They had Skype! It was the verb for video calling for god’s sake! How do you LOSE so BADLY so CONSISTENTLY and STILL have investors.
Business, government, and military contracts. Doesn’t matter how crappy you are, as long as you promise to be the fall-guy when a insert large entity has a insert large tech problem, they’ll keep shoveling money at you.
Hey wait, I can do that! Where do I apply?
Well there used to be an island where the majority of folks involved in these kind of deals went to, but the owner landed in some legal trouble and decided to hang somewhere else instead
I have but one up vote and this is solid gold.
So you’re saying that position is open, too?
Sometimes I miss Microsoft Lync, but not often.
I made this comment as a joke but I actually do miss that chats could be in separate windows. s far as I know most major corporate (and non corporate, looking at you Discord) chat platforms don’t let you pop out windows.Edit: Okay, it’s just Discord that’s the problem then. It sort of supports it in that it will open the chat in your web browser, but then it does weird things like play the notification sound twice.
You can pop out threads with a command click in Slack, but I don’t know if you can change that to the default behaviour.
Just threads? Not a chat room or DM?
Edit: Just tried this on DMs and chat rooms and it works. Thanks so much for the tip! Another successful usage of Poe’s Law, the best way to find an answer on the Internet is to post incorrect information and wait for someone to correct you!
That’s Microsoft. They got desktop PCs. They repeatedly failed to get mobile, they repeatedly failed to get portable, they never had embedded, they had fucking Skype at one point. They drink gold and piss nickel, Microsoft.
Don’t forget Vine was basically tiktok and they just binned it for no reason.
Well, I think Vine was too early. The videos were too short, could you imagine trying to put ads or sponsors in 6 second videos? So how do you monetize it?
invent copilotRebrand ChatGPT
Ftfy
Naah, the initial GitHub copilot was something else.
I was on the Github Copilot Technical Preview (invite in my mailbox says July 16th 2021) and it was GPT-3 (not to be confused with ChatGPT which was introduced with GPT-4)
ChatGPT was built on top of GPT-3.5 which was GPT3 with the new deep reinforcement learning to make it more “conversational”, launched 2022. GPT 4 launched in 2023 and before the official launch there was “I have been a good Bing. 😊” Which was… checks notes… microsoft messing something up again
The first time I came across ChatGPT, it was still GPT3, GPT3.5 was coming shortly after.
you literally have access to all the code in the world
I’d like to believe that they were honorable enough to not secretly train on code without people’s permission. But realistically they totally did exactly that, but just made the AI Model this incompetent through some other engineering blunder.
Also, random side thought - training only on public repos probably yields you way higher code quality as opposed to training on both public and private repos? I assume we all have some very messy private repos that we’re too embarrassed to publish because the code quality is absolute shit … right?
honorable enough
Lol. Lmao
I’m always so extremely confused about the trope of the personal project having shit quality… Like, if I’m doing something for myself, that’s exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing, like literally all my private projects have much higher quality than my work ones - because in the work ones I’m forced to use stupid conventions, old tools, am not supposed to touch “legacy” code, etc etc etc
As such, since companies have their private code on GitHub, that’s where I would expect the shittiness to come from, not personal private projects.
Like, if I’m doing something for myself, that’s exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing,
That’s always my intention with my personal projects too! But that always results in “Wow I just learned how to do this thing much better, let me refactor the whole project to do it perfectly everywhere” followed by my Adderall running out. So there’s just so many half-done refactors I either forget about or abandon because I get a new idea the next day, but that’s totally just a skill issue.
You’re right though, the code I write at work is much worse, but my Company hosts their own GitLab instance so the code we write can’t even be used to poison Copilot :(
I would love my personal projects to be of the highest quality but unfortunately i need to pay bills so i have to prioritize my work projects that get me paid
Maybe they meant abandoned projects that never quite got through the todo list but you’re right. Even my abandoned projects are generally better than the legacy I’ve seen lol
I’d like to believe that they were honorable enough
In the future, will you still believe Microsoft (or any other big tech company) has honor not to do stupid shit?
