Comments
By _fat_santa 2026-02-0417:4019 reply The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.
Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.
Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.
Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.
I expect this is the crux of the problem.
There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.
Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.
But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.
For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.
I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma.
I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.
By bunderbunder 2026-02-055:017 reply Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t.
It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
By nindalf 2026-02-0510:40 I think this may have been Dell?
Dell reveals people don't care about AI in PCs (https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows-laptops/dell-rev...)
By nosianu 2026-02-059:25 Consumers is nice, but far more important are the big corporate purchases. There may be a lot of people there too who don't want AI, but they all depend on decisions made at the top and AI seems to be the way to go, because of expectations and also because of the mentioned prisoner's dilemma, if competitors gain an advantage it is bad for your org, if all fail together it is manageable.
By Suppafly 2026-02-088:20 My job is like that, although it's mostly driven by my direct boss and not the whole company, but our yearly review depends on reaching out to our vendors and seeing if an AI solution is available for their products and then doing whatever is necessary to implement it. Most of the software packages we support don't have anything where AI would improve things, but somehow we're supposed to convince the vendor that we want and need that.
By ManlyBread 2026-02-0514:012 reply >It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no different from crypobros who put their kids' entire college fund into some failed and useless project and now they need that project to succeed or else it's all over.
By bunderbunder 2026-02-0515:34 I’m not sure that really explains how people get onto hype trains like this in the first place, though. I doubt many people intentionally stake their livelihoods on a solution in search of a problem.
My guess is that it’s more of a recency bias sort of thing: it’s quite easy to assume that a newer way of solving a problem is superior to existing ways simply because it’s new. And also, of course, newfangled things naturally attract investment capital because everyone implicitly knows it’s hard to sell someone a thing they already have and don’t need more of.
It’s not just tech. For example, many people in the USA believe that the ease of getting new drugs approved by the FDA is a reason why the US’s health care system is superior to others, and want to make it even easier to get drugs approved. But research indicates the opposite: within a drug class, newer drugs tend to be less effective and have worse side effects than older ones. But new drugs are definitely much more expensive because their period of government-granted monopoly hasn’t expired yet. And so, contrary to what recency bias leads us to believe, this more conservative approach to drug approval is actually one of the reasons why other countries have better health care outcomes at lower cost.
By DharmaPolice 2026-02-0516:571 reply Currently if someone posts here (or in similar forums elsewhere) there is a convention that they should disclose if they comment on a story related to where they work. It would be nice if the same convention existed for anyone who had more than say, ten thousand dollars directly invested in a company/technology (outside of index funds/pensions/etc).
By ryandrake 2026-02-0517:26 A browser plugin that showed the stock portfolios of the HN commenter (and article-flagger) next to each post would be absolutely amazing, and would probably not surprise us even a little.
By skeptic_ai 2026-02-0510:06 That’s because so much experience with ai is completely crap and useless.
The perception may be that anything AI related will be obsolete in months. So why pay to have it built into a laptop?
By bunderbunder 2026-02-0515:49 I doubt obsolescence anticipation has anything to do with it. That’s how tech enthusiasts think, but most people think more in terms of, “Is this useful to me?” And if it’s doing a useful thing now then it should still be doing that useful thing next year as long as nobody fucks with it.
I would guess it’s more just consumer fatigue. For two reasons. First, AI’s still at the “all bark and no bite” phase of the hype cycle, and most people don’t enjoy trying a bunch of things just to figure out if they work as advertised. Where early adopters think of that as play time, typical consumers see it as wasted time. Second, and perhaps even worse, they have learned that they can’t trust that à product will still be doing that useful thing in the future because the tech enthusiasts who make these products can’t resist the urge to keep fucking with it.
By rurp 2026-02-0517:05 I strongly felt this way about most software I use before LLMs became a thing, and AI has ramped the problem up to 11. I wish our industry valued building useful and reliable tools half as much as chasing the latest fads and ticking boxes on a feature checklist.
By sownkun 2026-02-0515:54 This is exactly what I was thinking about my current place of employment. Wouldn't all of our time be spent better working on our main product than adding all these questionably useful AI add ons? We already have a couple AI addons we built over the years that aren't being used much.
By antonkochubey 2026-02-0517:34 To you – yes. But have you thought about the shareholders?
100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.
And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.
By Suppafly 2026-02-088:24 >Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
I'm surprised that they haven't changed the boot screen to say "Windows 11: Copilot Edition".
I thought Copilot was just ChatGPT - isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI ?
By dahcryn 2026-02-0512:55 they somehow made it worse and use a less capable version with smaller context window.
The only potential upside for businesses it that it can crawl onedrive/sharepoint, and acts as a glorious search machine in your mailbox and files.
