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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don’t have a horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again.

There’s a massive paradigm shift we’re just at the beginning of and Microsoft has been putting pieces in place for the last couple of years. Nadella has really turned things around for them.

Google and meta are scrambling.

Things should get interesting.

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I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big breadwinner software is still abysmal to use.

I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad serving platform that happens to run the applications you need, and they still constantly break basic system functions. For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear, jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default, built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is so clunky and prone to breaking.

They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub).

O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space.

Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not really representative. Even Windows itself isn’t that important (that was one of the big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took over). You’re right about edge though (which is why Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit).

Microsoft also ships (something Google can’t do very well). I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued because people have not properly updated from outdated historical sentiment.

vscode is an incredible piece of software, better than all the paid options in my opinion, the amount of features they pump out month to month is outstanding, just a bit slow due to electron. I never understood why they put so much effort into a free product that I run from Linux and Mac, but I'm happily paying the copilot subscription so it all makes sense now.

It's free and electron because they can run it in a web browser, running everything on MS Azure. With code on GitHub and CI on GitHub etc etc. The whole dev experience offered to companies as a service via a series of web applications. Companies will love this.

Just get any web browser, preferably Microsoft Edge on a Microsoft Window Pro on a Microsoft Surface laptop. Open Microsoft GitHub workspace. To dev for your Microsoft Azure hosted Linux VM. Run the CI on GitHub. Use Microsoft O365 for your design doc. And Microsoft Team for communication.

Poor little Linux in the middle.

Why poor little Linux? Those got what they wanted.

No gloomy project managers above you, just write the code you like, express yourself? Check

No telemetry to know what average Joe The Normie uses and wants? Check

No spending time on meetings and plannings, boring strategy discussions, just do a bit of here and there what your soul wants today? Check

Love to tinker and customize your setup without leaving a chance for IT department to standardize on software and settings rollouts, no MDM covering YOUR system ? You are out of enterprise - Check

Dreams came true, why poor?

Because the linux desktop is forbidden at many tech companies nowadays, for the very reasons you wrote!

At a company I worked, overtime they wanted everybody on Mac or Windows. No code locally, only ssh onto a Linux VM. When you argue you can also ssh from Linux, the response is: we cannot run the spywares on Linux.

Sure you can change job. But I have noticed the trend all over among my circle of friends.

You honestly had me do a double take. Copilot costs money? Maybe I get it through some other thing, but its been free for me as long as I can remember. It's wrong so often that I generally keep it on because it's entertaining. I wouldn't pay for it.

You might be thinking of IntelliCode, which was released in 2019. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/

No, I use in PHPStorm as a plug-in.

I think copilot is free in the education pack - you might have got it from there?

Looks like I get it through my organization.

Would have to differ. Best IDE would have the Borland Pascal 7/C back in the 90s, then Delphi and eventually Netbeans/Eclipse to take that position as something worthwhile between Linux, Mac and Windows.

For me Delphi Pascal was the pinacle of compilers/IDE combos. A simply fantastic combination of GUI editor, assembler support, fast compiler and truly useful documentation with pratical examples at the click of a button without needing internet.

VScode with a proper copilot seems to be a game changer. Crossing fingers.

Yep. IntelliJ's stuff is the only one that actually competes with VSCode - and the playing field is surprisingly even if you add the VSCode plugin ecosystem to it.

For C# Rider is still the gold standard in my book, but for Go I still prefer VSCode to GoLand.

better than PyCharm for python?

Nah that editor is much better if you're just using Python, but vscode imo is better for polyglots, the experience and keybinds stay the same across languages once you work out `tasks.json` and `launch.json`

Nope, but VsCode addicts are usually too cheap to try a paid-for tool like PyCharm

There’s a free, open source, community edition, which provides most of the functionality

Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100% of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will cook up this time to ruin your call.

O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the water in terms of creating maintainable non-directly formatted documents. Now that they are deprecating offline Office (I think last release 2017 or so) their office suite has gone downhill at alarming speed.

