It’s internet explorer vs Netscape navigator. Even Safari. Gemini gets pushed by Android phones. MS lost the smartphone OS war. Also lost TVs. Also lost home assistant speaker/mics. Microsoft and every other company without a major mobile OS under their unbrella is fighting a battle with a major handicap against Google
I’m typing this on a Surface, so I’m not inherently anti-MS, but they’ve very clearly given up on the consumer side, which is an industrywide trend.
AI is sort of like having a plug. If you know you want it, it’s easy enough to find.
I’m surprised one of these companies hasn’t bid against the AI bubble yet. Like have they considered going against the grain when there’s obvious push back could actually increase profits?
Could you imagine a world where Microsoft went back to a windows 7 Era where shit just worked how it was supposed to and was super solid? I feel like people would appreciate and buy into a product that just works.
Maybe I’m completely off base here but in my mind having a product that… y’know…actually works and does what it says it does is valuable.
That is unless there’s just so much money being thrown at them to force AI into their products that they seemingly cannot refuse, which could very well be the case. But it just feels weird
I feel like people would appreciate and buy into a product that just works.
The general public are no longer the market, but rather the product. Most of us have been demoted from customer to cattle. They don’t care what we want. We’re here to generate data for them to sell.
I feel biased, but i agree with you. Definitely seems to feel that way
Problem is that they’ve completely bent over to shareholders and shareholders are both A) non tech people and B) believe AI will print money for them.
A company with a backbone would say “No you know what, this is insane and it’s clear customers aren’t biting. We will win long run if we make quality products people want”. Instead they bend over to shareholders and, from my understanding they say something like “deeper plz”
Oh, you just know someone’s shorting this. It just doesn’t seem to get reported on.
The problem with shorting is you have to guess when the bubble pops. Call it too early, and you don’t get the short at all. Call it too late, and any possible earnings may get wiped out by rebounds and/or new bubbles.
You also usually short with leverage not actual full capital. To hold a short position for a long requires solvency and hopefully you don’t hit your stop loss and just lose.
While I grant these things are true, there’s no way in hell multiple people aren’t trying this bet.
“multiple people” doesn’t mean much unless it’s one of the top twenty people that own most of the stock market.
Sure, but contrarian investment and bets are built into the system. Everyone wants to think they’re the genius.
Right, but this is about the noteworthiness of talking about someone shorting AI. Who cares if joe schmoe from accounting shorted their six shares? It’d only be newsworthy if it’s someone with significant investment or supposed insider knowledge shorting it.
Both are owned by the same corporations (Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, Geode…), who’ll win either way. Until the bubble bursts, that is.
Vanguard and Fidelity don’t really own that stuff. They’re managing the wealth of customers. The funds they have are almost entirely or entirely owned by customers.
Vanguard and Fidelity make money so long as people hold money in their funds. They win pretty much no matter what. The bubble bursting will mean they make less money, but they can’t really lose money because they don’t own the underlying equities.
Same for BlackRock which I maintain gets a lot more heat than the significantly worse Blackstone. BlackRock manages a bunch of index funds and was renounced by several red states for being too woke (the CEO apparently believes in ESG). Blackstone however buys entire neighbourhoods to jack up rent in an area.
At the end of the day they’re all capitalists and none should exist, but I’m still fairly sure Blackrock has gotten a lot of the heat because the CEO is Jewish and a dem supporter. That gets the conspiracy theories flowing from the right. Doesn’t mean he’s a good person, I just think BR gets singled out suspiciously much in a world full of similar companies with even worse leadership.
Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.
Hint: nobody wants to use Google’s either.
I have never seen an AI more consistently wrong on everything. It’s the Apple Maps of AI.
Ohhh I get it. So MS should make the AI use mandatory and compulsory!
I was going to say, you can remove “its” and “shoddy” and the title is still accurate.
I wanted to use Assistant but now they’re butchering that to force people onto Gemini, which is functionally dogshit.
So not only are people not reading the articles any more, they’re not even finishing reading the headlines all the way through?
You realize these companies can force growth via cramming it in to every channel they own, right? You realize growth on paper is not public endorsement, right?
So why aren’t Microsoft’s numbers going up? Everyone’s faking it except them?
Because they’re easier to ignore and disable than the biggest advertiser and search platform on the planet that gets their grubby hands in everything? MS doesn’t have nearly as much of an online presence, and that’s exactly where these “AI” are getting used.
On top of that, Google gets to feed search queries into their AI and generate results for most searches. Copilot does not get to arbitrarily answer every search someone types in to Windows.
So… yea, in a way, everyone else is more capable of forcing engagement than MS. Would you be more likely to try something that’s merely available on a website, or more likely to enable a technology that could extract all of your personal information from your computer on accident?
Google Search being replaced by Gemini makes it easy for Google to have big AI numbers. Bing never got over its reputation of having bad result quality, and it’s only the default search engine on Windows PCs that don’t have Chrome or Firefox installed. My friend uses Windows and iOS and always sends me links to Gemini results, which normally are only slightly worse than “I’m feeling lucky.”
And yet beating out both of them by a very wide margin, with 61.30% of the AI search share, is ChatGPT. Which didn’t have any established reputation or pre-installed userbase or anything at all that either Microsoft or Google started out with.
Your friend uses Gemini, presumably willingly. That’s not “faked.” This narrative of “nobody wants AI” is false, it’s just popular among social media bubbles where people want it to be true.
ChatGPT sold themselves as the easy way to add “AI” to products. I would not be surprised what so ever if the VAST majority of ChatGPT’s usage came from other people forcing it into their products (like all the companion apps) and not actual, direct interest in AI from the general populace.
