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Comment by jjordan | Hacker News Reader

The way Microsoft is pushing AI literally everywhere now feels reminiscent of circa 2001 when literally everything was branded '.NET'. Eventually they scaled it back, but it was complete overkill and diluted what the brand was supposed to represent.

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Its not even microsoft its everyone and their grandmother pushing AI this AI that crap. Really language model this language model that, but we've perverted what AI actually means to the public already so that's great too for technological literacy purposes.

To be fair, customers are part of the hype feedback loop. I have seen actual conversations with non-tech workers that boil down to "when we ask these people what they want AI to do, they say they don't know, but boy do they get excited every time we mention adding AI"

Using AI customer service chatbots really is a hoot. The most egregious examples they add an ai autocomplete service to your replies. So the thing asks you for your email and in the textbox its so very helpfully prefilled bob@example.com that you now need to overwrite with your actual email. Pretty fun to think of the resources consumed delivering this experience too

Are customers really asking for AI soda flavors, tho? https://us.coca-cola.com/products/coke-creations/y3000-limit...

smacking AI on anything is probably an easy promotion for the next couple years

Ding! We have a winner. It is exactly that. No different really from 1999 products slapping Internet on everything or 2020 ones inserting crypto. Most importantly of all, its what investors and stockholders want to see now, and they will punish the stock price of anything that doesnt have an AI strategy.

I wonder if they just pasted their recipe into ChatGPT and asked “how can I make this taste better?”

They did at one point ask for cosmetics with thorium and radium[1], so who knows.

[1] http://museumofradium.co.uk/tho-radia/

I saw post in this general purpose forum where this guy claimed he asked chatgpt to learn about cnc-milling machines and material properties and produce g-code to mill a gear.

People were replying "I dont understand, but thats cool!" etc.

I checked his code and it did circle with G3 and then it did "finishing pass" which was also circle by rotating the chuck or A-axle. When I asked him about it, he just said "Oh, I didn't look at the code"

The new "blockchain". We don't know what problems we want to solve, but we sure know that we need to solve them with AI!

Apple, to their credit, hasn't announcing some generative-AI powered project. Yet. I'd like to think they have an Amish-like attitude to tech fads... hence why they never had a foldable come to market.

They actually have, but they generally refer to the technology by its more technical terms. Instead of saying "generative ai", they'll say "transformer based predictive text". They have a few things (keyboard, camera, photos app, and some others) that are actually using generative AI but they don't refer to it as such.

And as for the folding phone, I think they couldn't build one to their standards. I like the concept but there's a reason they've stayed relatively niche in the market.

Yes, they have. They haven't announced much in the way of concrete products/features, but they have announced an effort to stuff iOS full of unspecified generative AI ”stuff”, much centered on Apple’s own in-house LLM, and put lots of resources behind it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-22/what-i...

I mean sure it's "everybody" but renaming Edge to Edge: AI Browser (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....) is more over the top than most.

Good lord, that's just ridiculous

“It’s toasted”

Everyone had similar complaints about the cloud and USB, WiFi.

Operating systems before that. DSLs for configuration.

Circle of tech life, Simba.

What does the "AI" button on the keyboard do that compares to universal data and power ports or standardized secure wireless internet?

Not really, it’s literally mostly Microsoft shoehorning AI everywhere and rebranding everything into Microsoft Azure CoPilot <insert shitty product here>

The biggest thing I hate about the marketing is that they call everything CoPilot.

It's extremely confusing to users. Users get free windows CoPilot and wonder why they can't use it to generate PowerPoint presentations because the cool marketing doesn't clarify that that's a $30 a month separate license.

For this reason we actually turn windows CoPilot off. It doesn't really do much for business (it's just chatgpt really which we already offer using a custom integration) and it only causes confusion.

And these aren't the only ones. There's GitHub CoPilot, sales CoPilot (which can talk to Salesforce) and many more. Lots of which have features that won't work with the other iterations.

Another example, CoPilot studio allows you to make custom chat bots similar to the celebrity-tuned bots developed by meta. But no, these don't work in the Microsoft 365 CoPilot. It's such a mess.