VS Codium is OKish, and has some cool features, but ultimately does not get close to what I have in Emacs in most aspects that actually matter, so that's not a convincing offer either.

Their software is OK at best and rubbish in the average. And don't even get me started on Windows itself.

A quick search turns up Office 2021[0], and I see no indication that offline Office is being discontinued.

And claiming that O365 is a toy? Literally the only other online office suite I've used or heard of is GDocs, which has a fraction of the functionality that I use from O365.

Your post doesn't sound serious at all to me.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...

It was clear to me when they mentioned Emacs that their opinion on this can just be ignored. That isn't to say Emacs isn't a great thing for a certain niche, but it's just not something that matters in this kind of strategic product discussion (and thinking it's comparable is just a signal it's not worth engaging imo).

There are many reasons why VSCode is dominant and emacs isn't, similarly there are many reasons slack failed to compete (even after taking out a full page ad pretending to be apple before suing Microsoft). If you're going to pretend to be apple, you better be as good. If you're going to mock competition you better hope you're apple and not netscape [0][1].

I too think Slack is a great product, but that's not enough. Slack needed to expand into a more competitive offering and they failed to do that.

[0]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/

[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-letter_n...

GDocs is a toy as well. Maybe worse than O365. If you only know those two, then I can understand your opinion.

Try using offline office suites, best not MS Office, and use their writing tool. So many things are missing in these online office suites. I assure you the post is serious and I have used multiple online and offline office suites. Perhaps you should explore more and make use of styles and all that. You will quickly notice how many things are missing in the online office suites.

Desktop Office apps are still available, fully supported, and fully functional. Office 2021 is the latest buy-once release, but Microsoft 365 subscribers get all the desktop apps with their subscription (and they get continuous updates). The web apps are separate and have their limitations. Microsoft 365 subscribers get to choose between the two. Non-subscribers get only the web version with some features removed.

Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.

I think it's more about salesforce, I have a pretty negative opinion about them and everything they acquire seems to limp along or die (and the good employees leave immediately) - just seems like a boring place to be (nice sky scraper though).

Microsoft has a better track record with acquisitions.

Salesforce wastes all their effort on new acquisitions making business-driven decisions like “add Einstein to it!” or “integrate it with the Lightning Experience (TM)!” instead of doing anything remotely useful to pre-acquisition customers. Once it’s adequately diced up, they can add it as another line-item to renewals who already pay so much money to salesforce that they don’t care.

> at least we have Discord

Poe's Law?

Discord is yet another walled garden to be fair. It might be good replacement for some little, private communities.

But also large communities are moving into Discord instead of using some public, index-able and findable platforms. They used to be public in the past and people very able to read information about them without going process for creating account, acceptance or even finding whole community.

Discord is terrible for storing long term information in text form. People try to keep some pinned posts but no.. information disappears, when in comparison for forums it was there.

And let's not start with privacy.

> information disappears

Wait really? I've never seen that happen on Discord, I can still see messages from over half a decade ago. Why would they delete data they mine?

Slack on the other hand deletes everything immediately if you're not on the paid plan of course.

> information disappears

Main point was that you can't access or view it without creating the account at first, or even being able to find the whole server. You might even need to give phone number before you can view anything. Then wait 30min to verify that you are not a bot. And all this to find a solution for a problem which you might never return to. The search in Discord is kinda terrible.

Also, if you are couple days or even hours late for the discussion, it might be too late to take part or continue it in large communities. Discord lives in the moment, it is not a place to store information.

On the other hand, on forums, it is not a problem to continue some discussion couple days later. The quality is often much much higher.

Not sure what you mean, you just need one account for all of Discord, joining a new server is just one click away. Or do you make a new account for each server? That seems unreasonably hard to keep track of. I guess the search could be better but I've never really had too many problems with it and I've seen far far worse implementations. Such as Rocket Chat which has completely broken search. Literally never returns anything.

But yes chat is chat, you can't compare it to a forum style board because they're not trying to do the same thing. You do typically need both a Discourse and a chat server for any major organization.

