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Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products
- jimbob45 10mo agohttps://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-product-line/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ... Helpful chart to draw conclusions
- NicoJuicy 10mo agoThat's 2 years old?
- glimshe 10mo agoIs Bing now called "Copilot" too?
- CoastalCoder 10mo agoOr "Watson". I lose track.
- stackghost 10mo agoCopilot .NET Core, not to be confused with Copilot Core, and Microsoft Core Copilot Plus.
- luis_journey 10mo agoI don't understand why they name everything Copilot now, it's the most confusing thing in the world. Copilot AI, Copilot 365 Copilot. GitHub Copilot makes the most sense I think because it's Copilot AI but for coding.
- remirk 10mo agoI doubt it's useful to draw conclusions in today's world. The chart is almost two years old.
- PKop 10mo agoNot so helpful, it's too out of date
- amai 10mo agoThis is from 2025: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-microsoft-makes-its-billions/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-microsoft-makes-its-bil... Copilot and AI are not on the list anymore.
- jpmattia 10mo agoMaybe they could add a helpful paper clip to improve sales. Edit: Or better still, convince all of their customers to throw away perfectly good hardware and upgrade to one with a single extra chip, creating a hazardous waste epidemic for landfills as a nice side effect. It's especially important to do this in the middle of a RAM and HDD shortage. Really, I'll just never be half the great business strategist that these guys are. <sigh>
- guluarte 10mo agoAnyone remember Cortana? It seems like MS doesnt learn
- diego_sandoval 10mo agoWait, Cortana doesn't exist anymore?
- Elfener 10mo agoIt doesn't (but it seems pretty much every Windows install has it installed, and if you try to open it, it just tells you that there's no Cortana anymore.)
- Findecanor 10mo agoBTW. They did the same with Maps and the PDF reader: the two apps I used the most on my Windows tablet. An "upgrade" replaced the app with a nonce. That just made me so incredibly angry.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoAw, that won't matter when management just forces you to use Copilot or else you're fired.
- jacquesm 10mo agoUnfortunately that is probably how it will end.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10mo agoThat's how it already is in some companies.
- outside1234 10mo agoMicrosoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive. But this also means they end up with average products. They don't have the talent to do something exceptional. This has worked well for them when they can just come in and copy something (say AWS in Azure) and not pay the innovation cost, but AI seems different for some reason, perhaps in the same way search was. You need the top 20% in order to really be successful.
- jacquesm 10mo agoThe only time they copied something successfully and did not rely on major tie-ins with their existing monopoly was Xbox and that division lost money hand over fist for a long time.
- Hasz 10mo agothis is just not true. Building great products with average talent is a sign of great management, and it's been done before in both business and sports. moneyball is about this idea at some level. Plenty of SV is building below average products with exceptional talent.
- lateforwork 10mo ago> Building great products This is where they are failing. > Plenty of SV is building below average products with exceptional talent. Yes, you can hire exceptional talent and give them poor directions, resulting in poor products. But to hire mediocre talent and still produce competitive products you must have an unfair advantage of some sort. The Windows and Office monopolies gave Microsoft that unfair advantage. But it is becoming clear that this unfair advantage does not extend to AI.
- lateforwork 10mo agoThat’s exactly what happened. For the past decade, the crème de la crème went to Google and Meta, which offered nearly double what Microsoft paid new graduates. Microsoft hired the next tier, after the top talent had already been skimmed off by Google and Meta.
- this_user 10mo agoMicrosoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.
- janlukacs 10mo agoI find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap software.
- drcongo 10mo agoMy theory is that they deliberately make Windows so shit to filter out anyone with taste. Once you have a userbase of people who don't know better, you can sell them any old crap. Like Teams.
- geodel 10mo agoReminds of an research article from Microsoft!. It detailed on why scam emails about `Nigerian prince` are so obviously dumb. The reasoning being it specifically need to target only those who can fall for it. Anything more sophisticated and they would get people who wouldn't fall for scam in subsequent communication.
- drcongo 10mo agoThat's exactly what I was thinking of!
- Eisenstein 10mo agoExcept it makes no sense because as a scammer your goal is to get as many people as possible in contact with you so that you can scam them. You can only score on the goals you attempt so cutting out any person, no matter the reason, is illogical.
- drcongo 10mo ago
- 6thbit 10mo agoWho are the likely successors if Satya steps down?
