Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products
by mohi-kalantari on 12/8/2025, 4:54:31 PM
Comments
by: ZeroConcerns
Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only <i>shoddier than average</i>, which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them.<p>Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... <i>zero</i> items when expanded.<p>I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to make that button <i>actually do something</i>, ending the conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"...<p>Oh, well, and I actually <i>also</i> have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does <i>exactly nothing</i>! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.<p>So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you <i>ever</i> tried to, like, actually <i>use</i>, like <i>anything</i> that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??
12/8/2025, 5:40:26 PM
by: neilalexander
I would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find installed programs or local files.
12/8/2025, 5:13:13 PM
by: kayhantolga
As a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer—and honestly, it might overtake it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got.<p>If you haven’t seen how bad it is, here’s one example: Copilot Terminal. In theory, it should help you with terminal commands. Sounds great. In practice, it installs a chat panel on the right side of your terminal that has zero integration with the terminal itself. It can’t read what’s written, it can’t send commands, it has no context, and the model response time is awful. What’s the point of a “terminal assistant” that can’t actually assist the terminal?<p>This lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid them, good for you. If your company forces you to use them because they’re bundled with a Microsoft license, I genuinely feel your pain.
12/8/2025, 5:59:31 PM
by: sylens
I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.<p>Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.<p>The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.
12/8/2025, 6:10:31 PM
by: this_user
Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.
12/8/2025, 5:12:10 PM
by: pseudosavant
I was hoping for a real look at weaknesses in Microsoft’s AI products. They ship lots of “AI features,” but only Copilot and Azure’s ChatGPT hosting see broad use. Instead, the article mostly reads as anti-MS/OpenAI without much detail.<p>From my experience, Microsoft’s GPT-5 integrations in Word, PowerPoint, and their ChatGPT clone struggle with basic tasks. Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better.<p>To be fair, building solid AI features is hard when model capabilities change so quickly. Reasoning and tool use only became reliable in the latest models, and when these Office features were planned, GPT-5 didn’t exist.
12/8/2025, 5:59:57 PM
by: voidfunc
IMO, it's time for leadership change at Microsoft. Satya revitalized the company but now it needs a Product person that knows how to rebuild the quality of it's products.
12/8/2025, 5:19:15 PM
by: kaluga
The irony is that Microsoft didn’t lose the AI race on models — it lost it on product sense. Copilot isn’t failing because the tech is bad, but because the integration is sloppy, unfocused, and shipped before anyone asked for it.<p>Google ships features people actually use; Microsoft ships demos people tweet about.<p>In AI, “ship it now, fix it later” doesn’t work when everyone else is shipping things that already feel finished.
12/8/2025, 5:44:26 PM
by: t1234s
Is there an excellent "AI Free" linux distro that one can escape to when AI is inescapable from both Windows/MacOS
12/8/2025, 6:07:21 PM
by: ChicagoDave
Still wonder why the OneDrive mobile can’t find a file and the photo backup has been broken for months. But I have a copilot button in notepad.<p>Satya’s days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very costly and painful lesson.
12/8/2025, 5:16:38 PM
by: belval
I feel like the case for Microsoft inability to execute in a lot of verticals should really be studied, not saying this as a sound bite, I'd genuinely like to know how that is possible.<p>Their investment in OpenAI, giving them what was, at least ~1-2 year ago if not now, the best possible LLM to integrate in the office suite yet they are unable to deliver value with it.<p>Their ownership of Xbox and Windows should have allowed them to get a much better foothold in gaming yet their marketplace is still, to this very day, a broken experience with multiple account types. It's been 10 years.<p>The counter point is Azure obviously which still has great growth numbers, but that's a different org.<p>From the outside, it just seems like they should be doing better than they are. They have much better business integration than Google and Amazon. The fit is obvious and people are borderline hooked on excel. Why aren't they dominating completely?
12/8/2025, 5:58:02 PM
by: mritchie712
I just had a sales call with someone from Microsoft who was looking for an AI tool to automate some Excel work they were doing. I doubt they'll buy our product, but it gave me a good laugh.