That's the only thing really valuable to me, everything else is not working as it should. The outlook integration sucks, the powerpoint integration is laughably bad to being worthless, and the excel integration is less useful than Clippy.
I actually prefer using the "ask" function of github copilot through visual studio code over using the company provided microsoft copilot portal
By anal_reactor 2026-02-0515:41 Someone somewhere understands that ChatGPT as a brand is too valuable to have it ruined by middle management. Hence Copilot.
By p_ing 2026-02-0513:49 Depends on the flavor. Now has Claude, as well. And Copilot Studio can extend to any model AI Foundry supports.
I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.
In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.
For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.
So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.
It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.
> cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth
Microsoft Azure was launched in 2010. They've been a "cloud" company for a while. AI just represents a sharp acceleration in that course. Unfortunately this means the software products have been rather neglected and subject to annoying product marketing whims.
By mbreese 2026-02-0517:23 They've had cloud products for a long time, but I don't think that Microsoft fundamentally changed. I still see them organized and treated as an Enterprise software company. (This is from my N=1 outside perspective.)
ChatGPT says that "productivity and business processes" is still the largest division in Microsoft with 43% of revenues and 54% of operating income (from their FY2025 10K). The "intelligent cloud" division is second with 38% revenue and 35% operating income. Which helps to support my point -- their legacy enterprise software (and OS) is still their main product line and makes more relative profits than the capital heavy cloud division.
By kalap_ur 2026-02-0515:19 Yeah. Hyperscalers who are building compute capacities became asset heavy industries. Today's Google, MSFT, META are completely different than 10 years ago and market has not repriced that yet. These are no longer asset light businesses.
By red-iron-pine 2026-02-0516:551 reply ITT: we assume that "computer rooms", mainframes, and other dev tools weren't a thing for software companies pre-cloud
By hosteur 2026-02-0518:01 I se no one that assumes that.
By PeterStuer 2026-02-0510:471 reply They bet the company on AI. If their AI push fails, everything else does not matter anymore. What you are seeing is desperation and Hail Marys.
My guess is every team's metric is probably reduced to tokens consumed through the products owned.
By red-iron-pine 2026-02-0516:57 take it a step further: the global market is stagnant, and the big gains of the 90s-2010s are gone.
you either hail mary AI or you watch your margins dwindle; captialism does not allow for no-growth.
By saidinesh5 2026-02-054:401 reply > But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.
Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.
By bunderbunder 2026-02-054:571 reply The thing about giving your application a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it is, then your application has a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it.
For the usecase of "How do I do thing X in Excell" you could probably get pretty far with just adding a small, local LLM running on the user's machine.
That would move the cost of running the model to the end user but it would also mean giving up all the data they can from running prompts remotely.
It would probably also make Office users more productive rather than replacing them completely and that's not the vision that Microsoft's actual customers are sold on.
By bunderbunder 2026-02-0515:38 Fair. But I sure wish we could instead solve this problem the way we did 20 years ago: by not having Web search results be so choked off by SEO enshittification and slop that it’s hard to find good information anymore. Because, I promise you, “How do I do thing X in Excel?” did not used to be nearly so difficult a question to answer.
By GorbachevyChase 2026-02-0516:34 To be fair. MS Office product defects should be regarded just as harmful as hallucinations. Try a lookup in excel on fields that might have text.
By Bombthecat 2026-02-0518:19 For coding,ai is amazing and getting better.
Spell checking is also good, grammar better then me lol
And pumping out fake news and propaganda, way worth it when you do it
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0423:2111 reply Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.
By safety1st 2026-02-053:49 The comparison to the dotcom bubble isn't without merit. As a technology in terms of its applications though I think the best one to compare the LLM with is the mouse. It was absolutely a revolution in terms of how we interact with computers. You could do many tasks much faster with a GUI. Nearly all software was redesigned around it. The story around a "conversational interface" enabled by an LLM is similar. You can literally see the agent go off and run 10 grep commands or whatever in seconds, that you would have had to look up.
The mouse didn't become some huge profit center and the economy didn't realign around mouse manufacturers. People sure made a lot of money off it indirectly though. The profits accrued from sales of software that supported it well and delivered productivity improvements. Some of the companies who wrote that software also manufactured mice, some didn't.
I think it'll be the same now. It's far from clear that developing and hosting LLMs will be a great business. They'll transform computing anyway. The actual profits will accrue to whoever delivers software which integrates them in a way that delivers more productivity. On some level I feel like it's already happening, Gemini's well integrated into Google Drive, changes how I use it, and saves me time. ChatGPT is just a thing off on the side that I chat randomly with about my hangover. Github Copilot claims it's going to deliver productivity and sometimes kinda does but man it often sucks. Easy to infer from this info who my money will end up going to in the long run.
