Microsoft CEO resorts to blogging in defense of AI | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft CEO resorts to blogging in defense of AI

gamesradar.com

67 pointsjuujian74 comments

It appears people are now using the term "Microslop" which I find funny. I'm not in any way an anti-AI absolutist but I do get annoyed by how Microsoft has jammed it into every nook and cranny of their product suite.

And it's not even good I can't understand what they're trying to do. I press the button occasionally just to mess with it and it has zero access to my data to do anything useful. Copilot in Outlook can't read my email, it's just a worse ChatGPT window sitting next to my email. What use-cases are you even imagining?

What they're certainly trying to do is get good annual reviews which increasingly revolve around saying "Look, I did AI."

They're trying to ship AI features. Which is the issue. They shouldn't be shipping AI features, they should be solving problems. If AI features are in service of solving those problems then great. But starting from a fad solution and trying to reverse-engineer a problem is backwards.

It can have access to all your data, but they want you to pay $30 a month for that. The free one doesn't have this access.

Fwiw I have that at work and IMO it's not worth that much. It's more useful than the free one but nothing game changing.

"Have you considered Copilot as your personal lord and retirements saviour?" These unwanted product pitches have something cultist and unsettling. Like all voices of reason have been removed the echo chamber diving bell is so sealed that the CEO blogs to ge to hear some sort of pushback. Time to serve the cool aid.

People wouldn’t be anti-AI if they weren’t losing their livelihood over AI only to find that everything they thought they’d do while being unemployed is also being ruined by AI.

Technologists are being deliberately misanthropic.

Spreading hate, fear, causing death, and violating every social standard of consent while they do it.

Something ugly has been grown in the bowels of the bay and it needs to stop.

Probably quite a feel people on HN paying their mortgage with selling digital crack to kids.

But with all technology eventually society catches up and the wild west is over.

By now, new forms of digital crack are being invented faster than lawmakers are able (or willing) to catch up with the previous forms. Yesterday, society and democracy were being destroyed by social media, today by “AI”. By the time the toxic effects of social media are being reined in (if ever), the forces of destruction will have moved on to “AI” or whatever comes after, in their efforts to concentrate wealth, power and influence in the hands of ever fewer people.

Wasn't this the observation / tension at the heart of Mountainhead?

The solution to this was representative democracy electing independently-minded technical experts, but electoral / parliamentary systems in many countries would need to change to make this viable.

E.g. in the US, what percentage of Congress do you think could give even an accurate 100-level description of AI?

It's easy to "disrupt" and "change the world" when you are protected from the consequences by a wall of money.

That's the thing - there are people who like AI, but hate Microsoft's approach to it. They draw disdain from that group of people on top of all of the people who hate AI in general.

Truly a shortsighted CEO and company

> I do get annoyed by how Microsoft has jammed it into every nook and cranny of their product suite.

It's infuriating that you can't even minimize it or close it. I love One Note, use it for work constantly and it's great for tracking meetings, notes, to do lists, vendor contacts, whatever. Now there's a giant COPILOT icon in the middle of the notebook and you can't move it, close it or minimize it. There's no way to disable it entirely. I'd be find if it were in the dropdown menu but shoved into the middle of the page is so aggravating, it's blocking my actual work and text.

You actually like onenote? Note taking is my primary tool at work but I really hate onenote. The web version can't even search properly in all folders. And there's no desktop Linux version.

Privately I use obsidian with self hosted livesync which is amazing. But at work I have to use Copilot. In some ways I don't mind it in onenote because it actually succeeds in finding stuff the search function doesn't. Syncing to mobile often doesn't work right either.

To me it's the worst O365 app and the one I need the most :(

I do like it! I have been using it since college though so maybe I am just set in my ways and lazy to move to something new.

The way I set it up I don't find myself searching for things much as I know the way it's organized to quickly find things I need.

Ah I see. I don't find it very fast and I really need good search because my notes are total chaos like my brain :)

I have observed that people who are used to Onenote mainly like it for its inline-box style notes which can be inserted at any point in the page. Obsidian due to its markdown backend can't support this. Unless you painfully mess with tables, you have to stick to linear top-down approach and don't have free-form flexibility.

Ahh yes could be. And people taking notes on tablets with pens perhaps. I hate that because I have the fine motor skills of a 2 year old. My handwriting is still a mess and very slow. Despite this being the only way to get through school in my time.

I always hate when OneNote opens random text boxes when I click somewhere. But yeah some people could like that too.

> can't even search properly in all folders

I'd be fascinated by anyone from the Office team to tell me why Microsoft can't get global search right in their products.

E.g. SharePoint has had broken search for decades at this point (on multiple entirely different platforms of the product!)

It's a solved technical problem -- it's just like no one at MS cares.

Sharepoint's search may be the one search that is actually worse than reddit's search.

I'm very happy Nadella is driving Microsoft to the ground with the help of Suleyman, Panay, and a bunch of other incompetent people.

You are wrong... Panay no longer works at Microsoft.

His ghost still lurks in the Windows 11 debacle.

Satya publishes his thoughts on some custom platform? What happened to the Big Beautiful Linkedin? I thought it was, ahem - "From cybersecurity insiders, to agriculture experts, to thought leaders on diversity and leadership, and beyond, the world’s experts are talking on LinkedIn.". Aren't Microsoft CEO the perfect leader to be an example and post there? Lead the way, so to say? Or did he realize that only corporate psychos and bots post there? :)

Or even just a github markdown file, considering there's nothing he needed in excess of md formatting.

'... it'd be a lot cooler if you did.'

