[_fat_santa]

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.

[ChuckMcM]

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.

[ryandrake]

For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.

[zuminator]

100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.

They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.

And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.

[mbreese]

I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.

In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.

For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.

So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.

It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.

[PeterStuer]

They bet the company on AI. If their AI push fails, everything else does not matter anymore. What you are seeing is desperation and Hail Marys.

My guess is every team's metric is probably reduced to tokens consumed through the products owned.

[saidinesh5]

> 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.

I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.

Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.

[GorbachevyChase]

To be fair. MS Office product defects should be regarded just as harmful as hallucinations. Try a lookup in excel on fields that might have text.

[Bombthecat]

For coding,ai is amazing and getting better.

Spell checking is also good, grammar better then me lol

And pumping out fake news and propaganda, way worth it when you do it

[anthonypasq]

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

[deckar01]

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…

[jansper39]

For years I've used this as a home page of sorts for Microsoft products. It's very annoying not to be able to use it now.

[quietbritishjim]

I haven't used office.com but it does seem to have links to the four main webapps (did there used to be more?). They're the second row of big boxes titled "Word with Copilot", etc. Admittedly with very confusing names.

[karel-3d]

Well there is no "Office" anymore, the suite is named "Microsoft 365 Copilot".

[iteria]

I noticed this and I wad enraged but it. The URL to the old page is way less easy to remember and I had to add it to my bookmarks. I'm still peeved about it.

[yoyohello13]

I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.

[bonesss]

I see Microsoft throwing spaghetti at the wall just in time as “AI” functionality hits government and educational procurement procedures.

The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.

My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).

[direwolf20]

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.

[SilverElfin]

They did the same thing with Azure right? I remember articles about Microsoft stock that would mention that Azure subscription numbers included Office 365. But the thing is, their weird game of inflating numbers worked. There wasn’t really any negative consequence of doing that. So why wouldn’t they do it again? It’s yet another unfortunate example of dishonesty being rewarded these days.

[apercu]

> "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.

[hibikir]

KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!

The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.

[walt_grata]

This is the bad side of things like OKRs. They push you away from user satisfaction since that harder to measure, coupled with go consequences for missing them. People just force adoption without taking the product signals that come from users rejecting your changes.

[heisenzombie]

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.

[jukkan]

Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.

We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.

I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html

[tartoran]

I'm baffled by this as well, Microsoft seems to have lost the plot almost completely.

[rurp]

A whole new toolbar appeared in Outlook on my work computer with nothing but a single button to open a copilot chat window. I tried asking it a few simple questions and it completely failed at all of them. Copilot didn't even know if I was using the web or desktop version of the very app it was embedded in!

Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.

[alkonaut]

Yeah did they test any of this? Did they run a pilot and ask 1000 users did you use it? Did you like it? Is it better with this than without it?

It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.

Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?

[kryogen1c]

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

[xmcqdpt2]

Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.

[WillAdams]

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.

[Daz912]

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

[onion2k]

That only good if you're doing measurably more with the time you save. I feel like I'm significantly faster in parts of my job using Copilot, but when I try to get data on what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before I had it I don't come up with anything. I know I'm working faster, but the time seems to have just gone.

[PassingClouds]

They should be trying to convince people it is something they want rather than forcing it on people. Alas that would mean making a product people want and Im not sure they are there.

[llama052]

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.

[mook]

Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.

[pwarner]

And Teams

[basch]

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?

[mzajc]

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

It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.

...

On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...

[podgorniy]

Sounds almost like every manager just covers their ass by formally doing what is expected core top-down idea is "AI is a future, thus make it everywhere".

Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.

Bad leadership, bad management.

So it's FOMO, formalism and conformism.

[kalap_ur]

I wonder if there is somebody here high up in the MSFT stack who understands the tech/code but also oversees more stuff to be able to opine.

[mattmaroon]

I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.

[primax]

It's good for creating meeting notes and action lists in Teams, but that's about it.

MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.

[MattGaiser]

Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is complete slop. Claude Code is better with PPT.

[dahcryn]

even Gemini is better with powerpoint, and they are the nr 1 competitor

[downrightmike]

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