Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2
19 days ago
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company
Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.
Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft.
But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
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Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone.
I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.
Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to? What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system?
It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of users that will continue to find ways to use their computer the way they want to.
This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough. MS should be happy to retain any end user they can at this point and not continue to piss of some nerds that still use your operating system under the one condition that they get to do so the way they see fit.
It makes more sense if you replace the person buying with "company" and replace "local user" with "employee".
MS wants control and they will figure out some way to monetize that control. Whether it is using the data stored in the cloud for AI training or something else.
If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.
How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
There was a conspiracy theory in my company that M$ had plants in my company to turn everything into M$. "If it doesnt have the word M$ in it, we aren't using it."
I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.
As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.
My company recently decided to move away from Power Automate after having trained lots of people on this 'no code' platform and then having to hire expensive consultants to support or flesh out the apps those users had actually written.
From the article, "its productivity software is used by hundreds of millions of corporate users, a captive audience to whom it can easily promote new AI products."
Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.
weirdly enough, we asked microsoft to help us build these reports and give us insights into these numbers. The ones in our country were utterly incapable and just send screenshots of powerbi reports from the US team.
So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane
Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions.
Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.
If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.
This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.
I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.
I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is that.
No, they were all-in on Blockchain-as-a-service on Azure for a hot minute, and it's still included in their supply chain protection stack (which in fairness is one of the few use cases that makes a lot of sense)
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