On diversification, I think anyone who's not a professional investor should steer away from picking individual stocks and already be diversified... I wouldn't advise anyone to get out of the market or to try and time the market. But a correction will come eventually and being invested in very broad index funds smooths out these bumps. To those of us who invest in the whole market, it's notable that a few big AI/tech companies have become a far larger share of the indices than they used to be, and a fairly sure bet that one day, they won't be anymore.
By lizknope 2026-02-051:30 I started working in 1997. Cisco was one of our big customers so I knew a lot of engineers there. Cisco stock hid $80 in 2000. In 2002 it was at $10.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/
I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.
I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.
By autoexec 2026-02-053:31 I have zero doubt that AI will eventually make many people lots of money. Just about every company on earth is collecting TBs of data on everyone and they know they're sure they can use that information against us somehow, but they can't possibly read and search through it all on their own.
I have quite a few doubts that it'll be a net positive for society though. The internet (for all of its flaws) is still a good thing generally for the public. Users didn't have to be convinced of that, they just needed to be shown what was possible. Nobody had to shove internet access into everything against customer's wishes. "AI" on the other hand isn't something most users want. Users are constantly complaining about it being pushed on them and it's already forced MS to scale back the AI in windows 11.
By RoddaWallPro 2026-02-050:151 reply What do you mean exactly by "diversify"? Money/investment-wise?
By toomuchtodo 2026-02-050:242 reply Sell the risky stock that has inflated in value from hype cycle exuberance and re-invest proceeds into lower risk asset classes not driven by said exuberance. "Taking money off the table." An example would be taking ISO or RSU proceeds and reinvesting in VT (Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF) or other diversified index funds.
Taking money off the table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763769 - October 2025 (108 comments)
(not investing advice)
What tomuchtodo said. When I left Sun in 1995 I had 8,000 shares, which in 1998 would have paid off my house, and when I sold them when Oracle bought Sun after a reverse 3:1 split, the total would not even buy a new car. Can be a painful lesson, certainly it leaves an impression.
By fallous 2026-02-052:40 Heh, I was at Netscape when the Sun-Netscape Alliance was created. Tip of the hat to a fellow gray beard. ;)
By sehansen 2026-02-1311:53 Eh, the top ten stocks in that fund are Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Broadcom, Google, Facebook, Tesla and TSMC. I propose looking for an ex-USA fund to put part of your investment into. Vanguard has a few, e.g. https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi... . You still get TSMC, Tencent, ASML, Samsung and Alibaba in the top 10, but the global stock markets seem less tech-frothy than the US.
(also not investing advice :)
How do you diversify now? I presume you don't refer to stock portfolio, do you?
By ChuckMcM 2026-02-0517:59 Stocks are fine for diversification, just stocks that have a different risk factors. So back in the 90's I had been working at Sun then did a couple of startups, and all of my 'investment' savings (which I started with stock from the employee purchase plan at Sun) were in tech of one kind or another. No banking stocks, no pharmaceutical stocks, no manufacturing sector stocks. Just tech, and more precisely Internet technology stocks. So when the Internet bubble burst every stock I owned depreciated rapidly in price.
One of the reasons I told myself I "couldn't" diversify was because if I sold any of the stock to buy different stock I'd pay a lot of capital gains tax and the IRS would take half and now I'd only be half as wealthy.
Another reason was my management telling me I couldn't sell my stock during "quiet" periods (even though they seemed too) and so sometimes when I felt like selling it I "couldn't."
These days, especially with companies that do not have publicly traded stock, that is harder than ever to diversify. The cynic in me says they are structured that way so that employees are always the last to get paid. It can still work though. You just have to find a way to option the stock you are owed on a secondary market. Not surprisingly there are MBA types who really want to have a piece of an AI company and will help you do that.
So now I make sure that not everything I own is in one area. One can do that with mutual funds, and to some extent with index funds.
But the message is if you're feeling "wealthy" and maybe paying your mortgage payments by selling some stock every month, you are much more at risk than you might realize. One friend who worked at JDS Uniphase back in the day just sold their stock and bought their house, another kept their stock so that it could "keep growing" while selling it off in bits to pay their mortgage. When JDSU died they had to sell their house and move because they couldn't afford the mortgage payments on just their salary. But we have a new generation that is getting to make these choices, I encourage people in this situation to be open to the learning.
The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0517:49 no one has ever used blockchain. consumer ai apps have billions of MAUs how is this even remotely comparable dude
By magic_hamster 2026-02-058:312 reply > at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do
The revolution already happened. I can't imagine life without AI today. Not just for coding (which I actually lament) but just in general day to day use. Sure it's not perfect but I think it's quite difficult to ignore how the world changed in just 3-4 years.
By missingdays 2026-02-0512:44 It makes me sad trying to imagine what it's like to not being able to imagine life without AI
That's just so strange to me. In my experience, it hallucinates and makes things up often, and when it's accurate, the results are so generic and surface level.
