The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.

Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.

Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.

Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.

I expect this is the crux of the problem.

There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.

Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.

But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.

CEO has only delivered failure, and in trying to avoid that, they brought it

MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…

They boosted copilot numbers by renaming office to copilot. No I'm not joking.

Musk could learn from this to boost his FSD subscription numbers for his bonus payouts.

I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling.

Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.

Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.

The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?

But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack

Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.

Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.

The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted.

Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/

If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?

It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.

> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."

That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:

The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.