> AI failed at Microsoft...

Let's be fair. Microsoft has not succeeded at mainstream consumer AI products... yet.

To say AI failed at Micrsoft when CoPilot (the real one, for developers) was, last I heard, the most subscribed generative AI tool for software developers is not a failure. It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Their other gen-AI components in Office, like Powerpoint and Word, are pretty darn good. But again, unless you're a corporate user in a work setting, you probably don't care.

This push to lease you your own computer is what hasn't worked very well so far. I dearly hope it pushes more people to Linux (though more likely they'll flee to Mac, which is a more palatable version of the clumsy crap MS is trying to do).

So consumer AI... perhaps that has failed. But the money isn't in you and me paying for a Windows license. The money's in big corporations paying for ten thousand seats at a time for their suites.

> It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude

It definitely didn't help back when my manager asked me to recommend a subscription to buy everyone on our team that Anthropic didn't offer any plan with a predictable monthly cost for Claude Code with SSO/externally managed billing (I think that changed fairly recently).

Github Copilot for Business with an easily digestible flat monthly rate + straightforward per request rate beyond the quota (for devs who actually ended up using it heavily) made it extremely painless to get approved.

Cursor was really the only other subscription offering that checked all those boxes but our team uses the official Microsoft VS Code extensions and there was 0% chance of getting buy-in if it meant disrupting everyone's workflow for a 6 month trial period.