By heraldgeezer 2026-02-0511:39 Yes but I use it as a substitute friend, gf, therapist, dumb questions like "how 2 buy clothes and dress good and is this good and how to unclog my toilet shits"
By toomuchtodo 2026-02-0423:29 > Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.
Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.
Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026
This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...
> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.
> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology
> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked
> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died
("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
By reaperducer 2026-02-0423:351 reply Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
It's happened before.
Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.
Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0517:431 reply > It's happened before.
source?
By reaperducer 2026-02-0518:581 reply Seriously? Have you just emerged from a hundred-year sleep in a monastery on the top of a mountain?
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0519:06 should be really easy to conjure up examples then. where every single business leader has been wrong about a new technology to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
By datsci_est_2015 2026-02-051:28 I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.
The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.
By alsetmusic 2026-02-051:38 And this is the broken mindset tanking multiple large companies' products and services (Google, Apple, MS, etc). Focus on the stock. The product and our users are an afterthought.
Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.
0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/
By mminer237 2026-02-0514:23 Microsoft has done the worst of any Mag 7 stock since the day before ChatGPT's release: https://totalrealreturns.com/n/AAPL,MSFT,AMZN,GOOGL,META,TSL...
By jamesnorden 2026-02-0512:182 reply Is sacrificing everything for short term gains really the right move in any situation?
By rightbyte 2026-02-0523:13 Dunno, hard question, but I think the payoff to executives is tied to stock performance in such a way that messes with the equation a lot.
What is on stake in the long term? Their legacy? Both in term of feel-good and getting the next job if they are not in the end of their career.
By DougMerritt 2026-02-0521:35 That's an excellent question, but the answer would depend on goals and the evaluation system used.
It seems to me that CEOs have a different opinion than anyone who cares instead about actual people.
By fallous 2026-02-052:45 The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.
Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.
In particular it's the short term stock price. They'll happily grift their way to overinflated stock prices today even though at some point their incestuous money shuffle game will end and the stocks will crash and a bunch of people who aren't insider trading are going to be left with massive losses.
Stock price increases that don't lead to higher dividends eventually are indistinguishable from Ponzi schemes after the fact.
Buybacks lead to stock price increases and are indistinguishable from dividends in theory, and in practice they are better than dividends because of taxation.
By saghm 2026-02-0518:13 The problem I have with that logic is that it still doesn't really give any sensible reason for why the stock should have any economic value at all. If the point is that the company will pay for it at some point, it makes more sense for it to be a loan rather than a unit of stock. I stand by my claim that selling a non-physical item that does nothing other than hopefully get bought again later for more than you sold it for is indistinguishable from a scam.
> top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong
There's another post on the front page about the 2008 financial crisis, which was almost exactly that. Investors are vulnerable to herd mentality. Especially as it's hard to be "right but early" and watch everyone else making money hand over fist while you stand back.
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0517:48 this was the top 10 companies in the s and p in 2008
Rank,Company 1,Exxon Mobil 2,General Electric (GE) 3,Microsoft 4,Procter & Gamble 5,Chevron 6,Johnson & Johnson 7,AT&T 8,Walmart 9,JPMorgan Chase 10,Berkshire Hathaway
1 financial institution.
8 of the top 10 currently are tech companies. its completely different
every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0517:411 reply name a technology that every single top tech company has invested billions of dollars in and then has flopped. the metaverse does not count unless google, amazon, microsoft etc was also throwing billions into it.
By ajkjk 2026-02-0520:42 weird goalpost
by that logic financial crashes wouldn't happen
By bandrami 2026-02-051:55 Were you around in 2008?
By vor_ 2026-02-0510:31 This industry has seen several bubbles in its existence. Many previously top companies didn't even survive them.
The mistake is simple. It is like the difference between giving you many tools to use vs making you the tool.
By autoexec 2026-02-053:38 I get the feeling that a lot of people using AI, feeding it their private data, and trusting what it tells them are certainly being tools.
By xyzsparetimexyz 2026-02-050:531 reply Doesn't matter what the leaders think if the users hate it and call it slop
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0517:42 right because copilot is bad, that must mean no one uses chatgpt, or claude code, or gemini. they only have billions of MAUs, people must really hate it
MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…
By jansper39 2026-02-0515:15 For years I've used this as a home page of sorts for Microsoft products. It's very annoying not to be able to use it now.
By quietbritishjim 2026-02-0510:201 reply I haven't used office.com but it does seem to have links to the four main webapps (did there used to be more?). They're the second row of big boxes titled "Word with Copilot", etc. Admittedly with very confusing names.