- bsshjdjddjdj 10mo ago[flagged]
- PKop 10mo ago[flagged]
- neilalexander 10mo agoI would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find installed programs or local files.
- jacquesm 10mo agoBecause they so much want to be a service business than a software business. Microsoft execs are losing sleep over becoming the next IBM, not realizing they are already there and have been for a long time. Their main problem is that they never really learned how to compete on merit, just on first-to-market and all kinds of legal (and illegal) tricks.
- morkalork 10mo agoTo be pedantic, IBM is a service company
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoI’m actually somewhat stoked about generative AI from a “good enough” perspective, because at this inflection point where a lot of countries and organizations are looking for Microsoft alternatives (digital sovereignty, etc), this is the best time to be able to build and deploy alternatives with the productivity advantages (if any) AI might provide. Big Tech thinks they have a moat, when it’s really diffuse power being made available via genAI to build software good enough to replace them.
- outside1234 10mo agoGemini is really great now. Fast is insanely fast and handles 90% of queries. Deep Research works better than OpenAI's deep research given their search expertise. It is going to be very hard for OpenAI or Microsoft to compete with this now that Google has gotten their act together.
- delaminator 10mo agoThat’s the joy of not having to compete, your stuff is just there.
- ChicagoDave 10mo agoStill wonder why the OneDrive mobile can’t find a file and the photo backup has been broken for months. But I have a copilot button in notepad. Satya’s days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very costly and painful lesson.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoAnd photo back up has never included metadata like locations when backing up to OneDrive making it usekdss
- guluarte 10mo agoOnedrive, that useless app that creates a mess in the desktop if you have a laptop and a desktop like most users
- IcyWindows 10mo agoMost users do not own two computers.
- PKop 10mo agoA huge percentage do, whether it's most or not would be a stupid metric by which to design a cloud storage product in such a way that causes issues when one does sign in on multiple devices.
- immibis 10mo agoAlso, signing in on multiple devices is the entire point of a file sync app.
- guluarte 10mo agowell, onedrive is the ms solution to dropbox which is main purpose is syncing between computers
- jedberg 10mo ago
- voidfunc 10mo agoIMO, it's time for leadership change at Microsoft. Satya revitalized the company but now it needs a Product person that knows how to rebuild the quality of it's products.
- johnyzee 10mo agoMS Bob -> Clippy -> Copilot -> ?
- Perz1val 10mo agoYou have forgotten Cortana
- tartuffe78 10mo agoSo did Microsoft
- SoftTalker 10mo agoCortana... ah yes, that thing that I immediately disabled. I had forgotten its name.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- yks 10mo agoAI assistance is a gold rush — promotions are to be made and huge complex system to be over-engineered in Big Tech. The race to stake out the future empires is underway, and there is no time to think about the quality control, UX etc. But who am I kidding though, there is no time to think about those things during the chillest of times either, as any user of Power Automate can concur.
- Sevii 10mo agoIt's being treated like a gold rush but I don't think it really is. This is like dotcom 1.0 all over again. They didn't know what the best use cases for the internet were but they still poured billions into it. The gold rush didn't come until the 2000s when social media took off. Normally you get a frontier exploration phase where fringe people experiment with the new technology and try to figure out what it's good for. It feels like we just skipped that step entirely.
- 72deluxe 10mo agoIt's sad that the "gold rush" on social media just means "using the Internet" is a depressing experience of being tracked incessantly and sold to, constantly. A lot of the content isn't to educate or delight, but to build a following exclusively so that you can sell to said following. It's more like the "poo rush", where you are the one getting pooped on.
- eviks 10mo agoThe AI beating will continue untill the buying improves. And the use will be forсed by changing the OS.
- ripvanwinkle 10mo agoI see mentions of Gemini as a fast growing alternative to ChatGPT. Isn't anyone troubled by the fact that for consumers there is no way to keep your data from being used for model training if you want to maintain history of your Gemini chats. ChatGPT respects privacy and allows for maintaining history while also opting out of using ones data for model training
- big-and-small 10mo agoI trust Google ad monopoly to keep my data actually secure. They have a great track record of not sharing their datasets with anyone because this gives them an edge pushing ads down people throats. Google is honest about what they doing. Google also not going away anytime soon so they also not going to sell off their datasets to highest bidder. And I don't trust Sam Altman and AI.com at all since their whole thing was built on lies. They could start regaining the trust by changing their company name.
