It's a wave of sewage, few users want to ride it in the first place
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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It’s like they created a very good phone tree and are trying to shove it into everything that never had or needed a phone tree in the first place.
The fuck is a phone tree? Pardon my language, sir.
"for financial services, press one. for technical support, press two. for goblins, press three. for repairs, press four."
I TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK ABOUT GOBLINS
you're absolutely right! substituting pigeons.
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You forgot the mandatory lead message. "Please listen closely as our menu options have changed." No, they haven't. Ever.
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funny you should use that example in particular because i recently had the displeasure of using microsoft's phone tree. i was trying to close a dead relative's account and the info on the website was wrong.
they built a phone tree that remembers you. if you try to call in multiple times during some time period (at least several hours) it will just assume you have the same question and skip to your last choice.
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Funny you mention a phone tree, something that's been hit by AI. It's actually been around longer as voice recognition that finds a close match to a keyword, but in theory AI should be able to take a request and break down what is actually needed.
I haven't run across an AI version that works well. I don't know if that's because the voice recognition part is still bad, or if they're using Co-pilot (since I know how it mangles simple requests in text).
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it's a tsunami. uncontrollable, started far away from any normal humans, sweeps up everyone in its wake, and will cause massive damage when it inevitably crashes into a place with lots of people.
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If Microsoft wasn't run by tools, they'd see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we'll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won't, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that's just a skin of chrome...
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
It isn't just ineptitude. Of course executives at Microsoft know that they could be good and be successful with consumers. But they don't need to please consumers, they have far more important customers: the surveillance state, and the military industrial complex.
Once corporations have a near-monopoly position, they do not need to make good products anymore. Microsoft has enough money already to completely fail at everything for centuries and they'd be just fine. So they can focus on other goals, such as dismantling online anonymity for the benefit of the ruling class, who owns and controls Microsoft.
they have far more important customers: the surveillance state,
Except Microsoft is also losing the whole EU market because of Trump
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They didn't miss the "wave", they discovered it's just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don't want. This really sums the problem up well:
According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
I'm sure I'm like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it's ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that's really it. I don't find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It's not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I've tried it's really plateaued. I just really don't see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.
I certainly wouldn't pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.
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You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
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Satya may have grown the company share price but he's absolutely killed everything that made Microslop even remotely interesting before he became CEO.
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The more logical explanation is that AI is not a wave like the Internet and Mobile, but it is instead a wave like cryptocurrencies, NFTs and tulip bulbs.
If there's one thing that almost 3 decades at or near the forefront of Tech has taught me is that "novel" is not the same as "better", and that of all the times a novel technology was pushed by insane amounts of hype, only a handful turned out to match the hype and the ratio of good-ones to bullshit has become much worse in the last 2 decades as the Tech Startup sector fully morphed from Techie-driven to Financeer-driven.
On hype alone "AI" (as in, what's called now AI for the public, rather than the ML domain) stinks of greed-driven bullshit and the more one analyses the Technical details of LLMs and the Mathematics of it as well as of the improvements over time, the more painfully obvious it becomes that it's not at all AGI or a path to it, rather it's an overhyped attempt at it that turned out to be the wrong path. (All of which would've been absolutelly fine and a big Scientific step forward if it weren't for the greedy financeer class and grifters pushing, purelly for their own personal enrichment, for people and companies to adopted it for doing things it's not suitable for)
AI has an interesting economic trait in that it's very, very expensive to deploy, and made very fast progress from 2022 to 2024. That caused investors with money to believe that:
- Pushing the frontier was going to cost a lot of money. More than any other purported revolutionary tech.
- Extrapolation of past improvement meant that whoever was on the cutting edge may end up with a product with a huge paying market.
- So whoever wins this race would be rich, and the investment would have been worth it for them.
But since 2024, we've seen that the cutting edge got even more expensive much faster than expected, and much of the improvements in performance now come from inference rather than training, which represents a high ongoing cost.
Now, if we extrapolate from that trend line, we'll see that the market will be much smaller for AI services at the cost it takes to provide that service, and the question then becomes whether the industry can make its operations cheaper, fast enough to profitably provide a service people will pay for.
I have my doubts they'll succeed, and we might just be looking at the industry like supersonic flight: conceptually interesting, technically feasible, but just a commercial dead end because it's too expensive.
The economics of it don't add up and the growth rate of the curve of improvement over time has already significativelly fallen which looking at the historical curves for other technologies is a very strong indication that it's approaching the limits of how far it will go even though it's nowhere close to the hype.
So at both levels it all looks like a massive bet in the wrong horse that's turning out not to be a winner but it keeps getting pushed by those who bet on it in the hope of making enough people and companies dependent that its sustained by nothing more than the unacceptable cost of it failing.
(In terms of strategy, it's similar to how Uber started by using loopholes in the regulations for taxis, investing heavilly in becoming so big and established fast that when Authorities around the world got around to address those loopholes, they ended up accepting Uber and the like as something that could not be reversed and instead of regulating it out of existence, legitimized it. A very similar strategy was used by AirBNB: make the facts on the ground so big and reverting them so damaging that their low-value-adding business model with massive negative externalities and collateral damage ends up protected rather than made to pay for the societal costs of said collateral damage and negative externalities - essentially at some level Uber and especially AirBNB are being heavilly subsidized by society by being allowed to "polute" at will without paying for it).
