Microsoft CEO resorts to blogging in defense of AI (opens in new tab)

Technologists are being deliberately misanthropic.

Spreading hate, fear, causing death, and violating every social standard of consent while they do it.

Something ugly has been grown in the bowels of the bay and it needs to stop.

You actually like onenote? Note taking is my primary tool at work but I really hate onenote. The web version can't even search properly in all folders. And there's no desktop Linux version.

Privately I use obsidian with self hosted livesync which is amazing. But at work I have to use Copilot. In some ways I don't mind it in onenote because it actually succeeds in finding stuff the search function doesn't. Syncing to mobile often doesn't work right either.

To me it's the worst O365 app and the one I need the most :(

They're trying to ship AI features. Which is the issue. They shouldn't be shipping AI features, they should be solving problems. If AI features are in service of solving those problems then great. But starting from a fad solution and trying to reverse-engineer a problem is backwards.

What they're certainly trying to do is get good annual reviews which increasingly revolve around saying "Look, I did AI."

It can have access to all your data, but they want you to pay $30 a month for that. The free one doesn't have this access.

Fwiw I have that at work and IMO it's not worth that much. It's more useful than the free one but nothing game changing.

His ghost still lurks in the Windows 11 debacle.

because?

Most people don't think Windows 11 is an improvement over 10.

There's a lot of people that actually started migrating to Mac / Linux when Windows 10 went EOL recently.

Windows 11 was clearly a regression after a very good Windows 10. Task bar from Win10 had been completely deleted and a garbage tablet replacement had been pushed in. It's already what, 3 or 4 years in Win11 an task bar still don't have a comparable functionality. It is also slower in performance, it takes visible seconds just to open a volume slider, which loaded almost instantly on Win10 and same hardware. There were multiple severe problems with AMD performance on release, fixed much later, again showing that hey took inferior code or even build from scratch (meaning Win10 had a superior code inside). Explorer has been degraded significantly, I usually use Total Commander and don't have to interact with it, but unfortunately Save/Open File menus are still Explorer ones. And there it has applied this new file "structure" of Today/LastWeek/LastMonth and so on, which overrides normal sorting rules for some folders like Downloads. finding files are now a damn quest. I had to change my downloads directory to a user created one in every program, just to avoid this crap.

And the list goes on, I just don't remember every single UI regression issue I've encountered right away. But Win11 is clearly bad. Not the awful bad, but annoying bad daily.

I agree with your points... From my POV, the pattern seems to be good/bad/good/bad, but what actually happens is a subtle lowering of our standards and expectations that we have towards what an OS has to do and how it does things. With every bad version, the next version seems to be less bad or even good, but what it does is lower the standard further. Stuff started to move to one drive, office is all cloud now, they are subtly chipping away the personal computing concept...