Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
> which "just doesn't work"
step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
step 2. download iso
step 3. flash iso on medium
step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.
It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.
...
On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...
YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.
> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.
Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.
Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.
Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - >>46871172 - February 2026
This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...
> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.
> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology
> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked
> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died
("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
Taking money off the table - >>45763769 - October 2025 (108 comments)
(not investing advice)
> “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote.
This is true in almost every large organization, and will affect every enterprise AI product out there. There was a relevant subthread just a couple of days ago recounting this exact, same dynamic: >>46861209
In fact, Palantir's secret sauce may not be their tech, but their "Forward Deployed Engineers" model (i.e. a rebranding of "partner engineers embedded within their customers' organizations"). Because it turns out that's a lot of what they do is navigating these bureaucratic and political hurdles to unlock access to the data: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir
It gets even worse if you consider this data is going to be extremely messy, with multiple bespoke, partially-duplicate / overlapping, potentially conflicting versions of the data with varying levels of out-of-datedness, scattered across these silos. (I would know, in a past life, I worked on a months-long project called, self-explanatorily enough, "Stale Docs".)
Yeah, untangling these bureaucratic webs and data horrors is not a quarter-long or year-long project, so investors are gonna be waiting a long time for the impact of AI to be visible. On the bright side, as TFA also hints at, AI providers themselves have been severely capacity-constrained. So hopefully by the time these issues get sorted out enough new capacity would be coming online to actually serve that traffic.
In the meantime, I expect a prolonged period of AI companies feverishly splurging on AI CapEx spend even as Wall Street punishes them repeatedly for the lack of impact of AI being reflected anywhere.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/
I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.
I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.
Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.
0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/
We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.
I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html
Edit: Wikipedia sums up the "failed branding campaign" quite scathingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
I think that campaign followed on from everything being named "Enterprise" something. I still miss the days when SQL Server Management Studio was called "Enterprise Manager"...