[conartist6]

Microsoft is in a pickle. They put AI lipstick on top of decades of unfixed tech debt and their relationship with their userbase isn't great. Their engineering culture is clearly not healthy. For their size and financial resources, their position in the market right now is very delicate.

[throwawayffffas]

I think that's the impression you get if you focus on Microsoft as a OS vendor. It's not that anymore, that's why their OS sucks for many years now. Their main business is b2b, cloud services, and azure. I think they are pretty safe from OpenAI. Plus they have invested big in OpenAI as well.

[Ekaros]

Windows is hard to replace in large organizations. Is there actually any real AI competitors in the stack? Well Google, maybe. The whole Windows+Office+AD+Exchange and now Azure stack is unlikely to go any time soon. However badly they screw it up.

[robotnikman]

True. Basically any medium to large scale business is reliant on Windows/Office/AD. While there are open source alternatives to Windows/Office, I can't think of a good open source alternative to AD/Group Policy/etc

[goalieca]

M365 is arguably far worse than office97. Drive/sharepoint is confusing and team is especially broken.

Azure is a product all right, but there’s nothing particularly better there than anywhere else.

[mr_toad]

SharePoint has been a dog’s breakfast since forever.

[BLKNSLVR]

M365 is inarguably worse than Office 97

[StopDisinfo910]

I don't think so.

They are one of the few companies actually making money with AI as they have intelligently leveraged the position of Office 365 in companies to sell Copilot. Their AI investment plans are, well, plans which could be scaled down easily. Worst case scenario for them is their investment in OpenAI becoming worthless.

It would hurt but is hardly life threatening. Their revenue driver is clearly their position at the heart of entreprise IT and they are pretty much untouchable here.

[thewebguyd]

> Worst case scenario for them is their investment in OpenAI becoming worthless.

And even then, if that happens when the bubble pops, they'll likely just acquire OpenAI on the cheap. Thanks to the current agreement, it already runs on Azure, they already have access to OpenAI's IP, and Microsoft has already developed all their Copilots on top of it. It would be near-zero cost for Microsoft at that point to just absorb them and continue on as they are today.

Microsoft isn't going anywhere, for better or for worse.

Despite them pissing off users with Windows, what HN forgets, is they aren't Microsoft's customer. The individual user/consumer never was. We may not want what MS is selling, but their enterprise customers definitely do.

[eitally]

I disagree. They're the one place that can get away without investing in frontier model research and still win in the enterprise.

Google is only place that serves the enterprise (Workspace for productivity, Cloud for IT, Devices for end users) AND conducts meaningful AI research.

AWS doesn't (they can sell cloud effectively, but don't have any meaningful in-house AI R&D), Meta doesn't (they don't cover enterprise and, frankly, nobody trusts Zuck... and they're flaky.

Oracle doesn't. They have grown their cloud business rapidly by 1) easy button for Oracle on-prem to move to OCI, and 2) acting like a big colo for bare metal "cloud" infra. No AI.

Open AI has fundamental research and is starting to have products, but it's still niche. Same as Anthropic. They're not in the same ball game as the others, and they're going to continue to pay billions to the hyperscalers annually for infra, too.

This is Google's game to lose, imho, but the biggest loser will be AWS (not Azure/Microsoft).

[hyperadvanced]

I agree that AWS/Amazon seems to be uniquely badly positioned to benefit at all from AI, while also being potentially screwed by AI companies failing.