Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI' | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI'

businessinsider.com

78 pointsnancyp42 comments

It's worse than that. They always sacrifice their customers to try and win new business on some fad of the hour. Every fucking time. This has been going on 20 years at least.

This is another Windows Phone. They shaft the entire platform for a decade to fulfil some stupid fucked up half baked ideology.

Imagine Windows if they invested in their customers rather than their stock price and ego. Imagine if they became a bastion of privacy and security. Imagine if they became someone we could trust.

This is so true! Going after the pie in the sky only works for a short while, then you have to work for your pie. the worst is that employees in windows used to get slower promotions than these new tech groups (live,mobile etc ) which means more of them are in powerful positions to continue this trend. They tasted success with this strategy in their early days when they built sq L, xbox and word. Azure was the last successful play like this but at least they wrote own software.

As my father used to say, shit floats to the top of the tank. Shit being sycophants, yes men and liars usually. Oh that sums up MSFT senior management nicely.

And this is why you cannot trust any corporation in the long term and why i think copy left licences are becomming a hidden corner stone of our civilization.

I agree their customers certainly are being sacrificed now.

Windows Phone was very costly, but did not have much negative impact on existing products - Windows/Office etc?

I learnt that lesson, the way they allowed a small team to screw up C++/CX customers, paying for Visual Studio licenses, bringing down the whole XAML C++ development experience to the 2000's ATL days.

Most people do trust them already, they're still the worlds biggest desktop os by a large margin.

So erm, it probably wouldn't make any meaningful difference?

Actually no we don't. I work for a company with 10,000 windows seats and we use it because we're basically locked in and stuck with the steaming turd. And the rug is getting pulled on Windows 10 now.

Notably one of our biggest security threat vectors is actually Windows. The security model on it is so crap it's either locked down so it's completely unusable via GPOs and behind DLP proxies and firewalls. Or the risk is accepted and as a regulated industry we get fined to death if anything goes wrong.

So no we aren't happy, we don't trust them but we have to gargle it anyway.

> Most people do trust them already,

Forced to trust them. Windows is the default at most companies, and the cheapest laptops on the market (the ones that will shove ads all over Edge and your start menu) run Windows also.

Mobile phones were a fad?

No but Microsoft was never going to be able to do it. Maybe there’s a parallel now.

> Imagine Windows if they invested in their customers rather than their stock price and ego. Imagine if they became a bastion of privacy and security. Imagine if they became someone we could trust.

You're missing the point. Think of the actual Windows user: it's not the average joe/jane that get the oem laptop with windows pre-installed, it's the big IT departments that are going to not only ship tens of thousands of windows machines (with "professional" tier licenses) but also the whole bundle of expensive shit (office, outlook, teams, office364, active directory and the whole thing).

Have you focused on those customers?

Ok now think: what alternatives do those customer have? Pretty much NONE.

If you're thinking GNU/Linux you're being unrealistic. GNU/Linux on non-tech workers' desktop will always be ready next year, every year.

If you're thinking Macbooks... No IT budget is deep enough for that.

Microsoft has no need to worry about their customers as Windows users. They have no other place to go anyway.

It's businessinsider so you can be sure it's an entire article spun around half a tweet and a daydream of an editor... but,

> a former executive who left as a result of the changes said products like Azure Cognitive Search, Azure AI Bot Service, and Kinect DK are practically gone.

I'm familiar with the first two and... good riddance. These only kept on existing because of marketing money being pumped into selling them to inept nincompoops. These products are exclusively meant for people with purchasing power but zero understanding of turning ideas into actual software.

> That's according to interviews with several current senior Microsoft executives, former execs, and many rank-and-file employees

Not really the same thing as “half a tweet and a daydream of an editor”.

And all of those employees are anonymous. Yeah, right.

Agree. I'd believe only if Satya come and say MS is just an IT for OpenAI.

The problem with this kind of reporting is that we don’t know if it’s a reliable source or someone spouting off but who has no insight, or has an ulterior agenda.

This is how narratives work best. You mock something up, give it some gravitas and hope it grows legs.

Sometimes you get “the pentagon papers” other times you get a “Steele dossier”… it’s hard to tell the two apart but in retrospect.

2 month old article.

https://archive.is/bLaDA

Since then - Recall recalled - Copilot+ cut down to a web wrapper - CoPilot+ PC benchmarks faked - CustomGPT support dropped from Copilot - Curb Stomped by Apple actually having a developer platform strategy around AI

> Curb Stomped by Apple actually having a developer platform strategy around AI

Lol no. Intelligence of an apple did not curb stomped anything. Including apples. So far regulators like EU and countries like China curbstomped the fruit intelligence.

What happens with microsoft if openai fails to become a dominant player that created a new market with significant revenue? I feel like this is gonna end up just like Windows phone did.

This is what I expect will happen. Invest $10B (already happened), then invest another $5B for the sunk cost fallacy, then layoff and close (or divest if they're motivated enough). They'll write this off as a loss and the market will eventually forgive them as they chase the next buzz

Isn't there some value in handling the infra for the largest genai products currently?

I mean, AI is a vector for their growth now and Satya questioned in the past like why Microsoft research did not produce something like OpenAI.

That'd be because MSR was working on stuff for customers, not for shareholders...

MSR was actually working for themselves (researchers who were career paper-publishers aka professors without teaching responsibilities).

Source: worked at MSR

That is exactly what working for the customer is. Fundamental technology, research and science.

Working for the customer is designing a new graph search algorithm that speeds up formula propagation in Excel by 10%. Working for yourself is designing a new graph search algorithm that’s really cool and gets published in top journals and conferences.

The latter makes its way into products occasionally. Which helps the customer. A lot of the stuff I use comes from research not a product team.

Now that's not really fair is it?

They're also Sales, Marketing, and Channel Partner Management for OpenAI.

Now that OpenAI has chosen Oracle Cloud, Microsoft is becoming completely irrelevant in the domain of AI, and their "efforts" will soon be regarded as a "cloud clippy"

They say it is for backup: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/openai-selects-orac...

do you understand that Oracle was chosen in the first because all the cloud providers are running out of the available hardware? Microsoft also partnered with Oracle with the same reason. Oracle has some cloud infra, that nobody is using (lol).

> Oracle has some cloud infra, that nobody is using (lol).

Nor should they, Oracle is awful!

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