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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is a publicly traded company. Which investors are causing them to shit up GitHub with AI features nobody wants? In which venues?

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The imaginary pressure of investors. When you actually ask investors if they care about most of the things CEOs think investors will care about, they don't.

The same thing happens much lower down the ladder: when you ask customers if they care about most of the things managers (or engineers) think customers care about, they don't.

The same thing is how a law about "if you hack someone we might arrest you" ends up causing internet providers to shut down a connection upon a single errant packet.

I had a $400/month server turned off because of a single failed TCP connection to the wrong address which ended up on an abuse database. If they'd gone to a court they would've been laughed out of it, but the provider's upstream's upstream's upstream wants to avoid court (even though that wouldn't happen), and so every step in that chain gets more paranoid about upsetting the previous link until then a typo in an address gets your server turned off until you reply to your server host.

If I'm picking a stock to buy (in the "retail" market, it's primarily based on a balance of EPS, P/E ratio, and a low(er) amount of debt.

My P/E filter filters out the likes of Nvidia, Amazon, etc, whereas my debt filter ensures the smaller cap companies won't be swallowed by their debt like many businesses are.

Who knows if I'm smart or an idiot.

They need to justify to the markets that their Azure investments were worth it. The whole company is built around Azure. The AI justification is just a storefront for it. Every engineer who worked on it will tell you it's a pack of cards waiting to crash. All the issues with Github, etc. are just side effects. Otherwise, if they write off Azure, their stock price will take a dip as they just admitted to burning cash on a lost cause - which it actually is (my personal opinion).

It's their $80B+ investment in building AI infrastructure.

If Microsoft can't meaningfully integrate AI into their own products and make profit off of selling it to end users, why should anyone assume that third parties can? By extension: if nobody can make money off of AI products, what's the point of building $80B in AI infrastructure - did they just set a giant pile of cash on fire?

Microsoft has to ship AI features, or write off its massive investments as essentially worthless. Remove the crappy AI feature from Github, and you pop the bubble.

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