The biggest problem with Microsoft is their UX. From finding out where to actually use their products, to signing in, wading through modals, popups, terms and agreements, redirects that don’t work and links that point to nowhere. Along the way you’ll run into inconsistent, decades old UI elements and marketing pages that fully misunderstand why you’re there.

It’s a big, unsolvable mess that will forever prevent them from competing with legacy-free, capable startups.

They should delete all their public facing websites and start over.

Bill Gates agreed with you 20 years ago :-) (this email never gets old)

https://www.osnews.com/story/19921/full-text-an-epic-bill-ga...

Thanks. That was a great read. Somehow missed that. Two points to make:

1. Not sure why osnews charactarised this as an "epic rant". I thought he was remarkably restrained in his tone given both his role and his (reasonable) expectations.

2. This to me shows just how hard it is for leaders at large companies to change the culture. At some point of scaling up, organisations stop being aligned to the vision of the leadership and become a seemingly autonomous entity. The craziness that Bill highlights in his email is clearly not a reflection of his vision, and in fact had materialised despite his clear wishes.

When we think about how "easy" it would be for the executive of a large organisation to change it, those of us not experienced at this level have an unrealistic expectation. It's my belief that large organisations are almost impossible to "turn around" once they get big enough and develop enough momentum regarding cultural/behavioural norms. These norms survive staff changes at pretty much every level. Changing it requires a multi-year absolute commitment from the top down. Pretty rare in my experience.

That was epic. The type of email we all dread to receive at work. Can’t fault Bill for his detail though, most of those kind of emails are “website slow, make fast”.

That email is a gem.

It's not only public facing websites - Azure is also pretty inconsistent and lately any offer to preview a new UI was a downgrade and I happily reverted back - it's like they have a mandatory font and whitespace randomizer for any product. Also while far from a power user I've hit glitches that caused support tickets and are avoidable with clearer UX. Copilot in Azure - if it works at all - has been pretty useless.

Their UX, their naming conventions from products to frameworks and services, pulled plugged on products, user hostility and so on are all pointing out the root of the problem is elsewhere. I think Microsoft is no longer reformable. It is a behemoth that will probably continue to coast along like a braindead gozilla zombie that just floats due to its sheer size.

That's the feel I get too :/

Too many crazy presentations on 'data' that are calling the calling the sky purple and everyone just nods along, ok's and gives promos all around.

Those stupid dialogs that may you think they will help you solve an issue but actually just waste 5-10mins "scanning" just to link you to irrelevant webpages that sometimes don't exist.

I'll add, that Google search AI integration is quite good. I'm actually amazed how well it works, given the scale of Google Search. Nowadays I don't click search results in 50% of searches, because Google AI outputs response good enough for me.

Maybe we have a different Google AI down here in south Texas, but the Google search AI results I receive are laughably bad.

It has made up tags for cli functions, suggested nonexistent functions with usage instructions, it’s given me operations in the wrong order, and my personal favorite it gave me a code example in the wrong language (think replying Visual Basic for C).

The AI Overviews (on the main SRP) is pretty hit or miss. The new "AI Mode" (separate tab) is _very_ good.

It cracks me up that I can only find animated marketing bs pages about this that show nothing of interest, but I can't actually find how to use it despite minutes of looking.

Well done Google Marketing, well done.

Another product carefully kept away from the grubby little hands of potential users!

They even disabled it if you didn’t use the right combination of browser and willingness to share your data.

Seems a lot more like general availability on my end now, though, these past few days. One can try Google dot com, slash AIMode.

Not nearly as good as using Gemini 2.5 pro which they do offer for free but I forget where. AI studio? So many ways to access it.

Its about half and half. Really depends on whether there are good results that gemini can summarize. If not, it gets creative. Chatgpt is generally much better.

ChatGPT is better, but Google owns all of the panes of glass (for now).

We've never seen a "Dog Pile vs Yahoo" battle when the giants are of this scale.

It'll be interesting to see if Google can catch up with ChatGPT (seems likely) and if they simply win by default because they're in all of the places (also seems likely). It'd be pretty wild for ChatGPT to win, honestly.

People are forming deep personal attachments to it. They think all their chat history is in context and Act as if it knows them personally and has formed an opinion about them. They are replacing social interaction with it. I doubt someone in that deep would want to switch to something new very easily.

I doubt that's a very high percentage of users. Most people use it as a productivity-boosting tool like search engine.

It's a spectrum.

A lot of people who are unfamiliar with how the technology works talk about "my GPT". Google that phrase, or start watching for it to crop up in conversation.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are lots of tiny little pockets like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/

I think a bigger issue is people just believing all the stuff that AI tells them, without bothering to check it.

this is the first I've heard of anyone praising it... the results are usually outright wrong or useless.

A lot of folks probably just assume it's correct

My buddy learned this last week when we went out of the way to get gas at a wholesale store and he swore he looked it up and claimed it was open late. Well, it wasn’t.

Agree, I've seen enough wrong answers that I think it's actively harmful to put AI answers at the top of Google search results.

The problem is that they made huge time consuming investments in technology to make copilot work with the various O365 controls, then confused everyone by slathering copilot on everything.

Microsoft hired the infamous guy from Inflection AI and fired the one responsible for Bing Chat which was actually good and it's all downhill from there. Bing Chat actually made Google nervous!

I still remember "You have been a bad user, I have been a good Bing". It was refreshing to see a chat with some personality at the time.

Even with their failures Microsoft still has OpenAI over a barrel.

Access to their IP, and 20% of revenue (not profit).

Would love to see how that plays out. It’s a pretty absurd situation to eagerly sign the deal and take the funding and then when better deals start showing up turn around and try blow it up.

Can you give a simple description of what the antitrust case would be?

I think the complaint would be two things, however IANAL

1. Lack of access to compute resource. Microsoft intentionally slowing OpenAI's ability to scale up and grow dominant quickly vs. Copilot, a competing product. Microsoft shouldn't be able to use it's dominance in the cloud compute market to unfairly influence the market for consumer AI.

2. Microsoft should not automatically gain OpenAIs IP in domains outside of the AI offerings that the company was supplying when the initial agreement was made. If it must be upheld the terms of the contract mean Microsoft get all of OpenAIs IP, then it block OpenAI from competing in other markets eg. Windsurf vs. VS Code.

Probably but it might not matter. They don't really need to compete on quality, just the simplicity of selling a suite that's bundled together to enterprise in the same way they did with Teams which is inferior to Slack in pretty much everyway (last time I had to use it anyway). Isn't their advantage always sales and distribution? Maybe its different this time, I don't know.

How have they failed? They still get 49% of openAI’s profits so if openAI wins, Microsoft wins.

That can be considered victory only if Microsoft is an investment firm as opposed to a software company.

> That can be considered victory only if Microsoft is an investment firm as opposed to a software company.

An investment vehicle would be more accurate, but that's the primary function of every broadly-held publicly-traded firm.

Aren't they actually an investment firm with a passing interest in software?

Maybe you should actually read one of their earnings reports. They don’t make $250B in annual revenue because of a “passing interest in software”.

You’re contradicting yourself with that statement. Microsoft is seen as a mercenary… yes they make a lot of money, that’s proof they’re a mercenary. If you want to prove they are not then point to software categories they invented, not how much money they are making.

They're like the Merck of the pharma world.

Fair point

Wonder why they’re going so slowly…

(& small typo, “Proclarity” = *Perplexity)

Thank you. I did mean Perplexity... and it is not a very memorable name.

The lack of a true first-party model is glaring now that everyone else is racing ahead with their own stacks