Azure (and all of cloud compute) is the Extend phase of open source. I’m just waiting to see what the extinguish one will be.
Being the first mover doesn’t guarantee shit and never has.
I was using tabnine before copilot was even announced… they are the ones who fumbled this more than github.
What about Cleverbot? Or Tay?
Literally should be literally studied, literally!
Microsoft never fails to disappoint
Be Skype. You literally are the first one. You literally are the only one. Covid happens. Zoom pops up from nowhere and takes everyone. You die.
Still, still, I’m like, how???
Huh. I guess Microsoft and I have that in common.
🥁
At least you and I will always have your mom.
You forgot the symbol crash at the end. How disappointing.
Typical!
It’s really so funny to watch when you don’t use any of their junk
It is much more enjoyable
Failing successfully tho.
Lol! Be like GitLab instead:
1 - Be the underdog with good reputation in a market completely monopolized;
2 - Have the incumbent self-destruct by vibecoding its product and pushing AI above every other feature to its customers;
3 - Loudly announce that you are leaving your past good behavior behind, and that you are betting everything on vibecoding and pushing AI to your customers!
The US Govt. as a customer, and the forges they operate / contract, being pushed to use AI is probably (unfortunately) a huge piece of this problem.
Well, they have a choice of pandering to this one large customer for whom they’ll always be the untrusted underdog, or pandering for the larger, more diverse market.
They never managed to become profitable as the untrusted underdog, so the option of keeping doing the same was obvious, I guess.
Yeah the push to use AI comes from above, and it’s not just in the US. Anyone who’s at the top levels of any company now can tell you that the party line is AI positivity and insistence that workers adopt it into their workflows, even if they themselves see little use for it or can find a way to incorporate it into their own workflows yet.
It is truly, deeply amazing how bad Microsoft is. Proton on Linux is FASTER than the actual directX it’s emulating is on windows. They got beat at their own instruction layer.
I believe proton isn’t emulating but rather is a direct instruction layer. I’m ootl for close to a decade plus, but the commonly cited number was you need hardware 7x the power of original equipment to properly emulate.
And they had Skype, which was practically a genericized trademark for “video call–” until first Apple’s FaceTime and then Zoom utterly took them apart.
And they had Office, which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–” but then Google Docs took them apart on a molecular level.
Microsoft is the king of snatching defeat from the clutching jaws of victory.
Google docs is far worse than office, in every way except for collaboration. It does not destroy them at all. LibreOffice is on par except for having no collaboration, but is not widely used so definitely haven’t destroyed them. Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Unfortunately for almost the entirety of the corporate world and govt bureaucracy.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
Libre Office is also missing one very simple thing which means I personally can’t use it for anything more than a few pages, let alone 100. A normal static scroll bar with static buttons on it. It’s a program literally centered around scrolling up and down, and your only option is spinning a little wheel or grabbing an invisible handle. I use OpenOffice.
And discord somehow took everyone from skype.
And from TeamSpeak.
but then Google Docs took them apart
Tapping the breaks on that one.
Google Docs is very lightweight, but it’s also very stripped down. Word remains the first choice in word processors for 90% of the market. It (and Excel) are a big reason offices haven’t seriously begun abandoning Microsoft.
Not being able to paste a jpg of a screenshot into an Excel sheet embedded in a Word document is a feature.
I posit that the vast majority of users of Office would be just fine with any of the lightweight web app equivalents.
I think we’ll eventually see folks migrate to Jupiter Notebook style data entry and management. But they’re relatively new and not well-integrated into modern workflows.
For the time being, people are brought into offices and trained on Excel, get comfortable with Excel, and continue to use Excel because that’s how they spend the bulk of their hours. You’ve got networking effect and priors cementing these apps as the go-to for an entire generation.
100%
Excel is the one actual critical application because it deals with data (and formulae), data which is only useful when you maintain its integrity (hopefully you’re not storing dates).
