What model are you using ?
Microsoft has been releasing dog shit insanely overpriced software with decent alternatives for decades and is still used in every single company I work for or with.
Your take is the "current year is the year of the linux desktop" meme of "ai"
I don't think anything comes close to Microsoft's offerings. Macs suck. Ditto Linux.
cfengine is 33 years old
AI does not mean coders coding with agents all day long. AI integration is mostly for data processing, which is the promise and use of the APIs.
People use them, if for no other reason, because they are cheap, or are part of the Chromebook generation and have gotten used to it
Of their suite, Presentation and Sheets are the only ones people really have gripes about, Sheets by power users because it isn't Excel and it can never be, and Presentations because it's the ugly duckling of the suite
OpenAI and Anthropic have both transitioned into product companies. ChatGPT (the app) and Claude are both one-click installs that just work. People and businesses with pay for this.
People will also pay for the best (or the perception of being the best). Since it's hard to tell what "intelligence" really means model to model, there's a sense of safety in giving a task to the "best".
That's a payback of the infrastructure in a few weeks in theory. After a few weeks or a month, the only cost is electricity, and whatever they make after that is pure profit. This is why they can charge normal prices. Not $50 for 1M tokens.
Even 5.2 is doing really well in comparison here: https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard/sweatlas-refactoring
What's left are incompetent developers paired with people who get government contracts and leech off them. Ask me how I know.
You didn't discover some new trick for cost performance. And the rest of the world isn't dumb.
You're just too broke to afford the supercar and justifying the hooptie. It gets you to the kindergarten class after all. And that's all you need.