Not _immediately_ I think it's after 10,000 messages they start to remove some.

That 10k messages amount to less than a day in a highly active business.

+1 I’m hoping urbit can provide a solution to this, but it’s still not at the quality bar I want (though I think there’s a path to get it there).

> lot of their products > GitHub

Yeah that one doesn't count, they've made exactly zero changes since acquisition and Actions still has downtime every few weeks.

> integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart

Teams is terrible software and only beat Slack b/c it is included 'free' in every o365 sub. GSuite is much better at collaboration than o365, but because of decades of MS lock in most people still need office to deal with interop.

Slack recognized it was going to be hard to compete with a free feature from a product suite most companies are forced to have. SF could have been a good home, but they struggle at handling acquisitions.

It takes three seconds to cold start Word for me on an old (2015), underpowered (core i5, 8GB RAM, low end SSD) HP laptop.

You're complaining about 15 seconds? I can remember the Windows 3.x days when it took minutes to warm Word up.

> When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again.

I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right.

MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership and the GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now. Google in particular should be very afraid.

[1] Though quite long. Very, very long. But it's well worth reading all of it. There's untold numbers gems in there.

> GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now

Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition. They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft, including their XBox division.

Google competed but they weren't willing to pay the price tag. Microsoft understood better how powerful Githubs potential was at the time. Github was likely Microsofts best acquisition in the last two decades.

> That said, except for OS and Browsers

Windows is not negligible.

I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid?

There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like MS can.

If anything, this is where they should both be afraid because an upstart with a browser extension could replace them.

> I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing.

It's not an AI moat. It's about business models.

If MS takes even a small fraction of Google's search traffic, and/or convert a small fraction of people from Chrome to Edge, it'll hit Google's bottom line at the one place that's a huge majority of their revenue and profits. MS has nothing to lose and Bing GPT4 integration is very good.

Flip side, there's no area where Google is significantly threatening MS. Office suites: MS copilot announcements go significantly further than Google (Business Chat). Cloud: Azure's relationship with OpenAI and rapid product expansion could see it gain share.

MS is moving very quickly and coordinating across the entire company. Google is moving slowly. And company-wide execution? Well. That has never been their strong suit.

> An upstart with a browser extension could replace them.

Google regularly bans or breaks browser extensions that are inconvenient for their profits.

They also control the main app store for Android devices.

And for apps installed externally, they have a backdoor to remove any app they want from Android devices that they claim is for malware.

Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux distribution that runs legacy windows software within containers :D

or actively remove many reasons why people ended up trying out linux distributions in the past

like e.g. universtity students needing to run programs which don't run on windows natively all the time, so many try out native Linux distros, some stay. Now all of them can just use WSL. Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers etc.

Basically they have accepted that windows server have failed and their server license business model isn't that good anymore too due to how the cloud changed things. So instead of pushing for a Windows everywhere ecosystem they now embrace Linux on servers (preferable on Azure ;) ) and Windows on the desktop using WSL to bridge the dev experience and also bridge to university student use case.

But you can be sure that if they see a way to make it harder to install Linux on systems and get away with it both legal wise and PR wise (probably using some excuses about "security") you can be sure they will do so. Especially if they can push the blame onto others (like the hardware vendors not implementing some option in the BIOS which is needed to allow other OSes to be installed). Through at least for now I expect them to act careful to not damage their new image.

Also one way the failed the "Windows desktop" thing is by producing a pretty bad out of the box desktop experience for many people (like I'm fine paying for an OS but not if there is even a single AD in there, or bloat ware). This create reasons for people to switch to Linux which had been much less common during windows 7 days.

I use macOS in large part because its a *nix OS under the hood.

WSL gives a lot of that power to Windows.

Except it isn't, so e.g. running containers still need a VM.

I wish macOS had something like WSL built-in.

macOS is tempting but it's a pretty bad nix IMHO.

The amount of times I had to change ad-hoc scripts to work around macOS limitations is absurd.

