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Posted by thewebguyd 11/19/2025

Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash(www.windowscentral.com)
234 points | 381 commentspage 4
inshard 11/20/2025|
I was surprised when Microsoft hired him. He always seemed to be the cofounder to Demis Hassabis who took on a philosophical tangent rather than the hard engineering needed to build transformative technologies and user experiences. I feel Microsoft lost a gem when Panos Panay left them. He really did some great work on the Surface product line. Surface Studio in particular.
CamperBob2 11/19/2025||
"It must be the customers who are wrong," said no successful businessperson ever.
SailorJerry 11/19/2025|
This made me think of Henry Ford's quote about people wanting a faster horse. Granted, he was an extreme outlier, which is why he's worth quoting
CamperBob2 11/19/2025|||
But when people told him his cars sucked and they wanted their horses back, he didn-

Wait, no, that never happened. People bought his cars voluntarily and came back for more. If Ford had stolen horses out of peoples' barns and left cars in their places, then said, "You just don't like change!" when they objected, that would be more like modern-day Windows.

hopelite 11/20/2025|||
I just don’t get the sense that we are at the model T stage yet. This feels more like the Cugnot Steamer era, not the Model-T era.
willis936 11/20/2025||
1.6% of GDP wasn't poured into the model T. And even if it was there was a definite market and a clear path to profitability. These fundamentals are missing, have been missing for many years, from AI. No matter how much money gets poured in there is still no way to make it profitable. It is entirely a game of wealthy spending money to consolidate power.
cheschire 11/20/2025|||
Is AI-windows really the car though?

more like they retrofitted a motor into a dead horse with an exoskeleton.

Who the fuck actually wants Recall spyware?

flohofwoe 11/20/2025||||
That "quote" is most likely a modern invention anyway:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/02/23/horses-quote-henry-fo...

dogleash 11/19/2025|||
I hate that quote. Whenever I see it brought up, it makes me wonder what people think it's supposed to represent. The hypothetical person asks for faster horses because they know they'll be dismissed if they ask for something they think is even more impossible than faster horses.

Imagine the ghost of Henry Ford asked me what I wanted from transportation today and I said "a new novel technology to enable sub-second transcontinental travel". I'd be laughed at even harder than in an alternate reality where I asked for marginally more convenient air travel, without knowing Henry Ford actually did resurrect himself and invent the Stargate last tuesday.

mjevans 11/20/2025||
Wasn't there something about the wormhole that required it connect two relatively large gravitational bodies rather than a single one? I also remember 'harmonics' related to having more than one Stargate on a planet, even if the other was unusable.

For sub light second I think Scifi tends to like something along the line of isolating a region of space in an energy field and then either shifting or transposing that area with another. At least for the not 3D body printer death machine version of teleportation. Though maybe that was a very poorly phrased description of imposing a probability shift via precisely regulated change of energy state for a reference frame to match the state of another region.

cmiles8 11/19/2025||
Windows has just become too bloated trying to do to many things. I like CoPilot, but all the “Clippy” style integrations of crap in Windows directly is just poor design. Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
estimator7292 11/19/2025||
It's not even a question of trust or loyalty. Microsoft has explicitly told us they're doing bad things with the data.

I don't think Microsoft as a corporation is any longer even aware of customer trust as a concept. All we are is a KPI and a credit card to be exploited for anything they feel they can take.

We aren't even people to Microsoft anymore. Just a revenue source to be maximally exploited right now with no concern for future revenue.

thewebguyd 11/19/2025||
> Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.

I think this is a big part of it. If Apple ever achieves their vision for personal context Siri & AI in their OS, I bet people will praise it and actually use it. Because Apple has built trust with their customers, and has strong marketing around privacy.

Microsoft burned that bridge a long time ago. They feel sleazy. Maybe if they haven't violated their users trust over and over again, people would be more receptive.

pjmlp 11/19/2025||
It is going to be the next Windows Me, Vista, Windows 8, and while I usually do pro-Windows comments, I also don't want an agentic OS Microsoft style.
frmersdog 11/19/2025||
I'll take Charms, mouse gestures, and the Start Screen over Copilot any day.
moron4hire 11/19/2025||
At least those things felt like a sincere attempt to move HCI forward. Perhaps not very well tested to understand how all the parts work together, but at least sincere. MS' Copilot brand is a broken solution in search of a problem.

It's almost like the kind of trap a lot of solo devs get into where they build a thing that is interesting to them but then can't find anyone else interested. But at least the solo devs built something that worked for themselves. I can't imagine anyone at MS eating their own dog food on this stuff.

At a company like MS, that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to have the resources to understand what their customers want. But we've seen this trend for the last 15 years. Companies like MS, Meta, Google, don't want to engage and collaborate with the customer. They want to push ideas down and be celebrated for their design brilliance. They don't even really A/B test this stuff anymore. The inmates are running the asylum.

int_19h 11/20/2025||
It wasn't even ten years ago when I was participating in user studies as a developer at MS. And it was the real deal: we had a bunch of people, specifically selected to give a diverse cross-cut of the user base (so varying backgrounds, experience level etc), sit down and try to do some simple tasks with our product, while devs and PMs watched over a camera. And, crucially, you couldn't ask questions or provide guidance during that time - only after they were done. That was incredibly informative, much more so than any telemetry I've seen before or after, and I wish that was the norm in all companies; but, in any case, Microsoft definitely had both the resources and the inclination to do that.

