Posted by fortran77 2 days ago
I know Gemini has more advanced features in Docs and they rolled something out for Sheets. I would bet GWorkspace keeps gaining ground on the functionality battle.
People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)
I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.
It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.
Confusion and fear are much better for stock prices than clarity
When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.
For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.
I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.
People who paid are leaving.
That's a churn problem.
The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and Gemini at higher rates.
Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but won't share the numbers.
That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.
This is the Ballmer story all over again.
- Massive distribution advantage
- Captive enterprise base
Windows Phone had carrier deals too.
The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight.
This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:
> "About a year ago, Nadella sent a frustrated email to Rajesh Jha,
> executive vice president of experiences and devices, detailing an incident in which
> Nadella had asked the enterprise version of Copilot on the Edge browser
> to help with a public webpage he was on,
> but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"
Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.
I audibly winced
They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…
This says nothing about where the growth is going
> but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"
Another reason to use ChatGPT.
github copilot? bing copilot? office365 copilot? office365 copilot chat? windows copilot? or one of those clippy like copilots in dev environments that can't do anything but point you to the wrong documentation?
For a long while "Settings" had 2 interfaces, 1 that looks like it's from the iPhone, and the other which is from "Control Panel"...
Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.
But yeah, Microsoft competency means it's also fine to show some search results in the language which isn't the user's preferred UI language.
The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
and it’s definitely got some bad edges right now.
Literally.
> which "just doesn't work"
step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
step 2. download iso
step 3. flash iso on medium
step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.
almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course
theres probably less than 10 people in my entire company that know half of the words you wrote there. whats an "iso"? what is "flashing" the "iso"? how do i "boot medium"? what is "KDE" and why do i want to say yes?
(i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the vast majority of people do not)
This explains perfectly the annoying behavior when you search for ChatGPT using Edge. The top thing that appear to you is, well, Copilot and not ChatGPT! Tagged as "Promoted by Microsoft" and labeled as "Your Copilot is here", is clearly a weak move from MS to push Copilot as possible as it can despite its limitations in what it can do compared to its competitors.
At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.