cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1131961/former-microsoft-vp-says-microsoft-missed-the-ai-wave-like-the-internet-and-mobile-as-co
Context
He was replying to a tweet with the text:
In the past 6 weeks we have seen a rather strong shift for both Xbox and Windows implementing requested features after years of ignoring them.
This is great but…what changed for both of this massive orgs to suddenly start listening?
Let’s see…
- You make Bing your biggest bet with AI. Not a single percentage point of user share goes up from that investment
- You bet on Copilot with AI. Not even 3% of paying users use it, even when the distribution is massive, and it’s pre-deployed right in their faces
- Then you hire the wrong people and assign them to jobs they are obviously not qualified to do. It gets worse.
- Your OEMs invest on NPUs to then find out that nobody cares because not a single valuable use case was built for those in Windows/Office.
- Your GitHub, which should be thriving in the age of AI, drops below 90% SLA
- Your COGS go up significantly
- Your shares drop significantly
- The only thing you can brag about looks like an utilities company, not a software company
- Shareholders start asking the hard questions
There’s a point where you start getting fun phone calls and an increasing number of voices start asking you to maybe listen to customers.
I say that as a very positive thing (I know I don’t sound like that, I’m grumpy by nature, can’t help it). This is actually positive: If you don’t push for change, change pushes you.
Hit Factory Reset might be what Microsoft actually needed, since Hit Refresh wasn’t enough. Even if it comes with a ton of disruptions.
Source: Mat Velloso on X/Twitter.
Mat Velloso who was most recently the Vice President of Product for the Developer Platform at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. He also led AI developer products at Google DeepMind (including the Gemini API and Google AI Studio). But before his stints at Google and Meta, Velloso spent over 12 years at Microsoft, where he served as a Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows and, interestingly, spent four years as the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Missed it? They were right on top of it. Either everyone missed it or nobody did.
Good god their services and software suck
You forgot “cancel a bunch of products that were actually useful and had real growth potential in favour of Copilot”
Become complacent, make a sub-par product, prioritize Corporate decisions over user experience, do nothing to fix what the users criticize, abuse your control over the OS to double down and try to force it down your user’s throats through increasingly intrusive ways, fail to understand why people hate you. That’s the Microslop way. Its corporate culture, size and dominating position in the market prevents it from making a good product. Large companies like that should be broken up. They are too large for their own, or anyone else’s good.
Seriously, I am forced to use Teams and OneDrive for work and my productivity is constantly held back by the complete lack of basic quality of life features that most FOSS applications made for free by volunteers would have.
Them having to delete their Discord because of people saying Microslop was hilarious
In what way did Microsoft miss the Internet wave? Internet explorer was basically the gatekeeper of the Internet for a while, to the extent that it led to the antitrust case.
As I recall from the time, they were focused more on dial-up options so that you could connect into your work. IE wasn’t even in the first release of Windows 95, it only came into the second release after Netscape did so well.
I’m guessing it’s more about their failure do create any consumer focused internet services, e.g. shopping, social media, media, search, …
(future) Do you remember Microsoft? What happened, how could it go that wrong? … like Xerox, like Kodak, like Altavista, like Netscape
What an idiot