So as I see it, the way Microsoft and other AI investors are going at it is to try and create a beachhead for it via hype, branding and lock-in in the expectation that something will come along at some point from the companies they invested in that is actually a genuine breakthrough that uses all the computing capacity created with their investment money.
I think that the reason why from the point of view of the public the AI adoption feels wrong is because it's almost entirelly top-down, driven by marketing techniques and against the natural desires of people - it's a novel form of entertainment being shoved down people's throats as suitable for important responsabilities.
From my own experience, this feel a lot like the hype part of the cycle for the Segway, only with 100x or 1000x more investment money behind it.
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this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a "m$ sux lol" rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
Yeah good read. I don’t agree that Microsoft isn’t dying though. They are, because people and companies alike are tired of other corporations throwing them under the bus. So many people are realizing that the companies don’t want what they want, and it kills their business or happiness.
I think they will become like IBM, once dominant, not dead today but pretty much irrelevant compared to what they once were.
ibm is still huge, but mostly because their shitty tactics in the past means that all their customers are completely dependent on them.
seems like microsoft is taking inspiration.
MS should be more vulnerable, due to everything but Excel being toilet blockages.
TLDR; MS already got big by being like IBM, lots of dumb corpo procurement cash is already keeping them afloat for about as long as qwerty keyboards - because some people got really good at/dependent on excel.
Their dominance of corpo-procurement (and using 'security' to block out alternative tooling) means that vast amounts of the corpo world is based on highly specialised and over-stretched excel.
Even in databases, where my organisation (large public sector) should be having a genuine competition to administer postGRESQL for us or something, has been loss-led into into a big new ms fabric contract by them appearing to undercut the incumbent (Oracle - ok not hard to undercut), but not actuall . . . [rant deleted]
However, crap MS is at software, they're extremely good at getting dumb corpos to sign on the dotted line.
('always has been' meme).
And many humans being forced to use the only tool available, have built vast intricate systems on the foundation of that excel, many of them masterworks of skill in the face of those constraints. Hopefully they don't last as long as one of the old Egyptian dynasties.
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The "AI wave" is a scam. Everyone missed the AI wave because it sucks at everything except making slop.
I was going to say. If such a wave existed, Microsoft (which has considerable leverage over, and integration with, OpenAI) rode it better than almost every other company.
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Wave? This is like being sad you did not get in on the housing crisis, or the dot com bubble, or any other clearly labeled landmine.
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There is no "AI wave". Machine learning can he incredibly powerful when used properly, and is being used to process scientific and medical data in pursuit of improving humanity's understanding of reality around us.
But that is not what Microslop is pushing. LLMs that exist to chew up RAM, water, and electricity to shit out slop and generate suicidal tendencies in children.
They aren't trying to make copilot useful, they are trying and failing to make it profitable, just like every other LLM.
The " AI Wave" is just a fiction. The whole idea is just an attempt to get investments for companies that don't and cant really produce any value. I've tried many of these "AI" tools and none of them can really do anything useful.
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The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don't really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It's because they're shoehorning it into places it doesn't belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they'd gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it's needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don't rename half of your products "Copilot", don't put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck's sake. If I don't feel like I have control over my OS any more, I'm not likely to stick around when other options are available.
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They also probably realized providing free Copilot in Windows would get very expensive quickly, and that not enough users would pay for it.
Basically yeah
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
They're spending billions to get millions.
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They should add much more AI. Why? Cause it's really funny to watch from the outside as a Linux user.
scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these features. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
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First off, copilot is just ChatGPT.
Second off, their implantation of ChatGPT is so bad it actually makes the original look good. And that is a damn low bar to reach for and miss.
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They didn't miss shit, they just competed and lost to like the four other AI companies that executed much better than them.
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Are you really being "left behind" when everyone else is going the wrong way?
I'm really baffled because this is super easy to fix.
Step 1. Pull all the AI bloat out of Windows 11. Make a clean, compatible, and user friendly OS out of the Windows brand.
Step 2. Spin CoPilot into it's own OS. Go crazy with your "Every app is just a different AI presentation of your data." Make the AI in there all powerful. Allow users to remote to the OS and run the same AI regardless of the platform.
Step 3. Print money
The problem isnt co pilot. Its co pilot being rammed in incredibly stupid ways into every possible product.
More importantly, its cramming it in everywhere when basis windows 11 sucks. Explorer sucks, search sucks, performance sucks, Updates suck.
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Microslop was right there along with the rest of them. Idiots with more wealth/resources than they are actually capable of managing letting fear/fomo drive their decision making is going to bury us all.
I don't care anymore. Haven't used Windows in years.
I encurage MS to make an Operating System, like sit down with the Linux From Scratch book and try to make something. The Gentoo handbook is also a blast. Get the basics in, make a solid init system, a package manager and watch hardware start working for you.
Plastering DOS with even more layers of patches, AI slop and sales pitches has been done, did not work and it's time to move on.
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Good article 👍
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