[tacos]

Microsoft seems perpetually five to seven years behind the culture. You can see it in their ads, their product names, their outreach. Ironically it can actually be quite lucrative.

I remember talking to people in the music group about MySpace (I was not an employee). They looked at me funny. Ten minutes later someone finally said "You keep pronouncing the product wrong. It's called MSN Spaces."

The people working on MSN Spaces -- specifically musician outreach -- hadn't heard of MySpace. That very week MySpace sold for $580 million. After it sold, I saw the same guy in another meeting. He STILL hadn't heard of it, nor taken the time to check it out.

There's a certain stupidity that each of the big tech companies foster. This particular flavor is Microsoft's and with the chatbot here it rings again. This one was so obvious... and so preventable.

[chiph]

The MySpace sale was in 2005. That's 10 years ago - a virtual eternity.

[tacos]

That's my point. Ten years ago 75 people in Red West were so heads down putting together a MySpace competitor and an online service to promote musicians that they didn't have time even to try the competing site they were knocking off, poorly.

Five years ago Microsoft launched a variety of awful code forge sites that couldn't be more tone deaf to what was going on with code sharing online.

Now we have forty people who are so heads-down on an AI chat-bot that apparently they have no idea how Twitter works. But hey, sure sounds neat, let 'er rip!

Have these people really not had a chance to use Twitter recently? Are they completely oblivious to the tone shift there particularly during the past six months, even more so now during the US political elections?

This was an obvious recipe for disaster that any 22 year old working at Starbucks could have predicted.