They had Skype! It was the verb for video calling for god's sake! How do you LOSE so BADLY so CONSISTENTLY and STILL have investors.
Business, government, and military contracts. Doesn't matter how crappy you are, as long as you promise to be the fall-guy when a insert large entity has a insert large tech problem, they'll keep shoveling money at you.
Microsoft never fails to disappoint
Lol! Be like GitLab instead:
1 - Be the underdog with good reputation in a market completely monopolized;
2 - Have the incumbent self-destruct by vibecoding its product and pushing AI above every other feature to its customers;
3 - Loudly announce that you are leaving your past good behavior behind, and that you are betting everything on vibecoding and pushing AI to your customers!
It is truly, deeply amazing how bad Microsoft is. Proton on Linux is FASTER than the actual directX it's emulating is on windows. They got beat at their own instruction layer.
And they had Skype, which was practically a genericized trademark for "video call--" until first Apple's FaceTime and then Zoom utterly took them apart.
And they had Office, which defined the product category so completely that it's called "office software--" but then Google Docs took them apart on a molecular level.
Microsoft is the king of snatching defeat from the clutching jaws of victory.
but then Google Docs took them apart
Tapping the breaks on that one.
Google Docs is very lightweight, but it's also very stripped down. Word remains the first choice in word processors for 90% of the market. It (and Excel) are a big reason offices haven't seriously begun abandoning Microsoft.
Not being able to paste a jpg of a screenshot into an Excel sheet embedded in a Word document is a feature.
I posit that the vast majority of users of Office would be just fine with any of the lightweight web app equivalents.
I think we'll eventually see folks migrate to Jupiter Notebook style data entry and management. But they're relatively new and not well-integrated into modern workflows.
For the time being, people are brought into offices and trained on Excel, get comfortable with Excel, and continue to use Excel because that's how they spend the bulk of their hours. You've got networking effect and priors cementing these apps as the go-to for an entire generation.
100%
Excel is the one actual critical application because it deals with data (and formulae), data which is only useful when you maintain its integrity (hopefully you're not storing dates).
Word is just a shitty application for text. Needs that can usually be adequately addressed by a plain text file (or plain text email). It thinks it's a desktop publishing application (goodbye MS Publisher). Any tool that can do rudimentary text processing will suffice for the vast majority of use cases. One might have footnotes and some meta data that might be important, other apps do that well. Even markdown can do that.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application. Any equivalent will suffice.
There's quite a few other apps, I forget those.
Word is just a shitty application for text.
It's fine. People love to shit on the app because Microsoft Bad. But it's living at the rough midpoint of application quality, at least in it's modern incarnation.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application.
As a slideshow app, it's another perfectly fine piece of software.
What's disgusting about PowerPoint isn't the app but the LinkedIn psychos who use it
Microsoft acquired Skype, did not create it. Then destryed it with its own hands.
They acquired practically everything they have. They haven't created anything truly new since the mid-90s.
Google docs is far worse than office, in every way except for collaboration. It does not destroy them at all. LibreOffice is on par except for having no collaboration, but is not widely used so definitely haven't destroyed them. Office is still very successful and probably won't be gone anytime soon
They also had Internet Explorer. When it was released it was actually good (compared to the competition). Internet Explorer was dominant, but then it turned into the punching bag of web browser memes.
Proton (and Wine, what it's based on) are not emulators. They are compatibility layers, it translates Windows system calls to native Linux system calls.
Or simply put: Wine Is Not an Emulator
That isn't "simply put". It's a witty way to phrase half the comment, completely omitting the other half that actually explains what it does. WINE is a clever abbreviation as a name for the tool, but the opposite of descriptive about its purpose or function.
That's Microsoft. They got desktop PCs. They repeatedly failed to get mobile, they repeatedly failed to get portable, they never had embedded, they had fucking Skype at one point. They drink gold and piss nickel, Microsoft.
Don't forget Vine was basically tiktok and they just binned it for no reason.