- jofla_net 10mo ago> I trust Google... Yup, yeah, sure. The company that attempts to open your password-protected zip files. Let us not give it a free pass either. There is no good incumbent.
- dudneet 10mo agoYou just made that up, huh?
- jofla_net 10mo agohttps://grahamcluley.com/shouldnt-gmail-zip-files-password-infected/ https://grahamcluley.com/shouldnt-gmail-zip-files-password-i... Its been a while so i had trouble finding it (but Grok obliged) Moreover its always the edge cases that people are 'OK' with, but again if they can do it (setup the infrastructure) for one thing they can do it for anything, and it makes 'trusting' them seem naive. Since trusting was the original statement.
- zubiaur 10mo agoTheir copilot stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed with marketing slop on top of an under-performing product. However; their azure offerings are somewhat decent. AI Search is getting quite decent, access to Open AI models served through foundry is quite the differentiator (although the rate limits are an issue), their reference architectures are very helpful and their ancillary services, like document intelligence integrate well. I'm a bit worried that their marketing dept has gotten their crappifying and obfuscating eyes set on those services though, given the recent rebranding of Foundry and what not, but the underlying services are decent.
- dylan604 10mo ago> Their <snip> stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed with marketing slop on top of an under-performing product. Updated as it was almost close to being a generic comment about AI overall.
- pjmlp 10mo agoSee WinUI after Project Reunion announcement 5 years ago, unfortunately fits exactly the same description, and we are way past COVID to use that as an excuse.
- orev 10mo agoIt doesn’t matter. Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and they have no qualms using it to displace competing products. They did it with Teams, and they’ll keep doing it because they know there’s no appetite for anti-trust prosecution anymore (or maybe they feel comfortable arguing they’re no longer a monopoly because they have no presence in mobile). Every procurement team is going to point to copilot, saying it’s included with the other Microsoft services a company is already paying for, so duplicate AI products won’t be approved for purchase. Microsoft is laying claim to the desktop real estate, so in a few more generations of the technology, they’ll have the customers and competitors will already be starved out.
- jondoe 10mo ago[dead]
- andy99 10mo agoBig corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons that some committee decided solved a problem. When the internet came out, did many legacy companies lead the way with online experiences, figuring out what the real killer apps now that everyone was connected were? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it, I think it gave rise to some of the present crop of big tech, and others reinvented themselves after the use cases were discovered. All that to say, I expect the same here. In 10 years there will be AI uses we take for granted, built by companies we haven’t heard of yet (plus the coding apps) and nobody will talk about stupid “rephrase with AI” and other mindless crap that legacy companies tried to push.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo ago> Big corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons that some committee decided solved a problem. Or not even .. maybe someone said all products need to be AI enabled, so now they are. Just append "AI" to the product name, add bolt-on to call an LLM to do something, and declare mission accomplished.
- akomtu 10mo agoBig corpos have reached the stage where they can hire ex-politburo apparatchiks from the soviets or china, straight into C-suite roles, and nothing will materially change.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748
- burnte 10mo agoThey bought Dragon a few years ago, and 2 years ago they debuted the Dragon Ambient Experience, then renamed to Dragon Copilot. We had dozens of doctors try it, after a handful of months most had quit, it was a bad product. We switched to a competitor at literally 1/6th the price, and we don't even have to offer it, the doctors tell each other about it and they ask for it. Nadella has done a lot of listening through is CEO reign but it looks like MS is back in a "don't listen to customers, tell them what they'll get" phase.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nolok 10mo agoI mean have you tried them ? I did and they're beyond terrible, of course they're not the one I pay for
- elpakal 10mo agoNot just about the products imho. I do some consulting for law firms who typically use the MSFT stack, and I was excited about the private ChatGPT services in Azure, because from my (admittedly limited) sample of law firms, nobody likes using Copilot and LLMs need to be private/secure. The amount of outdated and poor quality documentation for Azure services is amazing given how nascent these services are.
- devinprater 10mo agoLol the Copilot app isn't even that useful on iOS for a blind person. On Android, you type something in, hit sent, and the app pipes the pure output of the AI, Markdown formatting and citation markup included, to the screen reader. That's at least something. I mean it's crumbs, yes, but we blind people are very, very used to crumbs. On iOS, you type a message and send, and... nothing.