12/8/2025, 6:08:30 PM
by: artingent
Microsoft doesn't just have a shoddy AI problem. Microsoft has a direction problem. I'm no fan of Ballmer, but his Microsoft seemed like they knew what they were doing, and were actually trying to be good at it. Nadella seems extremely clueless and seems happy to just ignore and later axe consumer products that don't generate immediate revenue.<p>And noone should actually be shocked about his ineffectiveness. Covid was a great example of how clueless his leadership has been. Skype used to be a verb people used in common parlance, and yet they dropped the ball and let Zoom take over both consumer and enterprise segments while focusing on "restructuring" Skype into Teams for no reason whatsoever.<p>Prior to Covid, he was ready to let Windows run its course and axe that too. The sudden demand for sub-$500 laptops during the pandemic showed him that people still liked Windows and wanted a good OS from Microsoft. But instead of capitalizing on it to give customers what they wanted, he just gave us an ad-filled spyware with AI slop.<p>I have zero hope in any product with a Copilot in its name (including GitHub). At this point, unless there's a change in leadership, it's only a matter of time before XBox faces the axe.
12/8/2025, 6:09:47 PM
by: burnte
They bought Dragon a few years ago, and 2 years ago they debuted the Dragon Ambient Experience, then renamed to Dragon Copilot. We had dozens of doctors try it, after a handful of months most had quit, it was a bad product. We switched to a competitor at literally 1/6th the price, and we don't even have to offer it, the doctors tell each other about it and they ask for it.<p>Nadella has done a lot of listening through is CEO reign but it looks like MS is back in a "don't listen to customers, tell them what they'll get" phase.
12/8/2025, 5:34:11 PM
by: andy99
Big corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons that some committee decided solved a problem.<p>When the internet came out, did many legacy companies lead the way with online experiences, figuring out what the real killer apps now that everyone was connected were? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it, I think it gave rise to some of the present crop of big tech, and others reinvented themselves after the use cases were discovered.<p>All that to say, I expect the same here. In 10 years there will be AI uses we take for granted, built by companies we haven’t heard of yet (plus the coding apps) and nobody will talk about stupid “rephrase with AI” and other mindless crap that legacy companies tried to push.
12/8/2025, 5:25:40 PM
by: devinprater
Lol the Copilot app isn't even that useful on iOS for a blind person. On Android, you type something in, hit sent, and the app pipes the pure output of the AI, Markdown formatting and citation markup included, to the screen reader. That's at least something. I mean it's crumbs, yes, but we blind people are very, very used to crumbs.<p>On iOS, you type a message and send, and... nothing.
12/8/2025, 5:37:09 PM
by: yks
AI assistance is a gold rush — promotions are to be made and huge complex system to be over-engineered in Big Tech. The race to stake out the future empires is underway, and there is no time to think about the quality control, UX etc. But who am I kidding though, there is no time to think about those things during the chillest of times either, as any user of Power Automate can concur.
12/8/2025, 5:22:28 PM
by: windex
Between the RAM shortage and the forced migration to Win11 along with a forced HW upgrade, I'd start shorting MS asap. This bit about lack of adoption of Copilot is just icing on the cake.
12/8/2025, 5:56:41 PM
by: orev
It doesn’t matter. Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and they have no qualms using it to displace competing products. They did it with Teams, and they’ll keep doing it because they know there’s no appetite for anti-trust prosecution anymore (or maybe they feel comfortable arguing they’re no longer a monopoly because they have no presence in mobile).<p>Every procurement team is going to point to copilot, saying it’s included with the other Microsoft services a company is already paying for, so duplicate AI products won’t be approved for purchase.<p>Microsoft is laying claim to the desktop real estate, so in a few more generations of the technology, they’ll have the customers and competitors will already be starved out.
12/8/2025, 5:25:06 PM
by: elpakal
Not just about the products imho. I do some consulting for law firms who typically use the MSFT stack, and I was excited about the private ChatGPT services in Azure, because from my (admittedly limited) sample of law firms, nobody likes using Copilot and LLMs need to be private/secure. The amount of outdated and poor quality documentation for Azure services is amazing given how nascent these services are.
12/8/2025, 5:37:07 PM
by: zubiaur
Their copilot stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed with marketing slop on top of an under-performing product.<p>However; their azure offerings are somewhat decent. AI Search is getting quite decent, access to Open AI models served through foundry is quite the differentiator (although the rate limits are an issue), their reference architectures are very helpful and their ancillary services, like document intelligence integrate well.<p>I'm a bit worried that their marketing dept has gotten their crappifying and obfuscating eyes set on those services though, given the recent rebranding of Foundry and what not, but the underlying services are decent.
