Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products
99 comments
·December 8, 2025ZeroConcerns
throw310822
The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".
ZeroConcerns
Absolutely! There are so many scenarios where they could actually add some value, and they're fulfilling, like, exactly none of those?
Even in Visual Studio Enterprise, their flagship developer product, the GPT integration mostly just destroys code regardless of model output. I truly cannot fathom how any of that made it past even a cursory review. Or how that situation would last for over 6 months, but, yet, here we are.
And, again, it's fine with me: I'll just use Claude Code, but if I were a Microsoft VP-or-above, the lack of execution would sort-of, well concern me? But maybe I'm just focused on the wrong things. I mean, Cloudflare brought down, like, half the Internet twice in the past two weeks, and they're still a tech darling, so possibly incompetence is the new hotness now?
Wojtkie
I bet c-suite uses Mac
furyofantares
> Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.
I guess that's worse than the Gemini button in Google Sheets that asks me to subscribe to AI services. I have multiple times been in a sheet and thought "asking an LLM how to do this thing I want to do right here in this product would actually be great if it works", remembered there was an AI-looking button in the top right, clicked it, and nope'd out of the subscription.
I just want to know if it works or not before I buy it.
neilalexander
I would think that if they actually spent the time and money fixing the core functionality of their core products (like Windows and Office) that they might have a much easier time promoting things like Copilot. Instead they leave their users wondering why they're so hell-bent on shoehorning AI into a Start menu that takes whole seconds longer to open than it should or into Windows Search that regularly fails to find installed programs or local files.
jacquesm
Because they so much want to be a service business than a software business. Microsoft execs are losing sleep over becoming the next IBM, not realizing they are already there and have been for a long time.
Their main problem is that they never really learned how to compete on merit, just on first-to-market and all kinds of legal (and illegal) tricks.
coldpie
Microsoft is a public company. That means their primary product is not products or services, it's their stock. Selling products & services can be an advertisement for their stock, but there are other methods of convincing people to buy their stock, too. Currently the stock market only wants stocks that have "AI" associated with them. It doesn't matter whether users like it or not, because having a viable business is not what the stock market is currently focused on. So, Microsoft is doing what they need to do to sell their primary product: shove AI into everything.
brookst
Are you saying they would rather double stock price than double revenue?
saubeidl
Maybe the stock market is not a good system to organize ones economy around then?
cezart
I've been thinking about this recently. The centrality of the stock market, while historically a great tool to allocate resources efficiently, might actually be a big weakness for the USA today. A capable adversary, like China, can kill entire strategic sectors in the US using the stock market. If they undercut the US companies and are willing to accept low returns on their investments, then the respective USA competition will be driven out of business by their investors, because there will be other sectors to invest in, with higher RoI. Do this at various points in strategic value chains, and over a decade or so it might kill entire verticals in strategic sectors, leaving the US economy vulnerable to any kinds of shocks.
mrweasel
The stock market weirdly enough ruins the idea of capitalism. Catering to shareholders hurts the idea that competition would create better and cheaper products.
nolok
It's basically the reason this bubble not only exists but has a chance not to pop : there is so much stock value in it that the big tech all want to keep feeding it, and they're sitting on so much cashflow they can afford to do it
It's absurd, but that's where it is. And a company like OpenAI basically hangs on it, because they have obligation almost ten time their revenue and the only way this does not deflate quickly is if others keep feeding it cash.
watwut
That is not what stock market is. A company does not have to focus on stock price and stock price is not its primary product.
coldpie
That's fair, I should reframe. The incentive given to decision makers at Microsoft is company stock. That means the primary focus for everyone who makes decisions at Microsoft is the stock price, which in turn means the stock price is the primary product for the company itself.
theiz
Or do things that actually work. Why, for example, can I not translate a PowerPoint using Copilot in Powerpoint? Why do I need to save it, then upload it into ChatGPT, translate it, then download it again, and open it in PowerPoint for further editing. But at the same time get all kind off nonsense I don't want pushed at me in Windows, like that MSN news clickbait crap.
mrweasel
As long as companies, and consumers, still pick Windows and Office, then why spend the resources. Making Windows better won't move the sales number significantly, but removing the ads and the potential AI upsell is a direct hit to revenue.