By deckar01 2026-02-0515:46 I checked way back machine and they have been making large changes to that page every day for the last month. It used to be a lie that office 365 was rename to office 365 copilot, yet it is an app with only chat bot functionality. They advertise the copilot integration for the main office apps now, but those are not part of the copilot app they are trying to trick you into installing.
Well there is no "Office" anymore, the suite is named "Microsoft 365 Copilot".
By deckar01 2026-02-0515:54 There are no office tools. It’s just a chatbot app. The page says they combined word and excel and PowerPoint, but it still doesn’t do anything but chat. I asked it to create a word document and it offered me a download link to a word template…
By iteria 2026-02-050:18 I noticed this and I wad enraged but it. The URL to the old page is way less easy to remember and I had to add it to my bookmarks. I'm still peeved about it.
By yoyohello13 2026-02-053:101 reply I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.
By bonesss 2026-02-057:56 I see Microsoft throwing spaghetti at the wall just in time as “AI” functionality hits government and educational procurement procedures.
The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.
My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).
By direwolf20 2026-02-050:061 reply They boosted copilot numbers by renaming office to copilot. No I'm not joking.
Musk could learn from this to boost his FSD subscription numbers for his bonus payouts.
By SilverElfin 2026-02-058:06 They did the same thing with Azure right? I remember articles about Microsoft stock that would mention that Azure subscription numbers included Office 365. But the thing is, their weird game of inflating numbers worked. There wasn’t really any negative consequence of doing that. So why wouldn’t they do it again? It’s yet another unfortunate example of dishonesty being rewarded these days.
> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."
That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:
The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.
KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!
The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.
By apercu 2026-02-0511:05 My phone, laptop, TV, fridge, etc., all demonstrably worse than they were 5 years ago.
By walt_grata 2026-02-0514:53 This is the bad side of things like OKRs. They push you away from user satisfaction since that harder to measure, coupled with go consequences for missing them. People just force adoption without taking the product signals that come from users rejecting your changes.
By heisenzombie 2026-02-0423:123 reply I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling.
Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.
Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.
We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.
I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html
I tried copilot agent once, and it just claimed that it accessed a website that should have been blocked by corporate firewalls and uploaded a bunch of proprietary data. Lots of very specific information about how it clicked on specific buttons of the website etc.
We raised a high priority ticket with MS and turns out that Copilot Agent lied about the entire thing because the website was blocked. It completely made it up.
The fact that we are supposed to use Copilot Agent for open-ended "research" is mind-boggling.
How did it know about the buttons? Or were they so generic that it could hallucinate them as well?
I wonder if the site you mentioned was earlier harvested through some firewall hole during Copilot's training.
By xmcqdpt2 2026-02-0612:14 It must have either pulled the websites docs or knew about them.
Copilot uses the Bing search index to access public content. Your corporate firewall is irrelevant.
Turns out that's not true, at least where I work. IT / Microsoft confirmed that all Copilot traffic goes through our corporate firewall.
By p_ing 2026-02-0622:27 Whomever you spoke to is misinformed.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/mana...
By tartoran 2026-02-055:24 I'm baffled by this as well, Microsoft seems to have lost the plot almost completely.
By rurp 2026-02-0517:13 A whole new toolbar appeared in Outlook on my work computer with nothing but a single button to open a copilot chat window. I tried asking it a few simple questions and it completely failed at all of them. Copilot didn't even know if I was using the web or desktop version of the very app it was embedded in!
Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.
By alkonaut 2026-02-058:39 Yeah did they test any of this? Did they run a pilot and ask 1000 users did you use it? Did you like it? Is it better with this than without it?
It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.
Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?
The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?
But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
By xmcqdpt2 2026-02-0512:51 Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.
By WillAdams 2026-02-0417:54 Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.
Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.
Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.
That only good if you're doing measurably more with the time you save. I feel like I'm significantly faster in parts of my job using Copilot, but when I try to get data on what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before I had it I don't come up with anything. I know I'm working faster, but the time seems to have just gone.
Working faster, but at what?
LLM workflow:
Describing to Claude that I need an edit made in the second paragraph of the third section feels easy, comfortable, and straightforward. I’m using my speech centers, speech to text, and then I wait for a generation during which I hit my phone or Reddit. Poof, the text flies out like magic, taking 20+ seconds, then I re-re-re-read it to make sure the edit was good and nothing was lost in that edit. Oops, the edit inverted the logic of the paragraph, lemme repeat the above… and again… time flies! 2 hours gone in a flash.
Old and boring workflow:
I gruellingly move my mouse to open a file, then take a coffee break. I come back and left-click into the sentence that sucks. I hit Reddit to deal with the anxiety… I think, boo, and then type out the edit I needed. It’s bad, I fix. Coffee break. Squiggly red line from a misspelling? I fix. I google and find a better turn of phrase, copy and paste it in manually with a little edit. Ugh. This sucks. I suck, work sucks. Time sucks. 35 entire minutes of my life has been wasted… time to get another coffee and check Reddit.
