Mustafa Suleyman says people that are unimpressed with AI's capabilities are mind blowing to him, after recent backlash around Copilot and Windows as an agentic OS.
“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”
talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.
oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.
one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.
being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.
in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.
and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.
Never mind any of that - does no-one do market research anymore? Did anyone bother to ask customers if they actually wanted any of this AI crap before billions of dollars was commited to it? Not to mention the damage to the environment.
Users of consumer Windows are not Microsoft’s customers in any real sense. Microsoft’s customers are huge enterprises who want this stuff and smaller companies who are trapped into using the MS ecosystem by needing to have interoperability with other people/businesses who use MS products.
It’s kind of the last slice they have left for gaming. Windows remains the de facto platform for PC gaming. It’s not as big as the segments you are describing, but it’s critical to Xbox’s near future plans. If they lose that advantage in gaming (Linux gaming is on the rise), Xbox becomes just another third-party publisher in the games space.
“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”
talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.
oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.
one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.
being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.
in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.
and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.
Never mind any of that - does no-one do market research anymore? Did anyone bother to ask customers if they actually wanted any of this AI crap before billions of dollars was commited to it? Not to mention the damage to the environment.
What’s funny is its not the first time Microsoft has found itself out of touch with customers.
Users of consumer Windows are not Microsoft’s customers in any real sense. Microsoft’s customers are huge enterprises who want this stuff and smaller companies who are trapped into using the MS ecosystem by needing to have interoperability with other people/businesses who use MS products.
Fair point but I still think that if consumers abandoned Windows enmasse MS would feel it.
At the very least shareholders would ask questions.
It’s kind of the last slice they have left for gaming. Windows remains the de facto platform for PC gaming. It’s not as big as the segments you are describing, but it’s critical to Xbox’s near future plans. If they lose that advantage in gaming (Linux gaming is on the rise), Xbox becomes just another third-party publisher in the games space.