Word is just a shitty application for text. Needs that can usually be adequately addressed by a plain text file (or plain text email). It thinks it’s a desktop publishing application (goodbye MS Publisher). Any tool that can do rudimentary text processing will suffice for the vast majority of use cases. One might have footnotes and some meta data that might be important, other apps do that well. Even markdown can do that.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application. Any equivalent will suffice.
There’s quite a few other apps, I forget those.
Word is just a shitty application for text.
It’s fine. People love to shit on the app because Microsoft Bad. But it’s living at the rough midpoint of application quality, at least in it’s modern incarnation.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application.
As a slideshow app, it’s another perfectly fine piece of software.
What’s disgusting about PowerPoint isn’t the app but the LinkedIn psychos who use it
Tapping the breaks on that one.
You don’t wanna do that. The whole thing could shatter!
I don’t think that’s the case, but I only have anecdotal evidence for that. I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference, and the last three I’ve worked at didn’t even offer it as a default. And I’m in my forties.
Many govt agencies around the world pay for Office 365 or similars. Where I work (govt health), some higher ups demand pro-level M$ office accounts. Those ain’t cheap.
I suspect the vast majority of USA govt (state and federal), plus many European govts, pay a fortune for Office
I’d never use Google Docs for any long-form writing. I wouldn’t even trust the online nature of it, not having the file stored locally.
Virtually every company I’ve worked at used Office primarily. And by the looks of the other comments your experience seems to be atypical.
Fair enough.
I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference,
I haven’t worked at an office where it wasn’t. And I’ve done years of consulting at Deloitte, so I’ve seen a few places.
Fair, which is why anecdote isn’t the singular of data I guess.
Microsoft acquired Skype, did not create it. Then destryed it with its own hands.
It wasn’t that they destroyed it, it was more that they let it bit rot. Skype was honestly never a great user experience by today’s standards. The audio was bad, the connection was very unstable over mobile networks, and push notifications for calls was hit or miss. Microsoft acquired it, slapped a Microsoft login screen on it and then basically didn’t do anything to improve it. Meanwhile, Google created and killed seventy different video calling apps, which all worked better than Skype, and Apple stuck the landing with FaceTime.
Actually, they didn’t just let Skype rot, they changed a bunch of things on it for the worse IMO. Skype used to be peer to peer (I believe the name is literally supposed to be a combination of “sky” and “peer to peer”), MS took that away to funnel it all through Azure. They redesigned the UI multiple times trying to follow the trend of whatever new app became popular (one was clearly trying the be a knockoff Snapchat). They forced all users to create Microsoft accounts to keep using Skype.
Not all their changes were bad, they did finally make a Linux client, which after many years became stable enough to use.
They acquired practically everything they have. They haven’t created anything truly new since the mid-90s.
They also had Internet Explorer. When it was released it was actually good (compared to the competition). Internet Explorer was dominant, but then it turned into the punching bag of web browser memes.
It’s not that internet explorer was good that made it successful, it was packaged with windows where Netscape wasn’t. People used the one that was already on their computer, then as they got market share they extended http to encourage sites to make stuff that wouldn’t work in Netscape, and couldn’t due to patents
By the time Microsoft was forced to unbundle IE and windows it was very hard for Netscape to get market share back
I think that Microsoft is paralyzed by corporate culture. Everything needs to be signed off by multiple stakeholders, everything needs a dozen meetings before anyone can make a decision, and as a result the stuff that’s “good enough” (read: still making money) languishes–or worse, becomes a dumping ground for whatever corporate pet project is exciting–until it’s unacceptably awful, mired under decades of technical debt and spaghetti code fixes.
At least they have the sense to let the successful companies they acquire manage themselves. There’s no AI in Minecraft, for instance.
which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–”
Err, no it’s called office software because it’s software you use in an office. Microsoft didn’t invent the word “office”.
No, of course they didn’t invent the word. But they popularized the composition of the bundle (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software) and the idea of calling that bundle an “office suite,” a pattern which almost all such suites still follow today.