Also Zune was a fantastic player.
~~invent copilot~~
Rebrand ChatGPT
Ftfy
Naah, the initial GitHub copilot was something else.
I was on the Github Copilot Technical Preview (invite in my mailbox says July 16th 2021) and it was GPT-3 (not to be confused with ChatGPT which was introduced with GPT-4)
ChatGPT was built on top of GPT-3.5 which was GPT3 with the new seep reinforcement learning to make it more "conversational", launched 2022. GPT 4 launched in 2023 and before the official launch there was "I have been a good Bing. 😊" Which was.. checks notes... microsoft messing something up again
you literally have access to all the code in the world
I'd like to believe that they were honorable enough to not secretly train on code without people's permission. But realistically they totally did exactly that, but just made the AI Model this incompetent through some other engineering blunder.
Also, random side thought - training only on public repos probably yields you way higher code quality as opposed to training on both public and private repos? I assume we all have some very messy private repos that we're too embarrassed to publish because the code quality is absolute shit ... right?
They didn't check licenses in any way, as it did reproduce the famous quake fast inverse square root function, comments included. And quake, like majority of github projects, is published under GPL, which requires all copies and modifications to be published under GPL as well, after which all sane enterprises have banned copilot usage.
Though, we're not living in sane times anymore. Chatgpt, gemini, deepseek, claude, all reproduce copylefted code left and right. Realistically, Stallman should've been rolling in cash by now...
honorable enough
Lol. Lmao
I'm always so extremely confused about the trope of the personal project having shit quality... Like, if I'm doing something for myself, that's exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing, like literally all my private projects have much higher quality than my work ones - because in the work ones I'm forced to use stupid conventions, old tools, am not supposed to touch "legacy" code, etc etc etc
As such, since companies have their private code on GitHub, that's where I would expect the shittiness to come from, not personal private projects.
Like, if I'm doing something for myself, that's exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing,
That's always my intention with my personal projects too! But that always results in "Wow I just learned how to do this thing much better, let me refactor the whole project to do it perfectly everywhere" followed by my Adderall running out. So there's just so many half-done refactors I either forget about or abandon because I get a new idea the next day, but that's totally just a skill issue.
You're right though, the code I write at work is much worse, but my Company hosts their own GitLab instance so the code we write can't even be used to poison Copilot :(
Their idea was that OpenAI was so far ahead of the competition no one could ever catch up. Turns out they weren’t and now they’re at the bottom.
Just like Skype getting lapped by Zoom during COVID
Have all the code in the world
Create LLM for software development
Try to advertise it
Oops, no budget
Get acquired by Microsoft
Enshittification ensues
Everyone else loots your code repos
Microsoft tries to put your coding tool in everything
Coding tool injected into Excel
Into Word
Into Teams Chat
Nobody knows what this is even supposed to do anymore
Copilot now synonymous with Clippy
Yeah, can't even begin to imagine how this happened.
The fact that it can't even get PowerShell right when it should be intimately familiar with PowerShell commands and scripts is absolutely asinine.
It's weird because copilot in office tries to push agents on you as if it were a Jehovah's witness.
So GitHub copilot doesn't have them? I don't really use that.
It's saying Copilot was the first on the scene and had access to literally all of the training data anyone could possibly want, and is still being shown up by most other AI models. Their failure to capture the vibe coding space is a legendary fumble. At least that was my read.
Being the first mover doesn’t guarantee shit and never has.
I see this as proof of how bad LLMs actually are. You have an AI trained on essentially humanity's collective programming library. Languages of machines and computers. The result should be ungodly and near perfection. If there was any semblance of understanding in AI, it should be revealed in it's capability to produce code.
Although... I can definitely see Microsoft thinking that their code is the example of perfection and training copilot on that rather than github.
should be ungodly and near perfection
Counterpoint: garbage in, garbage out
If agentic LLMs are the prize, I’d be fine with losing.
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