AI is going to destroy a lot of software companies in a way I haven’t seen talked about yet: it will give CEOs exactly what they ask for.
Before you jump in with “AI produces garbage and isn’t reliable by design,” let me say I agree with you 100%, but for the sake of argument, assume for a moment it could produce a high quality product.
Once a company gets large enough, very often the CEO gets completely removed from how their company actually works. I know I’ve worked at several companies where the job of my boss was to shield me from corporate nonsense so I could make an actually good product. If I and/or my boss were replaced with AI that actually followed the corporate nonsense, the company would go belly-up quite quickly.
I think many CEOs are looking to replace huge fleets of workers with AI they can directly prompt. Even if it worked flawlessly, since they don’t know how their products actually bring value to their customers, they will speed-run torpedoing their company’s place in the market by their own ignorance, ego, and overconfidence.
LostWanderer@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
LMAO The copium that these Microsoft chuds are huffing must be quality stuff for them to ignore criticism from their user base. Their naked desperation for users to embrace agentic Browsers and OS is cringe as fuck. I can only hope that this hurts them badly, when users continue to find ways to circumvent the AI madness that Microsoft has succumbed to. Glad that I switched to Linux and can watch the storm rage on the Broken Window side without worry.
timkenhan@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
It always makes me wonder: what exactly do they have to gain pushing AI to everything? Like, what’s the angle here?
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
I personally see two major factors :
but that’s just me, I can’t claim to understand the inner workings of Microsoft
markz@suppo.fi 3 weeks ago
AI is obviously the next big thing. If your product isn’t full AI right now, you’ll miss out.
So basically I’m convinced the reason everyone’s chasing AI is all just greed and fomo. People at the top of the ladder seem generally more detached from reality.
cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Three thongs
Inucune@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If your program/OS has to constantly phone home to operate, you can’t easily distinguish the traffic related to it’s operation from the traffic snooping all your data. Extra points if you willingly give the AI access or information.
unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Asskissing.
Decisionmakers at MS are divorced from reality. The cognitive dissonance is incredible. They make shit up as they go along and the rest eat it all up and re-spew some new godawful incarnation of the terrible ideas.
None of the decisions are based in reality or quality market research (what users want). Their market research boils down to AI is god and we need to make it even more ungodly.
Which isn’t that surprising. When you have a single company dominating a market niche (say, desktop OS-es on PCs), the focus isn’t increasing, retaining or in any way satisfying customers. It’s making shit up as you go along, trying to get your department’s lines a bit higher than the other one so you as a high-to-mid level manager get that sweet, sweet bonus.
It’s not limited to MS and OS-es. The same thing applies to Google and the search and browser markets, as well as Nintendo and their ecosystem, or HP and printers.
You don’t even need a monopoly for this shit to happen. You just need to be “too big to fail”. Luckily, such unsustainable behavior won’t be “too big to fail” forever, but it’s impressive just for how long a company with such rotten echochamber decisionmaking behaviour can keep chugging along just fine, all the while hurting the customers and the economy in general through knock-on - or shall I say trickle down - effects.
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
One step ahead - installed Syncthing on an always-on Windows box located at my office, pointed it at some needed Google Drive folders, and synced to Debian. The Windows box has other syncing tasks anyway so it’s not costing anything in power. The Debian laptop is becoming my main workhorse.
rclone is too much of a PITA to configure.
insync is way too expensive, especially with multiple Google Drive accounts.
Gnome’s sync thinggie does weird stuff with filenames in LibreOffice etc, is basically unusable.
I need Google Drive due to my existing business setups.