The sad reality seems to be that Microsoft do not care about the majority of their products anymore. Only Azure, Microsoft 365 CoPilot, CoPilot and maybe CoPilot.
falcor84
I'm not familiar with many "consumers" who still pick a Windows and Office, and in this generation, there are very few consumers picking xbox. Outside of enterprises, they seem to be losing market share everywhere, and at this rate they'll be akin to IBM or Oracle in a few years.
airstrike
Office is part of the "Productivity and Business Processes" at Microsoft. That business unit had $120B of revenue in 2025.
Microsoft 365, which I believe includes Office, makes up $95B of that amount, which is split between Commercial (92%) and Consumer (8%)
From there you can see why they're focused on Enterprise.
Source: https://www.bamsec.com/filing/95017025100235?cik=789019 (page 39)
pjmlp
Exactly, even those of us that like Windows have a hard time talking about it when Microsoft treats it so badly, I really miss Balmer era in regards to Windows.
The only good thing that came out of Satya era has been the Windows Terminal and WSL.
dboreham
Nobody gets a bonus and a new boat doing that.
Spivak
I will say that with enough group policy and sysinternals turning absolutely everything off, turning all of the settings to maximum performance lowest flashiness, no web results, killing Cortana with reckless abandon my Windows installation is actually what I would consider to be snappy. I was surprised.
It doesn't make it any better that Microsoft does this, but as a piece of practical advice, it seems like it can be done. There does still exist a core of Windows under all that garbage that is fast.
samrus
All that tinkering is getting you dangerously close to daily driving linux. And the advantage there is that the maker isnt actively trying to get in your way
kayhantolga
As a .NET developer who actually likes some Microsoft products, I can say this: the Copilot series is the worst thing they've shipped since Internet Explorer—and honestly, it might overtake it. The sad part is they had a huge head start before competitors gained access to powerful models, yet this is what we got.
If you haven’t seen how bad it is, here’s one example: Copilot Terminal. In theory, it should help you with terminal commands. Sounds great. In practice, it installs a chat panel on the right side of your terminal that has zero integration with the terminal itself. It can’t read what’s written, it can’t send commands, it has no context, and the model response time is awful. What’s the point of a “terminal assistant” that can’t actually assist the terminal?
This lack of real integration is basically the core design of most Copilot products. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid them, good for you. If your company forces you to use them because they’re bundled with a Microsoft license, I genuinely feel your pain.
pseudosavant
I was hoping for a real look at weaknesses in Microsoft’s AI products. They ship lots of “AI features,” but only Copilot and Azure’s ChatGPT hosting see broad use. Instead, the article mostly reads as anti-MS/OpenAI without much detail.
From my experience, Microsoft’s GPT-5 integrations in Word, PowerPoint, and their ChatGPT clone struggle with basic tasks. Copy/pasting from ChatGPT still works better.
To be fair, building solid AI features is hard when model capabilities change so quickly. Reasoning and tool use only became reliable in the latest models, and when these Office features were planned, GPT-5 didn’t exist.
belval
I feel like the case for Microsoft inability to execute in a lot of verticals should really be studied, not saying this as a sound bite, I'd genuinely like to know how that is possible.
Their investment in OpenAI, giving them what was, at least ~1-2 year ago if not now, the best possible LLM to integrate in the office suite yet they are unable to deliver value with it.
Their ownership of Xbox and Windows should have allowed them to get a much better foothold in gaming yet their marketplace is still, to this very day, a broken experience with multiple account types. It's been 10 years.
The counter point is Azure obviously which still has great growth numbers, but that's a different org.
From the outside, it just seems like they should be doing better than they are. They have much better business integration than Google and Amazon. The fit is obvious and people are borderline hooked on excel. Why aren't they dominating completely?
this_user
Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats. And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too, because otherwise Teams wouldn't be used by anyone.
afavour
Microsoft’s best pitch (and Google benefits from this too) is that contracts are annoying and take forever to execute. If you can sign a deal for Outlook and Teams it’s so much easier than separate contracts for Outlook and Slack. You’ll get very far with that logic alone.
stackskipton
Most companies I’ve been at that use Teams over Slack is not “We can’t get contract for Slack” but “We have Teams included, why would we pay for Slack?” - Accountant
dboreham
People here are mostly too young to remember but the original Microsoft business model was this:
Find a software market currently addressed by high price products; create a reasonably good product for that market; sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make much more profit. Repeat/rinse.
