63 pointsby thehamkercata day ago15 comments
  • throwawayms4a day ago
    Broken incentives, clueless trend-following leaders.

    For the last year or so all orders from leadership have been "build more AI, show AI usage" even above things like stability and reliability.

    There was no recognition from leadership over what use cases worked or not, and they appeared to believe their own hype.

    To complement this, there is near to no long-term accountability for upper leadership for failure, so even as features underperform and strategy turns out to be a flop, they will continue to make millions a year, having layoffs every 6 months, and then acting surprised pikachu when morale is down and top engineers are looking to the door, since salary is barely competitive even if you are a top performer getting special stock awards.

  • ed_mercer3 hours ago
    After reading Nadella's Hit Refresh on how he revived Microsoft, what's happening now is a 180 degree turn from that. I have no idea what's going on.
  • tsoukase2 hours ago
    Well, this year might not be the Linux's desktop but it definitely will be Windows' non desktop.
  • falloutx10 hours ago
    Its 2014 levels of total distrust inside the company. Morale has been on the floor since end of 24, due to closing offices, laying off people. Contractors are being left in limbo more and more often.

    Half of the people are just talking about layoffs and other are keeping thier mouth shut. There is sense that execs are making one bad decision after another. Xbox division knows this very well, the trust in that division is near zero, but now it has spread to even the orgs which were doing decently well.

    Product quality is also completely dogshit/dogslop, we have done nothing in last 2 years except making our products worse. We do hear reports of boomer companies moving to Apple every now and then, and these rumours are increasing. Windows 11 is a disaster, Copilot is an convenience no one asked for. Users are contacting support every day asking how to disable all these features but execs keep ignoring users. The consensus among top guys is that customer is wrong and we need to teach them.

    Trusting stock market more than the customers is now the industry standard.

    • markus_zhangan hour ago
      Regarding the last paragraph, users are now unpaid beta testers and products instead of … users. But again maybe it makes sense when a company is not making money in the retail market.
    • akomtu3 hours ago
      Sounds like AI fanatics are running the show.
  • throwmsreply43 minutes ago
    It's a disarmingly simple sillygism actually:

    1. Saying "AI" makes stock price go up

    2. Make all things AI

    3. Stock price will go even more up

    As for everything else, subordinated to the aforementioned.

  • ferguess_ka day ago
    I'm more interested in knowing the status of the kernel team. Is there any chance that there is an outflow of talents so they are OK to hire people who are not exactly qualified 100% for professional kernel development? So that I might get a chance to snug in...:P
    • altairprimea day ago
      If your professional goal is to train an AI to replace yourself as a kernel developer, put that on your cover page!
      • ferguess_k9 hours ago
        My professional goal is to get into a paying low level system programming job with a salary of 90K+ CAD. My current job is too high level to make a one shot transition so I'm considering making multiple hops. I did work on some low level system programming projects but I feel I could never compete with college graduates who have a ton of time to grind on the Linux source code. I have 2 hours at best every day. Maybe it is an unrealistic objective but I'm willing to give it a go.
      • CrimsonCapea day ago
        I can put over 30 years of kernel dev experience on my resume since my AI subscriptions were trained on 30 years of kernel development code.
  • kvemkona day ago
    Since more than a year no images available. Now the page gone completely: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...
  • rl320 hours ago
    >Why are they behaving like this since last year (trying very hard to burn themselves to the ground)

    Since last year? Burning themselves into the ground has been their M.O. for the last decade and a half, at least.

    I'd argue enshitification started in earnest with Windows 8.

    AI just enables them to speed up the process dramatically.

    • uyzstvqs8 hours ago
      There's a difference in Steve Ballmer's Microsoft and Satya Nadella's Microsoft. Ballmer was a villain, that hurt the company, but he was smart and never caused too serious destruction. Nadella might be slighly less of a villain, but he has no clue what he's doing and is driving the company straight into the ground.

      Microsoft would be such an easy fix to get back on the right path, but Nadella is not going to do that, and nobody is going to make you or me the CEO.

    • hahahahhaah12 hours ago
      Vista and 8 were just shit but they genuinely tried.

      10 and 11 are the evil shit. 11 especially so.

      • theothertimcook2 hours ago
        10 isn’t that bad, particularly the iot version.
  • tibbydudeza2 hours ago
    There are rumors of more big layoffs in Jan.
  • HackerThemAlla day ago
    Nobody wants to use Copilot voluntarily, therefore it's going to be pushed down deep into Microsoft customers' throats.
    • szszrk11 hours ago
      Loosing them in the process.

      Office 365 app suddenly is not called that. It's called copilot. When you open it it just shows chat. No files, no word, no documents. You have to try hard to find your files back.

      So suddenly an app that you used to edit word documents and print PDFs is completely gone with no warning. Word doesn't exist. Even Office doesn't exist :D How are clients supposed to navigate that shitshow?

      • tacostakohashi11 hours ago
        That's nuts.

        I wonder if all this shoving of AI down peoples throats could trigger a bit of a backlash around vendor software updates / proprietary software in general. There's this huge infrastructure of Windows Update, chrome auto-updates, app stores and SaaS that predated and enabled all this... and people accepted it when they were getting bugfixes and security updates out of it, but now it's getting used to take away the features they wanted and replace them with worse and worse versions of crapware.

        All of a sudden... the free software world of updating when _you_ want the new version, and being able to fork the old version if you want, starts to look pretty great.

      • cickoan hour ago
        They're supposed to chat, not navigate, no?
      • jeffwask8 hours ago
        I'm trying to understand why they think 30 years of brand building should be discarded.
        • szszrk6 hours ago
          It's over 40 years now.

          I just found that it's called "myopia" in English, while trying to find how short-sightedness is spelled.

          Multiple generations knew what Word and Office was. That beats even twitter rename fiasco.

    • leros20 hours ago
      I was at Microsoft in 2007. We were told to say "Bing it" but everyone was using Google to look stuff up for work.
  • aristofun9 hours ago
    What sane person even cares about that monster and their shitty products today anyway? Unless hands are tied by work or contract.

    The sooner they drown the better for everyone and the industry.

    • lotsoweiners3 hours ago
      > Unless hands are tied by work or contract.

      So most people.

    • pjmlp2 hours ago
      About 70% of the world, and game studios, thus Proton.
  • MopAmine14 hours ago
    Not me
  • VirusNewbiea day ago
    I interviewed at Azure the same time I interviewed at GCP and the former was an absolute shit show. It was comically bad.
    • markus_zhanga day ago
      Just curious why the experience was so bad?
      • VirusNewbie5 hours ago
        The talent level disparity between the two companies was astounding.
        • markus_zhang5 hours ago
          Wow that’s really concerning…
          • everfrustratedan hour ago
            You clearly didn't hear about Azure failing their security audits a few years back
  • euphoria_123a day ago
    [dead]
  • a day ago
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