Proton (and Wine, what it’s based on) are not emulators. They are compatibility layers, it translates Windows system calls to native Linux system calls.
Or simply put: Wine Is Not an Emulator
That isn’t “simply put”. It’s a witty way to phrase half the comment, completely omitting the other half that actually explains what it does. WINE is a clever abbreviation as a name for the tool, but the opposite of descriptive about its purpose or function.
WNE?
Ah, WINAE.
“Wine Is No Emulator” works ;)
Yes… I actually cannot fathom just how incessantly bad a company can manage to be, and how some people still refuse to realise how there’s literally nothing of value to be had from anything made by Microsoft.
Their idea was that OpenAI was so far ahead of the competition no one could ever catch up. Turns out they weren’t and now they’re at the bottom.
Google: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”. Prophetic words.
It’s so beautiful to read a giant corporation realise that they are hopeless and have no game to play.
At the bottom? Is there a single LLM that has surpassed ChatGPT?
EDIT: I missed Gemini 3.1 pro
Still, saying “Everyone else catched up and it’s at the bottom now” is seriously out of touch thing to say
Claude
Claude outperforms in coding and agentic tasks. I asked about LLM as a chat model. It’s still in benchmarks at the top, and still the most popular one, by far.
Even with Claude, the difference isn’t big and it’s the only one that managed to surpass it in benchmarks, so… still - at the bottom? You sure about that?
The context was about coding specifically tho
I was directly questioning the “at the bottom” phrase, not the entire context. Context matters, or something
That being said:
Just like Skype getting lapped by Zoom during COVID
It’s weird because copilot in office tries to push agents on you as if it were a Jehovah’s witness.
So GitHub copilot doesn’t have them? I don’t really use that.
It’s saying Copilot was the first on the scene and had access to literally all of the training data anyone could possibly want, and is still being shown up by most other AI models. Their failure to capture the vibe coding space is a legendary fumble. At least that was my read.
Eh wait. Copilot (any of the about 30 products with copilot in the name) is not a model. Microsoft makes a few models like phi but they’re underwhelming. All of copilot runs on models from external parties like openai and anthropic. So basically Microsoft is at the mercy of their own competitors. They’re in the awkward position that providing training data to their model providers not only improves their own product but their competitors’ as well.
Additionally, Microsoft’s most profitable market is enterprise and they would absolutely shiver at their data being used for training and would abandon the service in droves.
Despite being “all in on AI” Microsoft is in a really vulnerable position. Their added value is their integration with their other services (and data therein through RAG).
Pfffft. No way. That would be like the company that owned skype failing to capitalize on video calls during some sort of major pandemic.
At least Minecraft has been a success
No thanks to Microsoft 🤔
It does have agents.
No idea what the person above thinks. Maybe they think agents are just those little toys where you build an app in an iframe from a chat on the side.
I mean, GitHub has one of those, but CoPilot agents are primarily directed from CLI, the Issues system, and in VSCode. Because GitHub makes their money from enterprises who employ developers, not I’ve Got An App Idea guys.
They have agents, but they weren’t the first to make agents, and they aren’t the most advanced agentic system too. Maybe someone can enlighten me but I don’t see a single strong upside.
Have all the code in the world
Create LLM for software development
Try to advertise it
Oops, no budget
Get acquired by Microsoft
Enshittification ensues
Everyone else loots your code repos
Microsoft tries to put your coding tool in everything
Coding tool injected into Excel
Into Word
Into Teams Chat
Nobody knows what this is even supposed to do anymore
Copilot now synonymous with Clippy
Yeah, can’t even begin to imagine how this happened.
Microsoft acquired GitHub way before LLMs existed.
s/existed/were useful/
And the ONE useful feature (summarizing meeting transcripts) is behind a paywall corporate doesn’t want to touch.
“What do you mean this 4 hour meeting could be summed up in a single, 100 word paragraph without losing any important context or decision???” - higher ups seeing the summarized transcript, probably