The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.
Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month’s promotion. It doesn’t seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It’s some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella’s mouth. I don’t get it, but it’s very consistent with Microsoft.
They want to make stuff that look good in the quarterly earnings report. They want to show they’re fully committed to AI in all their products or whatever.
They don’t want satisfied customers. They want satisfied investors.
The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.
Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month’s promotion. It doesn’t seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It’s some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella’s mouth. I don’t get it, but it’s very consistent with Microsoft.
They want to make stuff that look good in the quarterly earnings report. They want to show they’re fully committed to AI in all their products or whatever.
They don’t want satisfied customers. They want satisfied investors.
The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.