———
Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis. The moment to moment feelings are deceptive and we humans are unreliable recorders of time-usage. Particularly when engaged in unwanted effort.
Google has had all this tech for a minute. Their restrained application and lack of 10x-vibe-chad talk make me think their output measurements are aligned with my measurements.
1 rabbit hole hallucination wrong-turn can eat up a lot, lot, lot of magic one-shotting.
By gtowey 2026-02-0512:13 > Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis.
Another post on HN likened it to gambling, in the way that slot machines work. Each time you prompt, you could hit the jackpot! But usually you end up with some mediocre or wrong, so you tweak that prompt and pull the lever again. It's and endless cycle.
By PassingClouds 2026-02-056:36 They should be trying to convince people it is something they want rather than forcing it on people. Alas that would mean making a product people want and Im not sure they are there.
It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.
The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted.
Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
> Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.
...
On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...
By basch 2026-02-0522:50 It's more than an image generator, and if you pop open the UX, it's somewhat thoughtfully laid out.
Image generator meets editor meets page design.
By podgorniy 2026-02-0513:24 Sounds almost like every manager just covers their ass by formally doing what is expected core top-down idea is "AI is a future, thus make it everywhere".
Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.
Bad leadership, bad management.
So it's FOMO, formalism and conformism.
By kalap_ur 2026-02-0515:16 I wonder if there is somebody here high up in the MSFT stack who understands the tech/code but also oversees more stuff to be able to opine.
By mattmaroon 2026-02-052:391 reply I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.
It's good for creating meeting notes and action lists in Teams, but that's about it.
MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.
I found that the time I spent reviewing and fixing issues/errors/omissions in Copilot’s meeting notes was more than just cleaning up my own notes that I took and sending out.
By gtowey 2026-02-0512:20 There's you problem, you care about accuracy!
It's time to accept the new way of working, just change your reality to match the copilot version and boom, you save time fixing its mistakes!
In fact, why have the meeting at all? Just prompt copilot to create notes based on a fictional conception of the meeting and you just saved everyone a whole hour!
By MattGaiser 2026-02-052:441 reply Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is complete slop. Claude Code is better with PPT.
By dahcryn 2026-02-0512:56 even Gemini is better with powerpoint, and they are the nr 1 competitor
By downrightmike 2026-02-052:29 CEO has only delivered failure, and in trying to avoid that, they brought it
I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product.
Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.
I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.
> I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do.
That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.
why? I don't base my youtube subscription or my drive subscription based on my AI subscriptions
Sure I get gemini for free now for a year since I have bought a pixel, but I have no intention to renew, I'll likely just leech of the ones my employer pays for
By mminer237 2026-02-0514:27 When YouTube is replacing translations with AI-generated ones or if Drive is using all your personal documents as training data, that can definitely drive people away.
By user3939382 2026-02-054:51 My take away from mobile first G was “sites need to be fast right guys for mobile?” -> amp -> actually let’s hostile take over the web, oh actually well rework chrome auto sign in, oh actually … just a long string of user hostility
By yxhuvud 2026-02-052:01 Google is certainly looking better than stack overflow.
That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.
Incentives almost always drive the outcome.
By Sharlin 2026-02-050:47 It's almost as if that's what incentives are for. Whether the outcome is the intended one is of course another question entirely.
By sandworm101 2026-02-050:17 That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.
By alex1138 2026-02-0423:16 You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there
I'm still super mad at Google+ because it was clearly the cause for Google Reader been killed.
That's when I started losing trust in Google as a company.
By paride5745 2026-02-059:00 They could have led the way to a social web using Google Reader.
Make a Disqus-like comment section that shows the comments in RSS articles from Reader.
Also Reddit, by empowering the GReader Groups capabilities.
But no, let's copy Facebook and force everybody on it. And kill Google Talk while at it.
I'll never forgive Google for that.
By shevy-java 2026-02-0423:201 reply Yeah - Google really tried to get people to use Google+ but it always sucked.
YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.
> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.
By Gigachad 2026-02-053:45 My experience of Google+ was that it didn't suck, it just didn't offer much Facebook didn't already offer. So why would anyone use it. And then they started automated posting on Google+ for when you did something like comment on youtube, it would make a post on G+ which pissed people off.
>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers.
I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go
By jazzyjackson 2026-02-0423:461 reply Edge /is/ a chromium based browser, it makes sense people wouldn't feel the need to download Chrome unless they want to use their google account to sync devices.
By tester756 2026-02-072:31 for (other) chromium based browsers, I meant.