If you ignore the stock price and just check in on the state of windows after windows 7, you get a clear picture

Maybe not the point you were making, but Windows 8 was lame, then 8.1 was an improvement, 10 was more improvement, and now 11 is further improvement. That's from a daily user. A lot of Windows criticism sounds like it comes from non-users or users who want to be in the hater in-group more than they want to invest in setting it up well.

The AI stuff is definitely terrible, but I turned it off a long time ago and never see it, it's another thing I don't understand the outrage about. The FUD about it getting reactivated hasn't come to pass for me.

I agree with your points... From my POV, the pattern seems to be good/bad/good/bad, but what actually happens is a subtle lowering of our standards and expectations that we have towards what an OS has to do and how it does things. With every bad version, the next version seems to be less bad or even good, but what it does is lower the standard further. Stuff started to move to one drive, office is all cloud now, they are subtly chipping away the personal computing concept...

Most people don't think Windows 11 is an improvement over 10.

There's a lot of people that actually started migrating to Mac / Linux when Windows 10 went EOL recently.

Windows 11 was clearly a regression after a very good Windows 10. Task bar from Win10 had been completely deleted and a garbage tablet replacement had been pushed in. It's already what, 3 or 4 years in Win11 an task bar still don't have a comparable functionality. It is also slower in performance, it takes visible seconds just to open a volume slider, which loaded almost instantly on Win10 and same hardware. There were multiple severe problems with AMD performance on release, fixed much later, again showing that hey took inferior code or even build from scratch (meaning Win10 had a superior code inside). Explorer has been degraded significantly, I usually use Total Commander and don't have to interact with it, but unfortunately Save/Open File menus are still Explorer ones. And there it has applied this new file "structure" of Today/LastWeek/LastMonth and so on, which overrides normal sorting rules for some folders like Downloads. finding files are now a damn quest. I had to change my downloads directory to a user created one in every program, just to avoid this crap.

And the list goes on, I just don't remember every single UI regression issue I've encountered right away. But Win11 is clearly bad. Not the awful bad, but annoying bad daily.

If I owned MSFT I would be selling right now.

because?

Windows 11 usage is declining. The Xbox is selling vastly less than Sony/Nintendo. PC gamers are moving to SteamOS and Linux. The billions poured into OpenAI no longer look so smart given very competitive offerings elsewhere.

Despite all this they still have a hugely profitable business, a pretty decent OS under all the adware, and a defacto monopoly on business productivity software.

first paragraph is why we should be selling or second?

Corporations get their software into businesses through the exact same process software gets replaced in those companies… usually through IT and/or users using things personally who become their champions.

So which paragraph do you think was more relevant to their recommendation…the one where they already have most of the customers they will ever have, or the one where people are increasingly moving away from them in their daily lives?

in just last 5 months they got two new corporate customers with 1400 and 550 employees. and this is just me, one nobody that knows about. if you think they are not getting new corporate customers not daily but hourly you mite be tad misinformed.

as an exercise see how many job openings there are where you won’t be using MSFT products if you get the gig :)

Likely using a rather generous definition of “new”. There is a difference between a new customer, and buying a license. Im also fairly doubtful that every server, docker, vm, and appliance is also running Windows. And even if said 2000 users are using Windows for absolutely every system, it’s still a meaningless anecdote about a drop in the bucket. I don’t think anyone suggested that Microsoft doesn’t have customers? But I suspect they were far from “new” customers, even if a new company, because I guarantee something somewhere was replaced for every one of them; bankrupt businesses they replaced, old hardware, whatever. Arguing the opposite would certainly seem to be naive on face.

wasn't expecting to read that Microsoft is not getting new corporate customers but here we are, you learn something new every day :)

none of this is anecdotal, I make a living as contractor and in just past two years have worked on numerous moving-to-microsoft projects, Oracle to SQL Server, AWS to Azure, Sharepoint etc etc... I am not a fan of MSFT by any means but what you are writing makes absolutely no sense. You should read MSFT quarterly earnings reports and not read few anecdotal things people on HN write about MSFT. It is M7 for a reason and practically has no competition (which is why they are able to do shit like Windows 11 and Copilot and... people on HN might be bitching but it is just for entertainment purposes)

Anecdotes like “I’ve done blah blah over two years”? Correct, I ignore anecdotes just like that. You can argue whatever you like — you seem to be heavily financially motivated to do so while I neither own Microsoft stock nor earn my money by convincing people to use their products. As a result, feel free to continue your evangelism while I go ahead and extricate myself from your sphere of biases.

Have you used their products recently? I predict we’re at the beginning of a downward trajectory. I’m not saying they’re going bankrupt but there are better tech companies in which to put your money.

> Nadella argues 2026 "will be a pivotal year for AI.

I hope that means they’re planning to pivot away from it. ;)

AI could make me probably more productive in, say, Word. If it would be integrated into Mac Word the way it’s there in VSCode. Which it isn’t. But while they do that, the writing software I’ve used for 30+ years gets worse and worse devouring my productivity. Word has had zero new features in a decade and yet it looses diagrams, messes up formatting, converts diagram labels into static text, breaks references or does other undesirable things with increasing frequency? That’s not a technology issue, it’s a leadership issue.

Source: https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/

His share price target and enterprise valuation depend on it.

Anyone here working in management/accounting:

Is this blog post perfectly timed for some financially important event, anual report, investors meeting or something? I'm very curious to know.

I actually thought it was a decent post. Corporate speech for "we may start to see some real world work being done with this, still gotta figure it out though"

That article is a well-deserved scathing satire. Nice to see that not everyone has fallen prey to “AI”-driven brain rot.

seems he's finally realised he's bet the company (and more importantly for him, his reputation) on a dud?

Maybe he used "AI" to help him compose the blog post

Why not

Reply on news.ycombinator.com