I wonder if we'll see a point in the next few years where we have a keyboard key that only works if you have a subscription to Microsoft to access their AI, which I'm guessing we'll have to do at some point because all of this costs a boat load of computing resources.

What is Microsoft suppsed to represent? I'm not sure their brand has ever been anything more concrete over its total existence other than BASIC/MS-DOS in the beginning, a few long running products (Windows, Office, Xbox, Azure) and that it is involved with user-facing technology.

The brand in question there was ".NET" not "Microsoft".

Microsoft represents a solid, stable, enterprise-friendly, conservative, but still somewhat “innovative” (whatever that means) company. Or at least that’s their brand. Given that a huge part of their value is their long term sales relationships, I’d say they are an extremely brand-reliant company.

You could argue the same for bic (the pen/lighter company). Solid, stable, enterprise friendly (100 packs!) and still somewhat innovative (new kinds of pens, white out, etc).

There are lots of companies you could say this about

I think at this point MS is really representing the enterprise/corporate Office suite as well as being exceptionally annoying with their Browser strategy.

But that's just my IMHO.

Same as it ever was.

> What is Microsoft suppsed to represent?

unreliable software combined with abusive business practices

I've never been able to find a better office suite. The FOSS alternatives and the google suite just don't do it for me.

I also switched back to Windows over Linux as my primary desktop environment.

Am I a victim of abuse?

(Mind you I don't pay for either)

It isn't that Office is abusive or Windows is abusive, it's that Microsoft is.

Word '97 is still my favorite word processor ever. Windows 7 is one of my favorite operating systems. I don't think they're abusive.

What's abusive is how slow Office 365 is. What's abusive is how updates reset all my settings trying to make Office 365 bearable (don't use cloud, save to computer by default, don't show backstage, etc.). What's abusive is FORCING me to combine taskbar buttons on Windows 11. What's abusive (and unreliable) is randomly selecting the whole filename while I'm editing it when the file is on OneDrive.

And that's just the tip of the ice berg.

Feels more like Google+ to me... push untested features that no one asked for but miss getting the basics right. I mean GitHub/Copilot tells me all the time that it will change the way I develop and everytime I look at windows they are still not able to implement a proper dark mode.

Well they can’t even decide on which frontend framework to use this year it seems…

It's the only thing MS^H^H Bing has that offers a prayer of beating Google at something. Expect saturation.

O mean, GCE vs Azure?

Other than ads, search or mobile OS, I'm not sure where else Google is beating MS. I don't mean to diminish those things, they are important. But ChromeOS is clearly nowhere near displacing Windows (for instance).

New outlook keeps getting worse, while gmail keeps getting better; virtually no one under the age of 40 buys Office for personal use, they all use the google suite, Chrome has an absurd market share. Really the only place they're winning is in the ChromeOS vs Windows fight.

> gmail keeps getting better

Gmail was always a parody of a mail client. Damn, even the demo called Lotus Notes was better.

ChromeOS? I think that's for old-person devices called "laptops"?

These days all people has is a smartphone and it runs Android or iOS, no Microsoft in sight.

> It's the only thing they have that offers a prayer of beating Google at something

I'm guessing their office suite offerings (hosted and desktop) dwarf anything that Google has.

Yeah, I clarified the post to indicate what I actually meant (Bing.)

They would really, really like you to use Bing for search instead of Google. Until the OpenAI partnership started to bear fruit, they had no way to get their foot in that particular door. Now that they do, they will never let us forget it.

From what I’ve seen the AI gimmick has resulted in almost no new market share for Bing. I downloaded it myself and used it a couple of times but the app was buggy on iOS and I can just use ChatGPT for the generative features. I imagine many others felt the same

I think ppl need to realize that Microsoft isn't a uniform monolithic entity. Its a collection of hundreds of products all desperately vying for the attention of the market and of their own enterprise sellers. Anyone inside msft who has a "failing" product like Bing would have looked at the halo around openai and told their dev and marketing teams to drop everything and get some of that glory. To steal Mitt Romneys infamous phrase, companies are people, too.

> It's the only thing they have that offers a prayer of beating Google at something.

Azure's market share would indicate you are wrong about this.

Replace "Google" with "another leading tech player" because they're way smaller than AWS.

And not even MS itself. They just invested in OpenAI to jump ahead.

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