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Comment by IceHegel | Hacker News Reader

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste and and and what that means is... I don't mean that the small way I mean in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."

- Steve Jobs

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I'm perfectly happy with Microsoft, as an an enterprise solution provider, having no "culture" in their products. I don't want "Made with <heart emoji> at Redmond", I want the equivalent of vanilla ice cream that just works.

That said, ads in bing chat IS adding a flavour, and I don't like it, not one bit.

You're just misunderstanding the concept of culture here.

"Culture" doesn't define a flavor, it's just having a consistent flavor driven by shared values at all levels of the company: If Microsoft had culture, that culture could be "we are always the plain vanilla ice cream for our customers"

"Culture" is what keeps you from adding soy sauce to your vanilla ice cream that has managed to captivate the globe... just to make a few pennies. Which is what these ads are.

Culture is the recipe; the combination of attributes that makes it distinctive.

I think in my mind it's loaded because of who the quote is coming from - I have a very clear idea of what "iCulture" means to me. It's not at all vanilla, though it does offer vanilla, but calls it "artisanal french vanilla".

How you're describing it, "culture" sounds more like "values", which might be a better understanding.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNK4VKeoBM

A much more clear example. However and tying this into what Steve Jobs was saying, Microsoft's culture would not be "plain vanilla ice cream". It's lacking taste, so it would be a waffle cone topped with mayonnaise that looks like soft serve vanilla ice cream. They have no taste, they can't tell the difference and due to their massive moats people eat up anyways.

I agree they're not vanilla ice cream, but I do think Microsoft could be that vanilla provider if they actually worked to form a culture.

These ads are a great example: So many teams did thing right to get "BingGPT" in everyone's minds.

But then some tasteless exec looking to notch "monetized leading LLM driven search engine" on their belt got to ask some developers to get some ads into the thing and now they've dumped on all the hard work that came before that.

If they had a proper culture ideally an exec like that would not work at MS, and even if they did they'd have hit resistance on so many levels. Developers would not want to work on it. Designers would push back, PMs would deprioritize. At the end of the day their short-sighted idea would have stayed just that: an idea.

Fully in agreement, they're in all the necessary positions to do so.

Take a look at the modern software landscape, ads are the vanilla in your vanilla ice cream.

Vanilla is comfort.

Ads are more like the smell of old cigarette smoke and urine.

Well they had to come at some point..

You'd think they'd wait until you no longer had to sign up to the service to use it. I suppose we should be appreciative of how forthcoming with the dickbaggery they are being here.

I prefer made in nj, which is expressed as a series of cryptic two letter symbols and line noise looking stuff thrown between.

You’re right about how the tabloid news in your taskbar just works, in that it’s always there and I’m not allowed to turn it off.

I always hear people complain about this. I never see it. I use Windows 11 and I never see any ads. The closest I get to is if I search and bing pops up, but that's it. I also turned off all the extra crap, my taskbar and search menu are as bare-bones as possible.

Edit: To clarify, I run Windows 11 Home.

Yeah - a fresh windows 11 home install is pretty aggressive. But if you use the pro version or run a cleanup script it’s not bad.

Its not a thing on windows 11 pro, only home it seams.

Crappy road or poopies and cream?

When Bing Chat started sassing the user, that was like someone had swirled in a nice ribbon of diarrhea into the vanilla ice cream.

It wouldn't be a Microsoft chatbot without it getting controversial.

Bard does too. The other day I simply asked it whether it could search the Internet, and it gave me some asshole response about how it wasn't going to do my homework for me and some other stuff I don't remember. And no, homework had nothing to do with anything.

Even though I am mostly on Microsoft stacks, Steve Jobs was right.

Whatever good will the development teams are able to deliver, it get messed up by sales and marketing business units.

"Anyway, here's 100 Bible apps. Only on the Apple App Store."

Tried the Bing app on iOS and was baffled as to what was the unique selling point. It tries too hard, and is somewhat of an 'everything app' that does multiple things simultaneously and rather badly at that (News, Browsing, Search, Coupons, Chat, etc). It's also really aggressive on the amount of data it grabs. I opened my debugger and it seems they look at everything they can.

maybe that was true back then, but now? microsoft has vscode, copilot, chatpgpt ownership, a head start on LLM search, azure, github. It feels like some of those products have some taste/culture and if not, theyre still good products that people seem to be enjoyibg

Half of the stuff you listed they just bought and stuck their names on.

yes im aware they bought github and others on this list. would you say since github has only gone since downhill? I wouldnt at least.

I’m confused why you think you can attribute the taste and culture of Github to Microsoft, since you seem to know that they did not create it. I’d say Github’s text editor has gone downhill since Microsoft bought it and reassigned the maintainers to a slower and clunkier editor.

> I’m confused why you think you can attribute the taste and culture of Github to Microsoft

i didnt.

microsoft has owned github for 4 years at this point. In your opinion, have they degraded githubs culture in that time and if so by how much and how? Personally, from the outside looking in, github and their tools have gotten better. Though of course, that couldve still been the case if github retained its original leadership, i just doubt it.

I'm not sure, I think corporate overreach has always been the flavour of Microsoft. Poor decisions lead by business first incentives instead of a customer focus seems to be a consistent theme from them in my experience.

and then Jobs released a teal-colored computer

so maybe no taste isn't as bad as awful taste

I like the teal iMac G3, assuming that is the computer you are referring to. Computer colors are so boring usually. Beige, grey, black, white.

(Sent from my green M1 iMac)

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