This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Microslop is confused that the people forced to pay for shitty software won't pony up for the optional shitty software.
Corporations and governments are doing it anyway because MS is entrenched
Db2! Talk about entrenched!
Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.
And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there's too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.
'365' subscribers got rate increases specifically because the copilot bullshit was bundled in. they're already paying for it.. they just don't use it. and you have to jump through hoops, such as feigning a cancellation, just to be offered the non-copilot plan. most don't know that even exists as an option.
They're all already paying for it, barely using it, and still Microsoft is going broke paying for it.
This is literally the Gym Membership strategy that makes capitalists piss themselves, and an entity as big as Microsoft can't make it work.
AI is dead on delivery.
Also when there are shortages of material goods, prices and profits go up.
This is a good time to remind everyone of LibreOffice, which is free and fantastic.
Also O&O ShutUp, which helps you turn off Windows' intrusive anti-privacy features and delete Copilot. If you'd like to learn more I made a video about Windows privacy earlier this year.
Libre Office can read the douments your doctors send you for free. TAKE THAT! MICROSLOP!
We love a good, free product without any meaningful difference in functionality. :)
The difference is you don't have to pay unless you feel like donating
Chris Titus' cleanup tools have a Microsoft AI removal tool, and also runs the O&O Shutup tool. I can't vouch for it because I don't use Windows but I believe the toolkit is pretty good.
More proof that "supply and demand" was made up the whole time
I mean, it works at small scale... when people are honest about their products and desire... and dont just want to make money.
Basically outside of capitalism.
I remember 15 years ago when I needed to reformat my Windows PC and called Microsoft to ask how to import my Office account onto my clean install. They informed me that I already used my 'backup' copy when I reformatted last, and I would need to buy a new copy of Office in order to get it running on the same machine again.
OR, they had this 'Special Deal' for Office 365 where I could spend 1/2 as much money that day and re-download it as many times as I need! I confirmed with them that I lost my access for software I've had for years and that even with their 'best deal', I can only rent it back from them and I'd be right back in the same boat in two years. I asked how that was any better and the guy 'helping me' didn't know what to say.
Unsurprisingly, I'm posting from a Linux machine and use LibreOffice now.
i could count on one hand the number of users i've run across that absolutely had to have the real microsoft office. an alternative like libreoffice works just as well for nearly everyone.
I really wish libre office didnt feel and look like it was written by a physicist in 1997. I’d love to switch to it.
I use it for my personal stuff. It's pretty rough. It gets the job done, but it's not fun to try and figure out how to do things with it. Charting in their spreadsheet program is frustrating.
We are encouraged to use CoPilot at work and i hate it
Our bonuses are tied to Copilot adoption rates. But it's not able to do anything useful for my actual work, so I have to use it for shit like "Copilot, take this emoji and make it holding a cartoon knife."
Real glad my children won't have any water for this.
Yes 30% of our "score"/ ranking is AI usage for "efficiency."
Literally my ability to actually deliver the product, the only thing keeping the fucking lights on, is 35%...
I mean, did anyone expect anything different? The frontier providers that Copilot depends on switched to token-based billing in a desperate and ludicrous attempt to somehow turn a profit on AI, so of course Microsoft is gonna jack up their prices too.
The service is the holy grail of MBA. You own nothing and pay constantly. Subscriptions galore and there is zero portability so high vendor lock-in once you start customizing. The pricing agreement is entirely one sided so the execs can set bonus payout performance objectives in ways that let them take advantage of properly timed price increases.
It's similar to AWS, Azure and the rest of the cloud platforms and i've never heard anybody say moving to those saved them money even after staff reductions.
Copilot is the new clippy in word and it's annoying.
On occasion there will be an invisible window on the primary monitor in which no windows applications response. I will have paint open on the primary monitor and about 2/3 of the window won't register the brush to paint in it. Found it it is copilot related and if you close it in the task bar things start working again.
Fuck copilot
Who saw that coming?