The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after this. You can't lock in customers if they didn't already willingly buy your product.
dylan604
> And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too
You say this like it was a mystery to start with. When you own 90+% of the user base, you can create trends with any changes implemented
janlukacs
I find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap software.
esskay
Ditto. The more interesting part is how many people will defend it. Presumably some mix of post-purchase rationalisation and inherited assumptions about what's "standard" even when those assumptions stopped being true ages ago.
falcor84
It's the oldest trick in the IT book - focus on the buyer persona and ignore the user persona.
drcongo
My theory is that they deliberately make Windows so shit to filter out anyone with taste. Once you have a userbase of people who don't know better, you can sell them any old crap. Like Teams.
geodel
Reminds of an research article from Microsoft!. It detailed on why scam emails about `Nigerian prince` are so obviously dumb. The reasoning being it specifically need to target only those who can fall for it. Anything more sophisticated and they would get people who wouldn't fall for scam in subsequent communication.
llm_nerd
Microsoft's entire business model has been tying. Countless millions are forced to use Copilot because their IT department has contracts with Microsoft, and those same contracts are why they use Office, Teams, and so on. Their developers use Visual Studio, deploy to Azure, and run it all against SQL Server. Their email comes from Exchange.
It has been an incredibly lucrative strategy. We all herald some CEO's prowess in growing revenue when they've been doing the same playbook for decades now, and have been running on the inertia of Windows dominance on the desktop. Every new entrant is pushed out through countless incredibly lazy IT departments that just adopt whatever Microsoft shits out.
It's actually surprising that the one and only area where this really failed was as they tried to lever tying to the mobile market. A couple of missteps along the way are the only reason every office drone isn't rocking their Lumia ExchangeLive! CoDevice.
voidfunc
IMO, it's time for leadership change at Microsoft. Satya revitalized the company but now it needs a Product person that knows how to rebuild the quality of it's products.
ChicagoDave
Still wonder why the OneDrive mobile can’t find a file and the photo backup has been broken for months. But I have a copilot button in notepad.
Satya’s days are numbered. The OpenAI investment will be a very costly and painful lesson.
raw_anon_1111
And photo back up has never included metadata like locations when backing up to OneDrive making it usekdss
guluarte
Onedrive, that useless app that creates a mess in the desktop if you have a laptop and a desktop like most users
IcyWindows
Most users do not own two computers.
windex
Between the RAM shortage and the forced migration to Win11 along with a forced HW upgrade, I'd start shorting MS asap. This bit about lack of adoption of Copilot is just icing on the cake.
kaluga
The irony is that Microsoft didn’t lose the AI race on models — it lost it on product sense. Copilot isn’t failing because the tech is bad, but because the integration is sloppy, unfocused, and shipped before anyone asked for it.
Google ships features people actually use; Microsoft ships demos people tweet about.
In AI, “ship it now, fix it later” doesn’t work when everyone else is shipping things that already feel finished.
bachmeier
> Google ships features people actually use; Microsoft ships demos people tweet about.
Can't speak to the part about Microsoft, but it's obvious Google is creating AI products the employees want to use and do use.
andy99
Big corporate AI products are all currently stupid bolt-ons that some committee decided solved a problem.
When the internet came out, did many legacy companies lead the way with online experiences, figuring out what the real killer apps now that everyone was connected were? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it, I think it gave rise to some of the present crop of big tech, and others reinvented themselves after the use cases were discovered.
All that to say, I expect the same here. In 10 years there will be AI uses we take for granted, built by companies we haven’t heard of yet (plus the coding apps) and nobody will talk about stupid “rephrase with AI” and other mindless crap that legacy companies tried to push.
devinprater
Lol the Copilot app isn't even that useful on iOS for a blind person. On Android, you type something in, hit sent, and the app pipes the pure output of the AI, Markdown formatting and citation markup included, to the screen reader. That's at least something. I mean it's crumbs, yes, but we blind people are very, very used to crumbs.
On iOS, you type a message and send, and... nothing.
Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average, which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them.
Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.
I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to make that button actually do something, ending the conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"...
Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.
So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??