Using "AI" is no longer optional at Microsoft. Reminds me how when Meta had to force their engineers to use their "Metaverse" product.
If your product doesn't even gain traction internally, maybe it's just ... shit?
(Original title: ‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work)
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/30/ai-is-no-longer-optional-microsoft-admits-ai-doesnt-help-at-work/
The fact that this came at the end of the financial quarter, when a lot of investors are getting increasingly anxious about what returns they're getting from the investment into LLMs, makes me suspect that this is at least partially done as theatre for shareholders.
That doesn't make it better of course; regardless of whether it's theatre or not, it's being enforced on workers.
@[email protected] > These changes are meant to address what Microsoft sees as lagging internal adoption of its Copilot AI services, Old enough to remember when it came out that Microsoft's Windows development was done on Unix machines - you need to get the job done, right?
@tante The Kin 1 and 2 phones would have sold gangbusters too if Microsoft had demanded their employees buy them. 😜
(I spoke to a Microsoft employee after their two week short presence on the market, and he did not even know they existed.)
Mandatory dogfooding ONLY works if the development/QA/product teams listen, FIX THINGS, and also dogfood themselves.
I say this having seen the jumps betwen Solaris (outsider-only)2.0, 2.3, 2.4, (joined-Solaris-team-here) 2.6.
But at least even as an outsider I could answer, "What problem is $NEW_THING trying to solve?"
I do NOT see *any* hard-core GenAI proponents answering that question honestly. There *are* honest answers, but none that justify the hype some want to generate.
Solaris 2.x => OpenSolaris => Oracle Solaris (closed) and #illumos (Open) development learned about the Quality Death Spiral and wrote about it:
tante
Passenger
Martin Vermeer FCD
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
Alper Çuğun-Gscheidel
trisweb
Owl Eyes
Dan McDonald