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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

It really shows that Microsoft doesn't hold themselves up to a high standard. They make all this noise about AI PCs and a new (!!!) Copilot key, only to deliver... not much. Where are the adults in the room who have the guts to say "let's have a cohesive story and do this the right way?"

I suspect they think their customers are so dumb that they'll be wowed by the same Malibu Stacy doll with a new hat (!!!).

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Microsoft has never had a cohesive story, they've had a cohesive brand. From 'Windows' to '.NET' to 'Azure' to 'CoPilot', it's always been about slamming the new buzzword trademark onto everything, regardless of it's relation to the prior thing with similar name.

I was impressed how quickly they were able to dilute their copilot brand. A new personal record

Yeah like when they branded Skype on everything and we had to do a whole campaign to educate our users that Lync is now Skype but nothing has actually changed and it's not actually compatible with the real Skype in any way, it's just empty vacuous branding crap.

I really hate dealing with Microsoft.

Now with the CoPilot 365 stuff they're selling us something like it's the best thing in the world when really it's only a barely beta quality product that really shouldn't have made it to market yet.

The fact that Co-Pilot 365 is unable to directly search or reference current Microsoft documentation on their Learn site or any of the support articles and just tells you to go look that up yourself is annoying.

I understand the major selling point is it’s ability to search through your emails, team messages, meeting notes/transcripts, and SharePoint/OneDrive documents for information is not as useful as it could be because I can’t get it to find me information in my OneNote doc without giving it the documents and even then it usually just tells me to ask the person who last edited the file.

I was typing my list and thinking 'Im missing a big one' - how did I forget 365?!

> Where are the adults in the room who have the guts to say "let's have a cohesive story and do this the right way?"

Buck stops at the CEO.

Could be worse, imagine Ballmer still at the helm.

Why? While Balmer's products weren't market conquering smash hits (Xbox 360, Zune, Windows Phone 7) but they also weren't full of anti-user features, ads and spyware like those launched under Nadella.

Balmer seemed to at least care a bit about (windows) developers and how products were received by the consumers which is why he spent 1,5 Billion on fixing the red ring of death issue to save the Xbox, only for Microsoft to run it into the ground today under Nadella. How many people do you know who would want to buy Xbox today?

The way I see it, Balmer was better for the products, Nadella was better at increasing the share price, but the way Boeing proved it, you can have stock increases even if your products are going to shit once you nearly monopolize a market.

Windows development story would be much better, that one is sure.

Microsoft feels like it's now really just two divisions: the one that makes lots of money and the one that is thrashing around desperately trying to find income streams to justify their continued existence. The latter division likely lives in fear of the day that they're ejected from the company, either as a spinoff or sold to another company, so they have tons of motivation to find new revenue streams, even at the potential cost of damaging the corporate brand.

> two divisions

Just two? It feels like one of the most silo'd, incohesive software engineering firms on the planet!

Don't forget the Xbox/gaming parts, seemingly completely divorced from the rest of MS, and flailing about for years now, buying up every game company they can afford.

Looking at Windows 11 and Teams, I think they know how to sell ___.

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