Yeah it’s a tradeoff, that part is worse but everything else is a lot better (battery life, performance, hardware quality, software integration, design etc.)

That’s likely because macOS is BSD-based. (Which may be inconvenient at times, but it doesn’t mean it’s “bad”.)

Not all the world is GNU.

> Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers etc.

I develop for Linux but I use WSL only indirectly through Docker Desktop.

> like I'm fine paying for an OS but not if there is even a single AD in there

I can't remember last time I paid for Windows. Microsoft usually offers free upgrades.

I haven't seen any ad on Windows. I frankly find hard to believe there are ads in Windows.

> I can't remember last time I paid for Windows.

Every time you buy a new Laptop or pre-build computer with Windows installed you (very likely) implicitly bought a license.

But I agree that due to Windows handing out a lot of "free upgrades" even outside of their official supported upgrade path they missed out on a lot of License cost, but made more users upgrade so probably worth it.

Most important Microsoft mainly cares about Businesses buying Pro versions of licenses, potential in huge batches.

> ... disabled ads ... [from other adjacent comment]

Or uses a pi-hole or a software which disables them for you but which you might have installed to e.g. set privacy settings or replaced components with 3rd party ones or that LTT Linus ability to subconscious filter out ads. What matters is that there are a lot of people which have had the AD experience.

Sounds like you are on an older version of windows or maybe you disabled them in a drunk rage.

I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux, and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10 in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with Microsoft.

That's no longer the case for Windows 11, or if I remember correctly later versions for Windows 10.

I just checked, Windows 10 in a VM (running on KVM on Linux), refuses to upgrade to Windows 11. I only keep it around in case a contract requires something regarding Windows. 10 goes out of support next year, I will delete the VM. I can reject any clients that would need me to touch windows.

If only they could get ipv6 working in WSL so that shenanigans[1] aren't required.

[1]: https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl

Shenanigans?! Do not get me started, i have for a year remember to close any WSL session before put pc to sleep, command line or VSC because on waking VMEM process will eat up the CPU. So had to restart or do a weird workaround, but Linux session was gone anyway. There is a github case 2-3 years old

Not saying Ballmer was great or bad but it could be argued that the US Government handicapped Microsoft more than Ballmer was a bad CEO. To my understanding Gates was also very active with the company during those years as well.

Ballmer inherited a company at the top with everyone wanting to crush it & make it dissolve.

Nadella inherited an underdog.

I think this should be considered when thinking about the legacy of the CEO.

I don't buy these excuses for Ballmer.

- Massive miss on mobile

- Delayed cloud stuff because of obsession with windows

- Delayed cross platform apps because of obsession with windows for same reason

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

> "That memo prompted me to write a post entitled Services, Not Devices that argued that Ballmer’s strategic priorities were exactly backwards: Microsoft’s services should be businesses in their own right, not Windows’ differentiators. Ballmer, though, followed-through on his memo by buying Nokia; it speaks to Microsoft’s dysfunction that he was allowed to spend billions on a deal that allegedly played a large role in his ouster."

I think he ultimately held them back actively with bad strategy and things only started getting better when he was finally gone. Nadella inherited an underdog because the previous decade's decisions caused them to become one.

As a young developer, I always wondered why Google didn't buy Java from Sun. Wouldn't it be a strategic buy?

Not sure what to make of that, but I'm just glad we don't live in a world in which Google + Java is the winning horse

cough Android coughh

+2.5 billion Google Android devices running their apps overwhelmingly in Java.

Wasn't a coincidence this was chosen that way.

google is literally the next generation Sun, many of the same people were involved.. the Sun Micro company was scrapped for (valuable) parts, with a lot of internal competitive moments

Google wasn't a big player when Oracle bought sun. Don't ever underestimate them. There is a reason Oracle of all companies is the government's pick to annex Tiktoc.

I'm first to crap on MS but they've really pulled it together recently with a lot of big plays coming to fruition. I don't use any of their tech but I can respect what they've done as a business.

If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a wee bit caught out as well.

I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.

Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated).

Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. It’s always been what they’re weakest at, I’m not sure LLMs will be different for them.