- delaminator 10mo agoOpen VSCode, close co-pilot again. That monkey face simply won’t go away.
- pcdoodle 10mo ago[dead]
- ZeroConcerns 10mo agoWell, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average, which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them. Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded. I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to make that button actually do something, ending the conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"... Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that. So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??
- throw310822 10mo agoThe other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".
- ZeroConcerns 10mo agoAbsolutely! There are so many scenarios where they could actually add some value, and they're fulfilling, like, exactly none of those? Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we are. And, again, it's fine with me: I'll just use Claude Code, but if I were a Microsoft VP-or-above, the lack of execution would sort-of, well concern me? But maybe I'm just focused on the wrong things. I mean, Cloudflare brought down, like, half the Internet twice in the past two weeks, and they're still a tech darling, so possibly incompetence is the new hotness now?
- Havoc 10mo ago> I suspect the issues are deeper for Microsoft, who have worked tirelessly under Satya Nadella to create doubt around its products This reads more like a hit piece than good faith article (But yeah the MS AI products especially on consumer level are pretty terrible)
- BiteCode_dev 10mo agoMicrosoft has this problem with most of its products. It's not just AI, it's a market fit and quality problem. They don't need to solve it, however. Their strategy has been quite clear: make it barely usable so that is passes muster to auditors, integrate it with systems that corporations need, and sell them on the integrations. Teams and Azure suck? So what? Big companies will pay for that, because it's integrated with their ldap, has an audit trail, gives them the ISO-whatever stamp, and lets them worry about something else. That the users are miserable is almost never the question for the ones signing the checks. In a world where box-checking is paramount, this approach is a winning strategy.
- kaluga 10mo ago[flagged]
- bachmeier 10mo ago> Google ships features people actually use; Microsoft ships demos people tweet about. Can't speak to the part about Microsoft, but it's obvious Google is creating AI products the employees want to use and do use.
- thevillagechief 10mo agoIt's criminal that Microsoft is losing to Cursor, even as they own VS Code, Visual Studio and Github. How does that happen?
- thm 10mo agoJust remember what SPJ said what the problem with Microsoft is.
- quchen 10mo agoWhich is what?
- SoftTalker 10mo ago... they have no taste.
- windex 10mo agoBetween the RAM shortage and the forced migration to Win11 along with a forced HW upgrade, I'd start shorting MS asap. This bit about lack of adoption of Copilot is just icing on the cake.
- belval 10mo agoI feel like the case for Microsoft inability to execute in a lot of verticals should really be studied, not saying this as a sound bite, I'd genuinely like to know how that is possible. Their investment in OpenAI, giving them what was, at least ~1-2 year ago if not now, the best possible LLM to integrate in the office suite yet they are unable to deliver value with it. Their ownership of Xbox and Windows should have allowed them to get a much better foothold in gaming yet their marketplace is still, to this very day, a broken experience with multiple account types. It's been 10 years. The counter point is Azure obviously which still has great growth numbers, but that's a different org. From the outside, it just seems like they should be doing better than they are. They have much better business integration than Google and Amazon. The fit is obvious and people are borderline hooked on excel. Why aren't they dominating completely?
- kayhantolga 10mo agoAs a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer—and honestly, it might overtake it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got. If you haven’t seen how bad it is, here’s one example: Copilot Terminal. In theory, it should help you with terminal commands. Sounds great. In practice, it installs a chat panel on the right side of your terminal that has zero integration with the terminal itself. It can’t read what’s written, it can’t send commands, it has no context, and the model response time is awful. What’s the point of a “terminal assistant” that can’t actually assist the terminal? This lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid them, good for you. If your company forces you to use them because they’re bundled with a Microsoft license, I genuinely feel your pain.
- jandrese 10mo agoThe crazy thing is Microsoft was so early with an AI product but was burned pretty badly when it instantly turned into a Nazi. Funny how the constant complaint on Twitter is how the modern AI agents are too "woke" and how Elon has to keep fighting his own AI model to conform with his viewpoints.
- 486sx33 10mo agoContext “ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot... “
- mlrtime 10mo agoWTH Are you talking about?