There was no way..... /s
You'd think they would have learned this lesson with clippy. Instead they made Clippy 2
I really wish I knew to what extent they retasked engineers to work on that pile of shit copilot rather than maintaining and improving the rest of their portfolio. In recent weeks alone, I have provisioned a Windows 365 box that mysteriously randomly showed up in São Paulo Brazil, despite the account and everything else being based in the US. Intune Controls erroring out every click when I tried to set policy to fix it. I have had OneDrive zip files, almost always corrupt, regardless of end point or network connection.
I couldn’t even change a billing payment method without going through support on another case, and all of this adds to the infuriating addition of friction and clicks to get to the old fucking apps at office.com. All this from the same company that brought you windows server 2012 when tablets were released and took away the start menu as if all of us were going to start running our data centers on fucking tablets.
On top, no less, of Microsoft proactively going out of their way to spy on Windows users and forward their information to law-enforcement without them being under investigation and without a warrant.
Enshitification surely is a thing, but at $1 trillion company scale is just absolutely fucking wild.
Isn’t Windows 11 majority written by AI in the past year?
Probably, you can just tell this shit isn't made for and by humans.
Microsoft claim there's over one billion Windows 11 users though... So wouldn't 4.5 % still be huge?
Last year Windows 11 was estimated at 400 million “devices”. Thats 16-17 million possible copilot users.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/it-took-almost-4-years-but-windows-11-finally-overtakes-windows-10
Hardly worth a new fucking key on my keyboard.
Isn’t copilot one of the worst LLMs anyways? Why should people pay for it?
Copilot isn't an LLM. You can choose different LLMs per response, eg Chat GPT, Claude.
They just can't launch a product can they? I mean if you look back:
Vista: "oh shit! Oh shit! Quickly, course correct!!!" And then w7 made it a little better.
W8: FUCK!! Again?!!!! Then there was the service packs and it was ok.
And now this. When is it going to be the moment? You'd think they would've course corrected by now instead of doubling down so viciously.
Even the word "service pack" is funny to someone like me who doesn't use windows.
They mean patch but it's corpo speak... :)
Probably because it's not very useful.
Not a fan of Copilot but how is it only 4.5%
They literally changed every single Office 365 Subscription to add a $30 Copilot subscription. You have to pretend to cancel to change it back
Did that many people really threaten to cancel?!
I suspect most people on business accounts and they can't really mess with businesses as much as customers
I tried to use M365 (CoPilot) with a seemingly simple task - take a Word doc with a form and populate it with some example data. It took several minutes to think, and then fifteen or so more to complete.
"Co-pilot" made me switch back from 365 to the "One-time purchase Office Home 2024".
Adoption can't be forced with price increases.
I genuinely think AI is useful for about 2% more adoption of things than was going on before. 2% more coders, 2% more artists (for whatever that’s worth which isn’t a lot), just 2%.
I really wanted to make copilot work. Spent hours and hours hoping I was the problem and I could prompt it well enough to provide something useful in return. At this point I'd rather have the old Microsoft Paperclip help me.
It is good at taking technical text, and generating "executive" speech. My role is in the line between developer and executive and it's quite good at ~~dumbing it down~~ translating the technical bits. Fills it full of fluff that the ~~LinkedIn lunatics~~ My bosses love
But I am literally graded on my token usage on my reviews so shrug
It's just marginal at most anything it does. I use it to monitor my inbox and chats. It misses stuff all the time. I've actually had to use claude to create very specific prompts for Copilot agents. It helped a lot, but overall, it's just not very good.
I tried to get my company to buy my security team Anthropic tools, but they all fought me on it. My boss, my employees, everyone.
I told them that while we're here trying to make Copilot help us work through things, the bad guys are out there using anything they can get their hands on. In response, my boss said that we should focus on patching and not spend time concerning ourselves with what bad actors are doing to leverage AI.
I never understand the current anti-AI view for a lot of people. When regular people use it to try and help them do their jobs, they turn out slop, when adversaries use it to successfully and rapidly mount cyber attacks, all of a sudden it is scary effective? Which is it, because it can't be both. Either AI is shit and makes slop or it is effective in the hands of people that learn how to use it.
I think that the people you will find who like AI and have used it know it's great at some things.
But it's being jammed into everything and they're using it to run our water, our aquifers dry, to set the literal Earth on fire. On principle alone - I am very conflicted on it.