The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.

AI in support of user interface has been downright awful. IIRC, Siri has the lowest customer satisfaction out of any other product at Apple.

However, the company has deployed machine learning in support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready to do gen AI at the edge.

The company has focused largely on STT and image processing but has worked to support use of the chip for general ML, via transformer. [1]

I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI.

Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like behavior to Xcode. When will this occur?

[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...

> I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI.

This is so true that now the only differentiating capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is excelling here in an unexpected way.

> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them.

They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"

Siri still sucks?

"Siri, set an alarm for 5pm eastern standard time" ... you get an alarm for 5pm local time, with the memo 'eastern standard time' (assuming aren't located in eastern standard time, this is not the expected behavior).

Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into.

The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included).

However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much.

Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone.

This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.

That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted.

We'll see if that changes.

The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?"

When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications.

Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while).

Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple.

Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs.

If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).

Just watch the introduction of the Siri product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ

"Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking"

I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy barely functioning timer setting app it currently is.

Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's not worth trying to use.

The tooling that it was designed for was things like https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709

Those were the intents that were set up.

Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call.

If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot.

Siri wasn't supposed to be smart. Siri was intended for an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and weather.

When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer setting app.

What functionality in there that you see in this segment that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? What time cue do you see them promising something smarter than what was designed?

They open with what they want it to be “intelligent assistant” and then show the capabilities it currently had.

Since that time in 2011 it has gotten no closer to “intelligent assistant”. That’s a failure imo.

Google’s is much better at answering basic queries.

Google's voice assistant is an interface to google cloud applications.

Siri is an interface to a limited set of the apps on the iPhone.

These are fundamentally different architectures for how how each was designed along with implications for privacy and where the company has compute resources that can be used.

If you are after a general knowledge search engine, Google will certainly out preform Siri.

Google has better cloud integration for a lot of their functionality. Apple doesn't have that amount of cloud resources that it can use and is a device first company rather than a cloud first company.

If you want to say "android can search google better" Ok. I'll grant that. If that makes it "smarter" - ok. Android is smarter than Siri because it can search google better.

If you want to say "android can control apps on its phone better" - I really want to see evidence that the ability for Android to control 3rd party music apps (e.g. Spotify) or report the weather or calendar or set up alarms... I don't believe that android is any better than Siri in that regard.

If you want to chat with it (e.g. "what is the answer to life the universe and everything?") then those are cute responses that are programmed in.

Do you have other criteria that you are using to compare the different devices other than its ability to search Google?

You can adversarially frame "ability to intelligently answer questions" or act as an "intelligent assistant" to "ability to search google" but those are different things. I'm comparing the use case of the former as an end user.

Siri will often uselessly "find results on the web and send them to my iPhone". Google can answer more queries directly as well as do basic timer setting stuff. The thing you're missing is the implementation detail is irrelevant to the end user, it's an issue of capability.

Your point about Apple being worse at cloud is partly what I'm talking about (and one of the reasons siri is so much worse). It's why Apple has not done a good job with this up until now. I don't buy the "it's intentionally not capable/bad by design because that's what they were going for" argument.

My prediction is Apple will make some sort of move here. Whether that's an investment in stable diffusion or something else I don't know. I expect what they do to have an apple flavor (on-device, privacy focused), but I think it will be leveraged to make Siri actually useful (and more of an actually intelligent and capable assistant).

My advice would be "don't expect them to do anything with LLM or similar so that when they don't, you won't be disappointed."

Expecting Apple (or any company) to be chasing the current hype is more likely to be disappointing (see Google and Bard or Bing and its mistakes). Apple, with its very cautious nature for curation of its brand image would likely be some time out.

I would also point out that Apple's prominent place in regulatory views would make it more hesitant to do things that they may have to open up.

Wait until after the regulatory dust has settled... and after the various lawsuits about copyright infringement or section 230 and GPT have settled ( https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/chatgpt-i... ).

I don't believe that Apple has any appetite for becoming more of a target for government regulators or wading into untested legal waters. But that's my crystal ball - yours apparently sees different things.