- jandrese 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
- pseudosavant 10mo agoI was hoping for a real look at weaknesses in Microsoft’s AI products. They ship lots of “AI features,” but only Copilot and Azure’s ChatGPT hosting see broad use. Instead, the article mostly reads as anti-MS/OpenAI without much detail. From my experience, Microsoft’s GPT-5 integrations in Word, PowerPoint, and their ChatGPT clone struggle with basic tasks. Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better. To be fair, building solid AI features is hard when model capabilities change so quickly. Reasoning and tool use only became reliable in the latest models, and when these Office features were planned, GPT-5 didn’t exist.
- darknavi 10mo ago> Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better. Side tangent: Copy/pasting from the Windows Copilot app is absolute dogshit. It makes no sense that the simple action of "copy this text" is this broken.
- 72deluxe 10mo agoI have found it copies the markdown that is used for the formatting? Perhaps this hopeless implementation is a wonderful microcosm and accurate barometer of the usefulness of AI-assisted development and tools.
- t1234s 10mo agoIs there an excellent "AI Free" linux distro that one can escape to when AI is inescapable from both Windows/MacOS
- treyd 10mo agoAll of them? I know of no Linux distros that do anything in particular to integrate AI. Although knowing Canonical they might add something to Ubuntu sooner or later.
- mritchie712 10mo agoI just had a sales call with someone from Microsoft who was looking for an AI tool to automate some Excel work they were doing. I doubt they'll buy our product, but it gave me a good laugh.
- artingent 10mo agoMicrosoft doesn't just have a shoddy AI problem. Microsoft has a direction problem. I'm no fan of Ballmer, but his Microsoft seemed like they knew what they were doing, and were actually trying to be good at it. Nadella seems extremely clueless and seems happy to just ignore and later axe consumer products that don't generate immediate revenue. And noone should actually be shocked about his ineffectiveness. Covid was a great example of how clueless his leadership has been. Skype used to be a verb people used in common parlance, and yet they dropped the ball and let Zoom take over both consumer and enterprise segments while focusing on "restructuring" Skype into Teams for no reason whatsoever. Prior to Covid, he was ready to let Windows run its course and axe that too. The sudden demand for sub-$500 laptops during the pandemic showed him that people still liked Windows and wanted a good OS from Microsoft. But instead of capitalizing on it to give customers what they wanted, he just gave us an ad-filled spyware with AI slop. I have zero hope in any product with a Copilot in its name (including GitHub). At this point, unless there's a change in leadership, it's only a matter of time before XBox faces the axe.
- sylens 10mo agoI think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer. Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale. The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.
- vezuchyy 10mo agoI don't have data to support it and I know AD was a gamechanger but I feel like Microsoft pumping free software to educational institutions was the main driver for it's adoption in the corporate world. When every person who kind of knows how to use the computer, can use MS windows and office and has to be retrained to use anything else, it's a no brainer to just give users what they know.
- sylens 10mo agoDon't you think this is why alarm bells should be going off right now about Google's complete domination of primary school systems? Google Classroom and Chromebooks are everywhere. Google Docs is the lingua franca, not Microsoft Word
- array_key_first 10mo agoThe main benefit of Google Docs is that, at least, Google is a better steward. Not good, but better. And also, their software is exceedingly simple, which is great for breaking vendor lock-in. Microsoft got away with murder because none of their shit works like it should and every single product they make is the "black sheep" in the category it's in.
- eric-burel 10mo agoMicrosoft is using the deep penetration of SharePoint in companies to sell Copilot license. At least in France it's well and alive and I see much more Copilot licenses than actual OpenAI uses.
- epolanski 10mo agoSatya is doing with AI what Ballmer did with cloud. Right direction, wrong execution.
- davesque 10mo agoOr is it that nobody wants to use integrated (i.e. force fed) AI products?
- btbuildem 10mo ago> FirstPageSage AI Chatbot Usage Chart (December 3, 2025) What a bizarre way to organize the chart. Clearly Anthropic is leading -- their early bet on "programming" as the main use case is paying off. The recent report from Openrouter [1] confirms as much: coding is the number one use case, with role playing / fantasy writing in second place. I have a feeling the remaining use cases will never dominate, instead they will slowly mature into acceptable practices across the various industries. That will probably take longer than the investment bubble can hold though. 1: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai
- thinkling 10mo agoClaude Code usage probably isn't counted as "chatbot" use. Also, I think you're overestimating how many people program vs. how many people are using AI chatbots as the new websearch. Orders of magnitude more of the latter.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo agoSure - US has 1M developers vs 300M pop. At least the Claude Code developers are paying for it though, vs only 5% of users paying for ChatGPT.
