Latest example:
Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496465)
Not only the rename is absurd, but the page (office.com) looks heavily vibe-coded
Latest example:
Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496465)
Not only the rename is absurd, but the page (office.com) looks heavily vibe-coded
22 comments
For the last year or so all orders from leadership have been "build more AI, show AI usage" even above things like stability and reliability.
There was no recognition from leadership over what use cases worked or not, and they appeared to believe their own hype.
To complement this, there is near to no long-term accountability for upper leadership for failure, so even as features underperform and strategy turns out to be a flop, they will continue to make millions a year, having layoffs every 6 months, and then acting surprised pikachu when morale is down and top engineers are looking to the door, since salary is barely competitive even if you are a top performer getting special stock awards.
When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed. Ballmer laughed at the iPhone when it was released and didn’t take it seriously. By the time they started trying to make moves it was too little, too late. Mobile has shifted how people use computers and other than have a few apps and enterprise management, Microsoft is largely absent.
How much of this push behind AI is a desperate attempt not to miss another transformative shifts in the industry?
A lot of which had to do with being under a consent decree.
> "When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed."
By "missed" you mean that MS was at the top of the mobile phone heap after defeating Palm Computing when the iPhone came out and swept Windows Mobile, Palm, Research In Motion and everyone else away.
Microsoft was late to respond, eventually bought Danger and released the Kin phone before cancelling it within weeks, and only released Windows Phone in 2010 a solid 3 years after the iPhone release.
Windows Phone was actually pretty nice to use, but they were already too late to the scene and didn't have a chance to steal ground from iPhone or android who already had solid app ecosystems.
I had an iPaq in 2004 when we got married. It was like living in the future, where the future was a scaled down Windows 98 box. We took a one month road trip and was able to Priceline hotels on the road as we explored. Amazing device but not an iPhone.
Ballmer was so butthurt about iPhone he would berate people who appeared before him with one. As a customer, my boss and I were invited to a meeting with high level Microsoft people and asked to not carry iPhones out of respect.
People sitting outside FANG/NAMAMA still drool over those barely competitive salaries you speak of.
I realize he can't even open Steam without getting bombarded by ads from MSN in the start menu.
I'm angry at Microsoft for this. Instead of being good stewards of "computing", they provide an environment that's poorly designed and exploitative.
Shame on the people at Microsoft responsible.
I can relate. My grandfather, who had been a math teacher and actually got me into computing way back in the beige toaster Macintosh days, religiously checked his email and practiced his Spanish on Rosetta Stone for decades. I had to update from Win 7 to 10 for the desktop I built for him, and that was a big struggle for him. That would probably be many times harder now considering the sad shape of Windows. It was heartbreaking watching him struggle with one of the few simple joys he had left towards the end of his life.
I'm very sorry you're having to deal with that and your anger is warranted.
Also has the nice side-effect of avoiding MSN news on Windows.
try Windows Server.
What Microsoft did do was make is super-confusing to people about what they changed and what is called what.
See: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re...
Half of the people are just talking about layoffs and other are keeping thier mouth shut. There is sense that execs are making one bad decision after another. Xbox division knows this very well, the trust in that division is near zero, but now it has spread to even the orgs which were doing decently well.
Product quality is also completely dogshit/dogslop, we have done nothing in last 2 years except making our products worse. We do hear reports of boomer companies moving to Apple every now and then, and these rumours are increasing. Windows 11 is a disaster, Copilot is an convenience no one asked for. Users are contacting support every day asking how to disable all these features but execs keep ignoring users. The consensus among top guys is that customer is wrong and we need to teach them.
Trusting stock market more than the customers is now the industry standard.
We had a service impacting issue and went through the typical Premier/Unified support gaslighting exercise. We finally escalated it to a batshit level and got to a real engineer. The dude was about the retire, was fed up, and knew exactly what was wrong. He claimed to have a fix pending approval that had been held up by his chain. We ended up getting a hot fix after a lot of drama with account leadership.
I was grateful to the guy, but kind of shocked that morale in that group was so bad. I used to be acquainted with a few people there over the years and every single one of them was either laid off or left. I never heard of anything like that at Microsoft at all, especially as a customer.
If youre not considering it, I would reccomend trying to find a local hacker club like defcon or 2600. There are usually a few embedded folks who go or are affiliated with those.
Office 365 app suddenly is not called that. It's called copilot. When you open it it just shows chat. No files, no word, no documents. You have to try hard to find your files back.
So suddenly an app that you used to edit word documents and print PDFs is completely gone with no warning. Word doesn't exist. Even Office doesn't exist :D How are clients supposed to navigate that shitshow?
I wonder if all this shoving of AI down peoples throats could trigger a bit of a backlash around vendor software updates / proprietary software in general. There's this huge infrastructure of Windows Update, chrome auto-updates, app stores and SaaS that predated and enabled all this... and people accepted it when they were getting bugfixes and security updates out of it, but now it's getting used to take away the features they wanted and replace them with worse and worse versions of crapware.
All of a sudden... the free software world of updating when _you_ want the new version, and being able to fork the old version if you want, starts to look pretty great.
I just found that it's called "myopia" in English, while trying to find how short-sightedness is spelled.
Multiple generations knew what Word and Office was. That beats even twitter rename fiasco.
1. Saying "AI" makes stock price go up
2. Make all things AI
3. Stock price will go even more up
As for everything else, subordinated to the aforementioned.
Since last year? Burning themselves into the ground has been their M.O. for the last decade and a half, at least.
I'd argue enshitification started in earnest with Windows 8.
AI just enables them to speed up the process dramatically.
Microsoft would be such an easy fix to get back on the right path, but Nadella is not going to do that, and nobody is going to make you or me the CEO.
Why treat workers right, properly resource teams, and build quality stuff on a roadmap that looks beyond the next quarter when you can just treat your workers, product and customers as if they're all disposable trash.
Basically the standard Fortune 500 playbook with few exceptions.
>...but Nadella is not going to do that, and nobody is going to make you or me the CEO.
That's a good thing. When they eventually fail completely and sell their assets, it'll be a source of cheap datacenters for the competition—at least assuming demand eventually chills out.
Because capitalism is a fact, and actually trying to build the best possible products for your users will give you a market-leading position which your greedy competition can't defeat, and which will give you the most profit as a result. Big CEOs and shareholders still don't get this.
Microsoft has a foothold in the market, and they may feel impossible to defeat, but they're not. If this is their attitude, they will lose.
> That's a good thing. When they eventually fail completely and sell their assets, it'll be a source of cheap datacenters for the competition—at least assuming demand eventually chills out.
If they continue like this, yes. But if they just get their act together, it would be a win-win for everyone. The company isn't doomed, other than by its own active doing.
10 and 11 are the evil shit. 11 especially so.
11 LTSC is heaps better than consumer editions but it’s still shite.
The second anticheat embraces Linux windows is deadskies.
Said similar thing to the ladybird browser a while ago — I’d prefer it NOT support some features.
Windows is utter ass.
They don't even use their own browser, languages, or OS half the time because they're so bad.
I don't use it but stuff like VS Code is a point of light but they run it like an internal project, and will drive it into the ground, just like GitHub.
The sooner they drown the better for everyone and the industry.
So most people.
Get out of MAANG. There is no decent one, only different flavors of evil and abuse. Integrity is worth more than money. Form a worker-owned co-op consultancy with other decent people and create enduring stability.