I agree w parent that the end user is who matters--Siri is just not very good at answering what seem like basic questions.

What made google amazing was it settled conversational disputes or provided instant (if limited) familiarity on a subject. Siri fails to provide verbal feedback on relatively simple questions, instead referring people to their iPhones for "web results."

As an end user, the product's failure understand or make sense of the intent of a user is even harder to deal with in Home / HomeKit. I often find myself pulling up the Home app to hunt down and manually operate some accessory because voice requests are just failing.

Common patterns happen throughout a home covered in HomeKit and Homepods and yet this AI is unable to provide reasonable suggestions for automation modifications, scene tweaks or suggestions for additional accessories.

Siri-based requests for songs or albums from Apple Music on HomePod is abysmal, providing covers, or flat out wrong genre, wrong era that my listening habits should well weight away from.

It is just bad--architecture design be damned the product fails under "normal" use. Outwardly, it seems like a MobileMe-level failure, where SJ asked at a town hall "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?"

All that said, I agree with this comment that it is a mistake to expect Apple to integrate LLM that uses any known model into its product.

Even if Apple wanted to, I don't know where the company could source data that is manicured to "safe" enough to serve as a basis for responses by Siri.

It doesn't really matter, to end users how they fix it.

The company's job is to drop the product or iterate until it figures out how to better satisfy they end user.

> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later.

Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years ago:

Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its unsolicited suggestions.

Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense, like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning.

One single time I can remember Google actually getting a suggestion correct.

This probably works better today than four years ago and maybe it always worked better if you were in a US timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri setting timers at least works and a few times a year it comes up with smart suggestions.

(Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.)

Really surprised Apple didn't buy OpenAI; they will regret that MSFT did so.

OpenAI was already in bed with MSFT when they started working on Codex/Copilot together a year or so back. So the synergies were already there when OpenAI needed to scale up ChatGPT for the masses using Azure infra

I think apple made a choice a while back to yield software engineering workflows outside Swift to Microsoft.

I had expected Apple to produce its own version of GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy.

The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad answers or questions about legality of what the models produce.

None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require expertise the company doesn’t have.

According to MSFT [1], its a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment", not an acquisition. Do they have an exclusivity deal?

[1] - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...

I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net.

Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute happens - which is likely in Azure.

Siri isn't a language model, AFAIK. I'm sure it's using machine learning on the back end, but it's doing something very different.

The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system)

---

User: Show me hotels near Mars

Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”)

User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week

Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two)

User: Honeymoon

Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week)

User: change the astronauts to 4

Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed)

User: Yes

Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info)

---

Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something.

Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.

I don't get the impression Apple ever caught up with Alexa or Google Assistant. That said, this is a bit different, since the AI tech is a bit more commoditized than with those voice assistants, and the product problem is the hard part. On the other hand, Apple has positioned themselves as extremely privacy-respecting - I wonder if that will affect their ability to use their users' data to train models.

It'll be interesting to see, anyway.

a headset is not a suit of AI products. it's kinda...irrelevant. meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it.

so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually". well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope for much.

> meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it.

A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails, too, we' ll see another in 20 years.

for now, Apple is in a different league

if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at the same time" and everyone will comply

And that's why I don't use their products.

Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is back on top.

- lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS

- more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers

- trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only through the Windows app store

- maybe retrying mobile if Google doesn't do that well

- probably even more anticompetive email nonsense in the sense of "who needs emails providers beside a few giants (like gmail)"

- probably trying to make proper (by then) modern 2FA not work on linux due patend or drm issues, trying to make it hard to log in anywhere in the web with a native linux system

> lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS

Nothing is locked down. UWP and win32 are funcionally equivalent with sparse registration. If you decide to publish to the store anyways, you can even use your own payment provider and keep 100% comission.

> more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers

Isn't WSL a win-win for the Linux-community and Windows-users alike? WSL2 and WSLg make Linux desktop apps more accessible than ever.

> trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only through the Windows app store Xbox Game Studios games are released on Steam.

I could go on, but you get the point.

it's not about what is done now, it's a response to the parents comment of "what will happen if microsoft becomes much more powerfull and market dominant again"

i.e. it's all hypothetical speculations about the future under a given assumption of development which might never happen

> Linux desktop apps more accessible than ever.

yes but it also removed the need to use Linux and could be extended with features Linux doesn't have => i.e. it could be used for the good old embrace, extend, extinguish strategy Microsoft loved to use in the

> yes but it also removed the need to use Linux

And is it a problem for user? Or anyhow a bad thing? Why not advocate for FreeBSD for example?

Do you honestly think that Microsoft is scared of Linux taking over the desktop?

It never was about emotional things like being scared.

It's about eliminating competition and especially preventing potential future competition, it's about maximizing control and power to the most you can without losing otherwise (due to e.g. law regulations lost consumer trust etc.). It's just a game of numbers and future prospect.

Just the fact alone that Valve has Linux as a form of "escape hatch" if Microsoft locks things down more. With a bit of "future potential" (Valve Gaming console which is more then "just" the Steam Deck) is enough for Microsoft to take actions like that from a purely calculative perspective.

And Linux Desktop _has_ future prospect, maybe not in context of how currently most Linux desktops are but prospect anyway.

I mean Linux desktop has a lot of additional challenges:

- like _massive_ fragmentation through every layer of components and users, often with a lot of more emotional then technical opinions

- much smaller financial resources etc. (the companies which invest are either small (e.g. System76) or are not focused on desktop Linux (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat, Valve))

- a lot of money is flowing into server Linux hence all decisions tend to be focused on the server aspect thing things which are negative for desktop Linux and can not be configured away. (Through also a lot of "accidental" improvements and maintenance.)

but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then Windows. The main problem is normally not missing functionality or hardware support but fragmentation. Fragmentation making it a bad deal to support Linux as a software vendor (getting better through Valve, Flatpack and Snap), fragmentation wasting dev resources, fragmentation making system management/hardware support harder, etc. As well as there not currently being too much monetary reason to invest into 1st party desktop Linux support (Valve is a special case, System76 is small).

But non of the reasons which make people not use Desktop Linux are fundamental, and under the right conditions _one specific_ Linux Desktop could become highly successful. It's very unlikely but it's still possible, hence there is reason to make sure it's not possible.

Microsoft already owns the desktop and I don't think they consider Linux a threat.

macOS would be a a better contender but I don't think they consider that a threat, also.

In fact, Windows is starting to weigh less and less in overall Microsoft strategy. Windows mattered when all we had were desktops but now they have lots of cows they are milking.

I won't be surprised if in the future Microsoft will find that it isn't worth to pay for the development of Windows and will release it's own Linux distribution. It would be quite a disappointment for me, but certainly possible.

> but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then Windows.

I've tried since 23 years ago to use Linux as a desktop but it failed repeatedly. I even have it installed on a separate disk on my home PC but I seldom boot it.

> they consider that a threat, also.

In the hypothetical scenario from above it doesn't need to be a thread, just having the potential to become one can be enough. I mean why shouldn't you remove potential future threads when you easily can do so now but can't once they become a thread?

> I've tried since 23 years ago to use Linux as a desktop but it failed repeatedly. I even have it installed on a separate disk on my home PC but I seldom boot it.

and other do not fail, I know even some quite non technical people who do use it daily and there are docents of steam deck users, too

I am glad Linux desktop didn't fail for others. Maybe they enjoy fixing broken stuff, configuring things repeatedly and tinkering with it. And maybe they don't miss software that doesn't run on Linux.

I am busy and I want to use software, not tinker with the OS. The OS should just work. And since software I use both professionally and personally doesn't run on Linux, it wouldn't bee good for me even if the experience was smooth.

On the server side I use Linux a lot. Most stuff I develop runs on Linux.

No one is talking about how they quietly acquired Nuance. If it weren't for Google, Microsoft would have a complete monopoly on AI.

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