The problem is that no amount of studies or A/B testing is going to change a political decision inside the company. And with AI, I'm convinced that for all the big players it is political at this point simply because all the execs have bet so much money on it. If they can't make it work, we're talking about literally billions of dollars of responsibility. Hence these desperate attempts to shove it everywhere in hopes that something somewhere would work well enough, if not to recoup the investment, then at least to postpone the moment it all comes crashing down.

moron4hire 11/20/2025||
The big problem I see now is that, when this bubble pops, there won't be any blood in the streets for the executive class. We truly live in a two class system where people like Nadela, Musk, Theil, and Altman and the slew of their enablers will never see any personal consequences for the havoc they have worked.
ndsipa_pomu 11/20/2025||
People are crying out for an intelligent Clippy to help them through the day. (Or maybe that little dog they used for a while, though don't know its name)
Macha 11/20/2025||
Was the dog ever the default? There were like 10 or so appearances you could change clippy to and the dog was one of them but clippy was the default so is the one people remember
ndsipa_pomu 11/20/2025||
Just looked it up and the dog was named "Rover" (another classy name from Microsoft). Rover was an option when introduced in "Microsoft Bob", but then later became the default search companion in XP's file search.

Also, we have Rover to blame for Comic Sans:

> Microsoft graphic designer Vincent Connare designed the typeface Comic Sans when he noticed that Rover's speech was displayed in Times New Roman, which he felt was inappropriate for a cartoon dog.

conartist6 11/21/2025||
I am still puzzled by how you can be a human being in this world and not be impressed by people.

The more we study AI, the more we discover one fundamental truth above an the others: people are really, really, really, really impressive.

A human being still absolutely melts an LLM like a Salvador Dali clock if the challenge is to innovate. In the race between human potential and LLM potential it isn't even close. Not a little close. Not remotely close. About as close as we are to each other compared to how close we each are to the sun.

And yet somehow there's always some fucking moron who apparently never considered this for a fraction of a second and runs around screaming that a fucking program will replace a fucking person

archerx 11/21/2025|
Yes people are amazing but they are also tedious, annoying, frustrating, unpredictable and undependable. Finding someone that will flow and synergize with you on a project is like winning the lottery. People love to talk the talk but when it’s time to walk the walk the reality and disappointment sets in. Work with enough people and this painful reality sets in very quickly.

However I don’t want an agentic or “A.I.” operating system.

conartist6 11/21/2025||
It's not my problem that it's still challenging to find and work with people. I'm saying that it's where all most valuable the rewards are to be had. Unless I was mistaken and the goal is to do what is easy ...
archerx 11/21/2025||
>Unless I was mistaken and the goal is to do what is easy

I don't know about you but my goal is not to work hard. My goal is maximize results while minimizing effort. You know, work smarter not harder.

conartist6 11/21/2025||
Yeeaaaah I'm exactly the same, but the LLM strat is actually "work harder not smarter" as far as I can tell. It substitutes quantity of work for quality, then lets you bulk-purchase quantities of work for cheap.

If you want to minmax the work, the only way is to actually do the work.

lousken 11/21/2025||
They use the worst model in 2025 by default, combine it with their dumb api and expect people to like it? You can't even switch to gpt5 or anything better in their stupid copilot ui.
PebblesHD 11/19/2025||
He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?

Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.

thewebguyd 11/19/2025|
Heck, I Do have day-to-day use for it, and I still don't want it to completely take over how I use and interact with my OS.

Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.

pjmlp 11/21/2025||
We are impressed by AI, and are using on our tools, what we don't want is to be force feeded into using AI in every single corner of Microsoft products, all of them.
WastedCucumber 11/21/2025||
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.

The image and video generation capabilities of AI is the most unimpressive part of AI's! It's the LLM's that are the most inpressive. Those might, just might, even make some sense in an OS, since plenty of people are happy to outsource a quick email or script to AI. Hell, what if your OS had a built-in AI to troubleshoot bugs for you? That might even conceivably be an improvement.

> Over in the comments, some users pushed back on the CEO's use of the word "unimpressed," arguing that it's not the technology itself that fails to impress them, but rather Microsoft's tendency to put AI into everything just to appease shareholders instead of focusing on the issues that most users actually care about, like making Windows' UI more user-friendly similar to how it was in Windows 7, fixing security problems, and taking user privacy more seriously.

I'm sure adding AI to Windows would make privacy problems even worse. Not to mention agentic AI could create a whole new class of security problems if not implemented carefully.

rucknar 11/21/2025|
Perhaps just me, but isn't this a case of the AI you ship to hundreds of millions of users isn't that impressive? The CoPilot (or Gemini in google workspace) experience is almost a different product it's so far off the raw performance of paid models.

I can't stand interacting with these AI buddies that feel like simpletons. Stuff like Claude Sonnet 4.5 however i use for work daily.

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