- smetannik 10mo agoThe more MS pushing a product - the less people want to use it.
- danielmarkbruce 10mo agoCounter: I use various co-pilot features at work, they are very helpful, save me hours, and many folks in my team do to.
- observationist 10mo agoMustafa is a side-character, he's the friend of a brother of someone who knows what they're doing. Competence isn't something that people pick up through proximity, and Microsoft is finding that out in real-time.
- mannanj 10mo agoIsn’t the problem more so that nobody wants to buy it and Microsoft is leveraging its power and influence to successfully coerce and pressure people into buying them? You using OpenAI’s products? Aren’t Microsoft getting cuts as owners?
- ptdorf 10mo agoNobody sane wants to use their shoddy products. Their office products can't even agree having the same menu options for the same functionality. People use them out of corporate inertia: Windows laptops are cheaper than Macs and that brings the whole office suite in.
- jsbisviewtiful 10mo ago> People use them out of corporate inertia And now with how things are going with the American gov, foreign companies see security flaws on two fronts: Microsoft's AI's unreliability+invasiveness and the US gov's unreliability+invasiveness relating to its stateside companies.
- Findecanor 10mo agoBTW. Feeding that AI boom, that is driving up the cost of hardware... while at the same time asking people to buy new computers only to run the next version of their OS. Not a great plan.
- Scubabear68 10mo agoI moved largely away from Microsoft products in 2010 personally, and 2015 or so professionally. Just came back to them last year for a client. What I am seeing are two really disturbing patterns: 1) really, really bad stuff that has been there for decades is still there, weighing everything down, for "backwards compatibility", and 2) a lot of horrible fluff and nonsense everywhere. #1 is pretty self-explanatory, as I am editing docs in Word I am finding my muscle memory circa 1999 or so still works with it due to all of the formatting bugs that still exist. #2 I saw with Windows 11 and the crazy adverts everywhere, seemingly random UI choices, half-broken or implemented tools and applications, and now random UI buttons thrown everywhere. The 1-2 punch is devastating and makes using Microsoft products 10x more depressing than it was 10-15 years ago, and it wasn't a happy fest then either for me. So to me, AI is just "more of the same" with Microsoft. It is more random shit thrown on the wall to see what will stick.
- kevinrineer 10mo agoBackwards compatibility has always been a Microsoft staple. What used to be a huge selling point - depending on the audience - is now clearly a crutch. Right now, it seems that the tech debt has finally started making the whole stack lean like the Tower of Pisa.
- estetlinus 10mo agoNothing an ad carousel full of AI-slop, embedded in the OS won’t fix
- WhyOhWhyQ 10mo agoI personally never found Microsoft software anything but shoddy: Microsoft word, internet explorer, power shell, outlook, powerpoint... these all make me shudder... I'll give them visual studio, that one is pretty good. I think Excel is fine. Skype was okay I guess. Anyway, I think the shoddiness can't really be the actual threat to Microsoft given their track record.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoSkype was an acquisition.
- s1mplicissimus 10mo agoAnd became pretty bad afterwards
- tialaramex 10mo agoWhen I joined my current employer, a few years ago, one of the things I thought might be good was that for the first time in a fairly long career I'd be using Visual Studio. Previously I'm a vi or vim user for everything, for many years. But I can say after a few years experience I'm not really impressed. It's too big and too slow. It has a few things I kinda like, a lot of half-working things I'd love if they worked consistently (e.g. some things I work on can be debugged, some can't, experts might know why but I don't) but as they are they're too unreliable to really change how I do things - but overall it's not enough to e.g. miss VS when I'm writing my own stuff, still in vim on Linux. Actually all of the Microsoft technologies I've run into were disappointing with only two exceptions which I'll get to. Powershell felt like they hadn't really learned the right lessons from the Unix shells for example, and Entra ID (called "Azure Active Directory" when I started caring) is a confusing mess. Two exceptions: 1. C# is a pretty good language. Mostly it's a better Java. Is that amazing? Not really, but it's still pretty good, it delivers reasonable performance, there's a large ecosystem, I don't hate writing it. 2. Azure itself has to have a way to "cut off" payments because Microsoft sold a product where students can get a limited amount of credit. The student doesn't have any money, so if they had $50 of Azure credit and Microsoft lets them spend $85 before turning off all the Azure systems that credit was funding, well, too fucking bad - Microsoft eats the $35 loss. Accordingly Microsoft are better (not perfect, but better) than AWS or Google's thing at actually turning stuff off when it exceeds what you asked to spend.
