant advantage over every other vendor for all kinds of products (including defunct ones). Sometimes they function well, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they make money, sometimes they do not. MS isn't the tech (or even enterprise tech) bellcow. Considering enterprise typically is characterized by perfunctory tasks, information silos, and bit rot, they're a perfect application of LLMs. It's just Microsoft kind of sucks at a lot of things.

Blaming slow sales on salespeople is almost always a scapegoat. Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Not saying that sales is useless, far from it. But with an established product that people know about, the sales team is more of a conduit than they are a resource-gathering operation.

seanw444 10mo ago
> Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t. Why do people use this useless phrase template? Yeah, the point is that it's not selling, and it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value.
- Ylpertnodi 10mo ago
  > it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value. So why are the sales-peops being blamed?
  - jccooper 10mo ago
    I think the point of this headline is that they're not being blamed in this one instance.
throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
I worked car sales for years. The same large dealership can have a person anyone would call a decent salesperson, and they made $4k a month. There was also two people at that dealership making $25k+ a month each. If your organization is filled with the $4k type and not the $25k type, you're going to have a bad time. I was #7 in the US while working at a small dealership. I moved the the large dealership mentioned above and instantly that dealership became #1 for that brand in the country, something they had never done before. Because not only did I sell 34 cars a month without just cannibalizing others sales, I showed others that you can show up one day and do well so there weren't many excuses. The output of the entire place went up. So, depending on the pay plan and hiring process, who exactly is working at Microsoft right now selling AI? I honestly have no idea. It could be rock stars and it could be the $4k guys happy they're making $10k at Microsoft.
- gernigg 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
    No but several women that came to buy cars (some with male coworkers, or so they told me) eventually did over the years. Tbh this wasn't some crazy brag post, as making $250-300k a year working 80 hours a week isn't all that impressive when software devs make more than that easily, and the top guys make many multiples of that.

cosmicgadget 10mo ago

Lol "Microsoft can't make something work ergo the technology is not feasible".

parliament32 10mo ago
"The technology is not useful", at least in enterprise contexts, is what this comes out to. Which is really where the money is, because some vibecoder paying $20/mo for Claude really doesn't matter (especially when it costs $100/mo to run inference for his queries in the first place). Enterprise is the only place this could possibly make money. Think about it: MS has a giant advantage over every other AI vendor, that they can directly insert the product into the OS and LOB apps without the business needing to onboard a new vendor. This is best case scenario, and by far the easiest sell for these tools. Given how badly they're failing, yeah, turns out orgs just don't see the value in it. Next year will be interesting too: I suspect a large portion of the meager sales they managed to make will not renew, it'll be a bloodbath.
- cosmicgadget 10mo ago
  MS has a giant advantage over every other vendor for all kinds of products (including defunct ones). Sometimes they function well, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they make money, sometimes they do not. MS isn't the tech (or even enterprise tech) bellcow. Considering enterprise typically is characterized by perfunctory tasks, information silos, and bit rot, they're a perfect application of LLMs. It's just Microsoft kind of sucks at a lot of things.