Reading this article reminds me about the story of McDonald's. After a certain level in the organization, at a certain executive delusion, McDonalds starts thinking they are all restaurateurs, and not low-quality fast food establishments to get a quick bite. They are so out of touch with what people are really doing and using their products, so misguided, they actually fail to innovate on their core concept.
For a company that finally has a decent web browser (and it's still not anywhere near Chrome/FF in terms of features and developer adoption), I am skeptical at best. Does anyone remember when Steve ignored the web and mobile for so many years, while Google and Facebook and Apple practically ate their lunch? Remember when he famously said he was "betting the company on .net"? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2000-10-29/microsofts...
"AI" is just a tool like .net is a tool. It's not a product or idea. It's not a service. It's cool to be excited about your HoloLens and 3D calendar, but it's just a calendar, and after the hype has worn down most people would prefer to look at a calendar on a laptop anyway. "AI" is Microsoft's new .net
"AI" is just a tool like .net is a tool. It's not a product or idea. It's not a service. It's cool to be excited about your HoloLens and 3D calendar, but it's just a calendar, and after the hype has worn down most people would prefer to look at a calendar on a laptop anyway. "AI" is Microsoft's new .net
This. It is as vacuous as saying "betting the future on the Fourier transform", or something.
And besides, they just closed the venerable Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, so it's not that they are putting their money where their mouth is.
Exactly. "Betting its future" is a line MSFT has to trot out every few years to get people to pay attention. They previous bet their future on .net, phones, tablets, Azure, cloud...
"as a platform" just sounds so silly in some contexts.
this is "fuzzy command line as a Human–computer interaction interface"
they should really call it an interface not a platform. a bunch of constantly moving, discrete services built by silos is not a platform, its a jagged, nonstandard mountain range. platform implies stable base.
Will CAAP be the next best thing? Who knows?
But one thing that has surprised me about MS and this whole bot-frenzy is how much they are opening up to other platforms.
MS offers tools to build a bot within their framework using Node.js with first party library support[0], and for deploying your bot to third-party chat apps (e.g. Telegram, Slack and FB messenger[1]). The idea is to build a bot once, and their service routes the bot's API between different endpoints. All of this with no obligation of ever touching VisualStudio, Azure or dotnet.
This type of attitude would be unthinkable three years ago.
What business wants from Microsoft is It Just Works. The same thing business wants from the power company and the water company. No constant fixes. No viruses. No crashes. Overall, corporate America liked Windows 7 and does not want to upgrade.
So, let's see: Microsoft is
thinking that a lot of the
future of their business is
new versions of a user interface.
They might make some money this
way, but I have to doubt it will
be very much money.
Why? At the core, from their
computing, people want some
significant utility, content,
functionality, etc. E.g., I
come to HN for content and
find the user interface to be just
fine except too often there
are too many characters per line
and to see the whole like
I have to use horizontal
scroll bars twice for each line or just
copy the screen into my favorite
text editor and reflow the lines
to fewer characters per line.
Satya, for developers, there is a lot
that is good in .NET. Now, if you
would do much better documenting it,
then it would stand a much better
chance of taking off like it should
and a lot of developers wish it would.
I'm doing an ambitious startup: By
a very wide margin, far and away
the worst problem was working through
5000+ Web pages of Microsoft
documentation of .NET and SQL Server;
the quality of the technical
writing was not good -- need
better explanations and
for the jargon links to
a glossary.
The next worse problem was having
to rebuild the boot partition
as attempts at SQL Server installation
ruined it. The next worse problem was rebuilding
the boot partition after
malware ruined it. All the work
unique to my startup was fast,
fun, and easy. Mud wrestling
with Microsoft's work wasted literally
YEARS, seriously hurt both
my startup and me, and nearly killed
at least my
startup.
It appears from the article and more
that Nadella is short on good, new
ideas for new directions for Microsoft,
is ignoring a lot that users are
screaming about, e.g., security
and system management, and that
developers are screaming about,
e.g., better documentation,
and is having vague,
ethereal, dreams about
the power of new user interfaces.
Uh, Satya, I don't really have
any problems with translating
foreign languages; for any
serious content in a foreign language,
no way would I trust a machine
translation; I don't want my
computer talking to me; even when alone
I don't want to talk to my
computer; no way in front of
others will I talk to my computer.
Satya, for my computer giving
me advice, no thanks. For
unsolicited advice, no way.
The second or first time my
computer tries to give me
advice, I will look how
to turn off that functionality.
Satya, what you call artificial
intelligence I call at best
trivial and otherwise nearly useless,
silly, annoying, insulting,
absurd, a pain in the back side,
and just genuinely stupid.
Satya, I am NOT going to talk
to my computer. That is just
not negotiable. And, I'm not
going to wear a helmet or
funny glasses.
And I do NOT want a touch
screen interface.
I WOULD
very much like a better keyboard,
e.g., as good as the old IBM
PC/AT keyboard.
Satya, let me give you some
warm advice: Computing is the
greatest opportunity in the
history of civilization, but
you are addressing it with
all the seriousness of
toys in Cracker Jacks boxes.
Satya, get real, get serious.
Is he talking about that "Tay" debacle? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist-twe...
Reading this article reminds me about the story of McDonald's. After a certain level in the organization, at a certain executive delusion, McDonalds starts thinking they are all restaurateurs, and not low-quality fast food establishments to get a quick bite. They are so out of touch with what people are really doing and using their products, so misguided, they actually fail to innovate on their core concept.
For a company that finally has a decent web browser (and it's still not anywhere near Chrome/FF in terms of features and developer adoption), I am skeptical at best. Does anyone remember when Steve ignored the web and mobile for so many years, while Google and Facebook and Apple practically ate their lunch? Remember when he famously said he was "betting the company on .net"? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2000-10-29/microsofts...
"AI" is just a tool like .net is a tool. It's not a product or idea. It's not a service. It's cool to be excited about your HoloLens and 3D calendar, but it's just a calendar, and after the hype has worn down most people would prefer to look at a calendar on a laptop anyway. "AI" is Microsoft's new .net