- chung8123 10mo agoI am honestly struggling to figure out Microsoft's licensing system. We have it here and there are some on my team that want to try "CoPilot" (not even sure what that means now) but there is no licenses option for me to enable them to do that. I am sure they are targeting the larger places than my 50 person shop but it is so confusing I don't have the time in my day to figure out how to enable copilot for my team.
- mv4 10mo agoWhat fascinates me is how someone at MSFT managed to get their own button (the Copilot) button approved. Having your own button or tab is a big deal (I remember we debated having our own shopping tab on the Instagram app while I was at Meta - and we had to abandon it when it didn't get the traction we were hoping for). These people have a UI button AND a hardware button on actual consumer devices, and it doesn't do anything. How?
- dudneet 10mo agoIt seems to me that America is a great big nomenclature butchering machine. If they can butcher what words like crypto or AI mean, they’re willing to put their whole economy behind that. I need to rethink my investment strategies.
- s1mplicissimus 10mo agoI'm always glad to see others notice this too. cheers
- Beijinger 10mo agoWould you be so kind to elaborate this?
- 72deluxe 10mo agoThis is true. Just look at what selling of products with "memory" means - "the tablet has 256GB memory"; no it doesn't. It has 8GB RAM and 256GB non-volatile storage. I suppose "AI" is easier to say than "word-guessing non-deterministic instruction transformer", but it does carry "intelligence" into the hearer, when the truth is that "AI" is not intelligent - it is a great mimicker of everything it has read.
- Beijinger 10mo agoI have not used Windows in ages. But I use Visual Studio under Linux that has some AI included. Does this count?
- pch00 10mo agoMicrosoft’s early/rushed attempt at AI (the various things called “Copilot”) does start to feel like how they lost the mobile wars. They had a tech fairly early (Windows Mobile) but utterly failed to execute on it and ultimately, allowed a competitor to dominate with a better product. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. With the sums of money involved it could end up being make or break?
- stahop01 10mo agobecause it is absolute shit and forcefeeding customers it will only make them resent it or use it less
- gaigalas 10mo agoWhen you're on the internet for a while, you develop an intuition for the average level of Microsoft hate that is supposed to exist at any given time. It's a rather stable measure. I'm seeing an unusual increase in that, and after some thought, I think the only plausible reason is that another company is afraid of them and creating anti-MS editorialized buzz. My gut feeling tells me this is all related to long-term sustainability of AI products, and both GitHub and VSCode are major points of anxiety for other AI coding platforms. We will eventually know if I'm right or not. If we see moves that point to other companies trying to decouple from GitHub and VSCode, then it's probably what is actually happening here.
- quitit 10mo agoMy first experience of copilot was learning that my Microsoft Office subscription was increasing in price. Then I dug a little deeper and saw that I could exclude it and go back to my old price. For what I do with office, I have no use for copilot so you can guess what I did. An unfortunate reality that software makers need to grasp is that a lot of people don’t use their software properly to begin with, meaning the addition of AI doesn’t push the needle - it’s just yet another “time saving feature” that the user won’t touch.
- KurSix 10mo agoMicrosoft's problem isn't bad AI, but a fundamentally wrong UX pattern. They're trying to shoehorn Copilot into linear workflows - Word, Excel, Outlook - but chat is a terrible interface for editing documents or analyzing tables. Google with Gemini is winning not because their model is better (though it is good), but because they integrate AI better as a tool, not as a conversational partner. This difference in mental model defines utility
- theshrike79 10mo agoI've used Copilot ih VSCode quite extensively, using both GPT-5(.1) and Sonnet 3.7 and Sonnet 4.5 as the LLM backend. (Before our company got the deals in place for OpenAI and Anthropic to use their tooling directly) The results are measurably worse every time vs. doing the exact same operation with Codex Cli or Claude Code. There's something in the Microsoft AI framework that makes the worse and more "stupid" than the competition.
- amai 10mo agoMaybe Microsoft should go all in and replace the CEO by an AI?