12/8/2025, 5:24:48 PM
by: eviks
The AI beating will continue untill the buying improves. And the use will be forсed by changing the OS.
12/8/2025, 5:22:51 PM
by: thm
Just remember what SPJ said what the problem with Microsoft is.
12/8/2025, 5:52:09 PM
by: jpmattia
Maybe they could add a helpful paper clip to improve sales.<p>Edit: Or better still, convince all of their customers to throw away perfectly good hardware and upgrade to one with a single extra chip, creating a hazardous waste epidemic for landfills as a nice side effect. It's especially important to do this in the middle of a RAM and HDD shortage.<p>Really, I'll just never be half the great business strategist that these guys are. <sigh>
12/8/2025, 5:09:02 PM
by: johnyzee
MS Bob -> Clippy -> Copilot -> ?
12/8/2025, 5:19:29 PM
by: delaminator
Open VSCode, close co-pilot again.<p>That monkey face simply won’t go away.
12/8/2025, 5:37:49 PM
by: 6thbit
Who are the likely successors if Satya steps down?
12/8/2025, 5:33:13 PM
by: ripvanwinkle
I see mentions of Gemini as a fast growing alternative to ChatGPT. Isn't anyone troubled by the fact that for consumers there is no way to keep your data from being used for model training if you want to maintain history of your Gemini chats.<p>ChatGPT respects privacy and allows for maintaining history while also opting out of using ones data for model training
12/8/2025, 5:24:28 PM
by: venturecruelty
Aw, that won't matter when management just forces you to use Copilot or else you're fired.
12/8/2025, 5:10:54 PM
by: nolok
I mean have you tried them ? I did and they're beyond terrible, of course they're not the one I pay for
12/8/2025, 5:35:49 PM
by: Havoc
> I suspect the issues are deeper for Microsoft, who have worked tirelessly under Satya Nadella to create doubt around its products<p>This reads more like a hit piece than good faith article<p>(But yeah the MS AI products especially on consumer level are pretty terrible)
12/8/2025, 5:41:36 PM
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12/8/2025, 5:34:58 PM
by: guluarte
Anyone remember Cortana? It seems like MS doesnt learn
12/8/2025, 5:33:12 PM
by: ChrisArchitect
[dupe] Discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748</a>
12/8/2025, 5:25:55 PM
by: outside1234
Gemini is really great now. Fast is insanely fast and handles 90% of queries. Deep Research works better than OpenAI's deep research given their search expertise.<p>It is going to be very hard for OpenAI or Microsoft to compete with this now that Google has gotten their act together.
12/8/2025, 5:13:27 PM
by: BiteCode_dev
Microsoft has this problem with most of its products.<p>It's not just AI, it's a market fit and quality problem.<p>They don't need to solve it, however.<p>Their strategy has been quite clear: make it barely usable so that is passes muster to auditors, integrate it with systems that corporations need, and sell them on the integrations.<p>Teams and Azure suck?<p>So what?<p>Big companies will pay for that, because it's integrated with their ldap, has an audit trail, gives them the ISO-whatever stamp, and lets them worry about something else.<p>That the users are miserable is almost never the question for the ones signing the checks.<p>In a world where box-checking is paramount, this approach is a winning strategy.
12/8/2025, 5:43:21 PM
by: jimbob45
<a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-product-line/" rel="nofollow">https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ...</a><p>Helpful chart to draw conclusions
12/8/2025, 5:04:58 PM
by: jondoe
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12/8/2025, 5:25:13 PM
by: pcdoodle
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12/8/2025, 5:38:20 PM
by: outside1234
Microsoft has a problem that they hire the middle block of talent in the market. They do not chase the top 20% most expensive nor the bottom 20% least expensive.<p>But this also means they end up with average products. They don't have the talent to do something exceptional.<p>This has worked well for them when they can just come in and copy something (say AWS in Azure) and not pay the innovation cost, but AI seems different for some reason, perhaps in the same way search was. You need the top 20% in order to really be successful.
12/8/2025, 5:11:31 PM
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12/8/2025, 5:20:31 PM