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Comment by supliminal | Hacker News Reader

There’s a poster on here who keeps posting and re-posting about their dinner with a Microsoft executive and how they were told Microsoft is all-in on enterprise. Waiting for that copy-paste to make its way over here.

Microsoft keeps footgunning things so hard I think even enterprise might be reluctant to go with them moving forward [0]. I don’t have Netcraft numbers in front of me but I doubt things have notably improved even if they do have a strategy shift to enterprise which includes crapping all over Windows for no good reason.

I’m personally glad FOSS is going strong but that’s a complete aside.

[0] We got burned by Azure as I’m sure many other enterprises have, and they did exactly nothing to remedy/compensate the situation, SLAs be damned. At this point our strategy is to move off of reliance on any Microsoft/windows tech. We moved off of ActiveDirectory not too long ago. Bing/Edge/etc honestly who cares.

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Microsoft was so focused on the enterprise they forgot that enterprises are made up of individual users.

Any trade-off that favors the enterprise in lieu of the user actually benefits nobody in the long term.

Crucially, at enterprise sales, those who make putchase decisions are not the actual users (except maybe for Outlook and Excel). They sometimes play golf together with vendors though. This is how stuff like MS Teams of Oracle Forms gets sold: it checks all the compliance boxes, has support, an SLA, "is industry strength", etc.

This is true until it isn't though. Blackberry was doing great with enterprise users until people refused to give up their iPhones even at work.

The end state of genAI is that the end user is the enterprise

The end state of genAI could as well be a few billionaires being their enterprise and everybody else being unemployed or working at the factory. Robots are not there yet (far from it) and someone needs to build and maintain the thing as well as food for everyone. High unemployment could drive salaries down and make lots of thing unavailable to the common people while making humans cheaper than automation for boring manual work.

That's an extreme scenario but today's politicians are not very keen into redistribution of wealth or prevention of excessive accumulation of economic power leading to exceeding the power of the state itself. I see nothing preventing that scenario from happening.

> High unemployment could drive salaries down and make lots of thing unavailable to the common people while making humans cheaper than automation for boring manual work.

‘I wanted a machine to do the dishes for me so I could concentrate on my art, and what I got was a machine to do the art so now I’m the one doing the dishes’

But you already have a machine that can do the dishes. Like doing the laundry, people forget the machines they already have doing 90% of the work. Soon enough artists will forget that computers can do 90% of their work too.

The French will lead the way.

The French are on their way to put a far-right government in power next year, don't count on them.

I imagine that the rabble will need to eat only a few before the rest catch on.

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