Think of it like mobile gaming. Most people do not spend much money at all on the microtransaction bullshit. Though it’s still successful in making the company money, thanks to whales and other uncommon big spenders. It would be totally unsurprising if GPT is getting their numbers in a similar fashion. Not from end users, but from selling it as a service to other companies and a very small percentage of heavy users.
They’ve got 70% of the desktop operating system share. Seems like every other thread about them around these parts is how they’re “shoving AI down everyones’ throats.” I’m dubious that they’re “easier to ignore.”
Read my last paragraph, then. It’s not how much MS gets in everyones’ face. It’s the specific avenues in which these companies are exposed. Google is everywhere on a platform that people don’t have to install to try things out, or have it automatically execute without permission.
MS is not. Do you not remember the MASSIVE outcry when MS said they were turning on Copilot for everyone? They tried to shove it everyones’ faces ala google, but their avenues for forcing shit are plainly different.
Alright. So for purposes of argument, let’s accept all of that. Microsoft and Google are just faking it all, everyone’s tricked or forced into using their AI offerings.
The whole table from the article:
# Generative AI Chatbot AI Search Market Share Estimated Quarterly User Growth 1 ChatGPT (excluding Copilot) 61.30% 7% ▲ 2 Microsoft Copilot 14.10% 2% ▲ 3 Google Gemini 13.40% 12% ▲ 4 Perplexity 6.40% 4% ▲ 5 Claude AI 3.80% 14% ▲ 6 Grok 0.60% 6% ▲ 7 Deepseek 0.20% 10% ▲ ChatGPT by far has the bigger established user base. How did they force and/or trick everyone into using them?
Claude AI is growing their userbase faster than Google, how are they tricking and/or forcing everyone to switch over to them?
None of these other AI service providers, except for Grok, have a pre-existing platform with users that they can capture artificially. People are willingly going over to these services and using them. Both Microsoft and Google could vanish completely and it would take out less than a third of the AI search market.
Microsoft has nothing worth using. Microsoft hasn’t made anything that’s even worth talking about. Anyone with an OpenAI key and an afternoon to kill could make something every bit as good as what Microsoft has done. They put the absolute bare minimum of effort into everything they’ve done with AI.
The only advantage they have is customer lock-in. Historically, that’s usually enough for them. I hope it’s not this time.
Eventually Microsoft will probably buy a company with people who know what the fuck they’re doing. I think that’s their only way forward because it looks like the brain drain has finally caught up with them.
Microsoft has nothing worth using.
Mostly agree. However, Excel remains the exception. I refuse to buy/subscribe to whatever subscription they are currently peddling, but I do consider my stand alone Excel license to be worth it. And if the next version of Excel is still offered as a stand alone perpetual license and does not force AI, I’ll buy that too.
For basic usage, just use LibreOffice.
For any serious data storage, get PostgreSQL.
SQLite perchance, as a treat.
Yeah, I meant for AI stuff specifically. Their main products are…well I wouldn’t say “good” but they successfully choked out all competition in the 90s so…
I feel like Google sheets is a better experience than Excel, at least for my personal usage. I’m not enterprise though, and not trying to run it like a database or anything crazy.
If I’m using it in browser, sure. But as a standalone application, no comparison IMO.
I’ve tried both. I think part of it is friction from little behaviors that I expect to be like Google sheets but aren’t. I don’t even know what they are until I hit some keys and excel does the “wrong” (but probably reasonable) thing.
I have the reverse, I am so used to Excel from work that using Google sheets can be really annoying.
Well, no. Microsoft has good products, to me specially in development area. That said I moved away from Windows and office as well, because of the crap they are putting into them.
Not fair!
Microsoft has made a lot worth talking about in the last few years.
You just have to talk it in the same way you would talk about touching the tip of a soldering iron.
To Microsoft’s credit, phi3/4 were both pretty good models for their size, for a brief period before they were comely outclassed.
If I could turn off the Google one at work, my usage for both would drop to zero
lol today I tried to resolve an issue with Gemini chat in Google cloud console.
It gave me advice that just hid an error, so technically the task succeeded but the results were garbage.
It was my mistake for trying.
That reminds me of copilot in the azure portal.
On every page, theres a header section with some recommended actions you can do there and with a click on it, you can task copilot to do them for you.
Today, everything I got was to the extend of “decommission this Kubernetes cluster” and other destructive things you do not want to accidentally click on.
Yeah, basically the same.
Running some DDL in big query and it suggested some fixes.
I also have my own ai system that does much better search and completion than Google’s, which is insane because it’s literally pulling from the information schema in big query.
It just lies like crazy whenever I make quick searches for scientific info. Like, beyond wrong and unhelpful, it cites literature that definitively does not show what it claims. Very unhelp for when I need to know, say, what are all the known ligands for a given receptor or whether a certain cell line expresses a specific cytokine. Things that should be super easy for an “advanced” search system.
Competition is actually a good thing. Nobody wants a single giant corporation to control the majority of a technology. However I am not sure if this is really a good thing, because this means Microsoft will invest more into Ai, buy more graphics cards, fire real engineers and so on. Is competition a bad thing for once?
When the competition is replacing workers en masse, yes.
Rare to see an AI-positive article getting so many upvotes on @technology@beehaw.org.
According to the chart in the article every AI is seeing stronger growth than Copilot, on a percentage gain basis. Gemini’s just the one that looks like it’s about to surpass Copilot in total market share.
