Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung assured us they were building the future.

Nobody wanted the future they built. After a couple of years, Bixby, Cortana, and Assistant are gone from the spotlight. But not to worry - Microsoft has a new thing it wants to stick into your face! This time it's a physical keyboard button!

2/

LLMs are just the new VUI. A technology that makes *some* things easier, in *some* cases, but is being sprayed on everything because it's the Hot New Thing, and rushing out features is easier than doing real user research and modeling use cases from observed needs.

3/

And when they need features but don't have a conception of how they will solve user problems, low product maturity teams turn to form factors. It's trivial to generate a dozen "ideas" when they are all some variation of "implement a design pattern from somewhere else that we don't have yet."

4/

Add a button. Add a chatbot. Add a dashboard.

Those are all form factors. Which is fine. But when your idea is "the everything button" or "the everything dashboard" what I hear is "we don't know or care what users need, just put everything in there and let them sort it out."

And users will sort it out. They sorted it out with Bixby, through 3rd party patches to disable it. And they'll sort out the Copilot button too.

5/5