By cursuve 2026-02-0423:45 Agree. I gave it a shot recently after being a hater of MS browsers since the 90's and am actually very happy with it. I love the Workspaces and syncing features. Arc had something similar, but Arc started to stall out remain frustratingly buggy. Edge is now my go-to...
By Onawa 2026-02-050:34 I really enjoyed Edge after it launched, but when they stuffed in all of the shopping plugins and integrations I bailed on it.
By trinix912 2026-02-0512:13 Have you forgotten about Edge 1 that was the evolution of IE’s Trident rendering engine? It failed that’s why they then started with the rebranded Chromium Edge 2.
By Tempest1981 2026-02-051:191 reply Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?
By romanovcode 2026-02-059:06 Yes, also it's not even encrypted. It's the worst case of all major browsers.
Firefox & Safari: E2E encrypted, you hold keys, not possible for Mozilla/Apple to access it.
Chrome: Encrypted, Google holds keys meaning it is useless, they can read and give away the data. One can enable sync passphrase which would enable E2E however.
Edge: Nothing is encrypted and no way to change this.
By jamesnorden 2026-02-0512:221 reply Did you miss the 2019 news that Edge switched to just being another Chromium reskin?
By tester756 2026-02-072:30 for (other) chromium based browsers, I meant.
By direwolf20 2026-02-0422:532 reply It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?
I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.
By aleph_minus_one 2026-02-050:162 reply > Why can't it just be called "internet"?
Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.
By albedoa 2026-02-054:42 Looks like the context understander has logged on. Welcome!
By Dylan16807 2026-02-053:141 reply They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.
By aleph_minus_one 2026-02-0511:272 reply The Internet Explorer is not for exploring the internet, but the world wide web, so the name never did make sense.
By jamesnorden 2026-02-0512:25 I guess intranets don't exist.
By direwolf20 2026-02-0519:28 Actually, it views HTML. But if you call it Microsoft HTML Viewer and then wonder why nobody clicks on it.........
By Avamander 2026-02-0423:29 That was the only time when YouTube actually had a proper comment system and you would actually get notified when someone replied to you consistently.
I wish they'd've kept the parts people used the most.
By RandomTisk 2026-02-0423:10 Frankly it's how they insist themselves onto their potential users. When I toyed around with Edge a year or two ago, just to get the t-shirt, it was impossible to set a custom home page for first-open instead of MSN crap. New tabs could be customized, but not the initial page. Apparently they fixed it since, but I still don't see Edge as a serious browser, just another rent seeking marketing tool.
By profsummergig 2026-02-0423:302 reply Also Teams and OneNote.
If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.
CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.
By FearNotDaniel 2026-02-058:081 reply Flashback to the days when literally every MS product had “.NET” shoehorned into its name somewhere because they had to show they were hip to this newfangled information superhighway thing. The development platform that still has that name 20 years later was just one of a zillion confusingly named marketing initiatives back then.
Edit: Wikipedia sums up the "failed branding campaign" quite scathingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
I think that campaign followed on from everything being named "Enterprise" something. I still miss the days when SQL Server Management Studio was called "Enterprise Manager"...
By Sharlin 2026-02-0515:07 ASP.NET has the dubious honor of featuring two generations of MS buzzwords: "Active" and ".NET".
By Izikiel43 2026-02-051:14 > Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.
MSFT not being good at naming things is not new.
By stickfigure 2026-02-0423:413 reply I actually think Google+ was a good idea and it's a shame google now has a dozen different products with completely different social identities. Facebook does this right, you have one profile.
Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".
By taeric 2026-02-050:06 Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.
What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.
And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?
By quantummagic 2026-02-054:09 You're right. Youtube comments are great now. Granted, it means you can't have controversial conversations there, but that's not what they're for.
By Telaneo 2026-02-051:12 Maybe this is just me only subscribing to channels where people behave in the comments and the channel owner actually does some moderation, but I actually kind of agree.
Sure, you find disagreements and arguments, but you don't get the 'ur mum gae', the reductio ad Hitlerum, the dongers, and the outright insane takes and paragraphs of all caps that I would expect from Youtube comments. Meanwhile, every time I open Facebook because of some event I need to press 'going' on, I get a glimpse of some inane take or someone writing in all caps because reasons.
There have been a few waves of comment spam, but maybe Youtube actually managed to curb that now? Only took them two or so years.
I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
By stickfigure 2026-02-0423:492 reply Comments in Facebook may not be perfect, but they are vastly better than youtube comments. This is a false equivalence.
By rockskon 2026-02-0423:54 Our experiences differ in that regard. And no it isn't a false equivalence since Facebook's "use your real ID" commenting system is directly comparable to any proposed system to mandate use of someone's ID to post on other platforms.
By tsimionescu 2026-02-0511:02 I've personally seen WAY more abusive and hateful comments on Facebook, from real accounts of real people, with pictures and friends and everything, than I have ever seen on YouTube. This may be very locale dependent, but in my country (Romania, which has a pretty large proportion of people online from very socially conservative backgrounds) you can easily find extremely explicitly misoginistic, racist, homophobic, and just plain hateful comments coming from real FB and Instagram accounts, again, from people using their real names and faces and everything. I've seen far fewer similar comments on YouTube videos, even ones from the same country.
By aleph_minus_one 2026-02-050:211 reply > I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.
The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.
By rockskon 2026-02-051:16 It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.
I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.
Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.
By eboy 2026-02-0423:31 [dead]
By knowitnone3 2026-02-050:31 [dead]
Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular.
Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time.
They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have carved out some of this search space with web-search being native to the tools now.
But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0423:239 reply >it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.
By Dylan16807 2026-02-053:191 reply I don't see how "most successful and profitable product" is supposed to disprove a big drop in quality.
By anthonypasq 2026-02-0517:502 reply people dont use and pay for things that suck
By Dylan16807 2026-02-0519:19 Sure they do. People don't abandon products very fast when they turn worse. And the power of being the default option is massive.
And it's easy to imagine a situation where the other options are still mediocre most of the time, so switching has an advantage but it's not a big compelling thing you shout to the rooftops, so it doesn't get a big popularity wave.
By djfushfusjdjsd 2026-02-0521:44 If you really believe this then you must be either too young and naive, or just desperate to prove a point. Because this is factually and historically proven to not be correct in the slightest.
By Saline9515 2026-02-050:46 Google search is extremely vulnerable to SEO scams. It's very common to see advertised/high ranked scams with similar domain names (e.g bankname.com vs bankname.co). I switched to Kagi mainly for this reason.
Your comment makes me wonder how long have you been online? Google was amazing from ~1999 until 2010 and has slowly deteriorated since.
By jeffwask 2026-02-0516:43 The first 3 pages are literal copy paste blog slop or SEO ads for the competitor of the thing you are looking for. I dropped Google as primary search ages ago. It's a pale shadow of what it once was.
Google search business is not the most successful in history. It's their ad business and monopolization of online advertising that's the most successful in history and the only way to break their ad monopoly is to stop using their junk.
Google Search hasn't been designed for users in like 10 years
By KoftaBob 2026-02-051:36 > most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity.
The iPhone is a much stronger contender for that title. It has probably surpassed $1 Trillion in profit for Apple since 2007.
By MBCook 2026-02-052:55 The fact that Google grabbed a monopoly and now is making bank does not mean the product is good.
It was amazing.
Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.
But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.
And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.
Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.
Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.
They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.
By ajkjk 2026-02-053:14 it's not "unfounded", mountains of people have observed it. That's the foundation.
Then prove it? There have been actual studies that confirm this fact. You could also use the fact that google search has been losing market share steadily since 2023 and since search was supported on things like chatGPT as evidence it has been in decline. But, as I have in the past also said, I refuse to argue about this with google employees/devotees because there seems to be a fair amount of delusion involved.
For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)
By anonymars 2026-02-0912:47 Have you seen this piece which goes into some detail about the demise of Google's search quality?
By snarfy 2026-02-0513:01 There was a brief time when everyone was trying Bing to see the new copilot feature for themselves.
By inquirerGeneral 2026-02-0515:56 [dead]
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse.
the 'new' ai mode routinely creates these silly categories that are not what i was looking for and my screen is filled with repetitive ai summaries of articles. it will ingest a source as fact, and then use that fact to create confirmation bias across other articles. it will even use words like "confirm" when it finds a source saying something, even if the source is junk or seo spam. it becomes somewhat impossible to escape the assumptions the model has made, and i have to resort to traditional web search to get diversity in my results.
and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.
By JohnMakin 2026-02-0417:44 I don't use it often, but at least now I can get an answer. I swear in early 2023 I would just get completely irrelevant, borderline spammy results to the point I gave up and felt helpless because there was no real alternative at that time for how I used google. It felt like the internet broke for a window of time and Bing (very briefly) brought me out of that hell. To this day I still can't believe they didnt capitalize on it.
By heresie-dabord 2026-02-0510:571 reply Nadella himself wrote:
"2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. [...] We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion. We are beginning to distinguish between “spectacle” and “substance”."
Customers are not buying the spectacle and investors are wondering why there is no substance.
By djfushfusjdjsd 2026-02-0521:48 [dead]
By cadamsdotcom 2026-02-0421:49 It cost them (as a guess) -1T of market cap..
In other words they still got rewarded by the market despite all the missteps. I don’t agree with this reality but here we are.
Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.
One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.
Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
By ifwinterco 2026-02-0418:07 Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.
I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
By Andrex 2026-02-063:07 There were six versions of Windows Mobile before the iPhone hit and they still couldn't do anything.
