Former Microsoft VP says Microsoft missed the AI wave like the internet and mobile, as Copilot scales back in Windows 11
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/05/17/former-microsoft-vp-says-microsoft-missed-the-ai-wave-like-the-internet-and-mobile-as-copilot-scales-back-in-windows-11/
38 Comments
It wouldn’t be Microsoft if they weren’t late to the party. The weirder part to me is usually they offer a better option that’s just too late to get a foothold. I thought Zune was way better than iPod, and to this day I don’t think I’ve used a version of iOS or Android that I liked more than Windows Phone. Copilot is ass.
Did they miss the AI wave, or did they completely botch their own rollout by ignoring their customers and making the wrong move most of the time?
Funny how they present it like something that happened to them, and not something their shitty executives did purposefully, one bad decision at a time:
>“We’re going to take a picture of your screen every 30 seconds. This is definitely a feature you want, and not us just blatantly trying to sell all your data”
>“Copilot is great on GitHub, let’s slam some shitty version of it into literally every project we have. Now in notepad!”
>“We’re forcing you to upgrade to a worse OS, your 3 year old laptop doesn’t meet requirements. Get fucked”
>“Teams is going to track your location, and it’ll tell your boss when you take a piss”
>”Xbox will come with a Kinect always on, pay for your own 1984 telescreen. Hey where did everyone go?”
Good riddance consumer windows, every day that Linux gets better at games is another day that you lose the only reason any consumer should use your product. Unfortunately, they’ll probably stick around in businesses and the corporate world.
Being more intentional about how Copilot integrates” is corporate speak for “sorry we duct-taped AI to everything and nobody wanted it.
While microsoft jumped first with their openai investment they have always lacked vision.
Like how azure is only used bc they bundle 365 with it Microsoft isn’t good at innovation.
Say what you want about llms but google came from being behind to implementing llms/ai much more intuitively in their products where if people want to use gemini they get value.
Microsoft just slapped copilot everywhere and called it a day and that isn’t enough for people to want to use it.
Former Microsoft VP, as is typical is an idiot.
They weren’t late, they were early investors in OpenAI and still hold a significant share, as well as Azure supplying compute to some of them as well. In addition Microsoft was the first to start integrating it into the OS ahead of their only real AI/OS competition Google with Android. Apple as usual is WAY behind.
The problem is Microsoft trying to integrate a thing that’s not ready, into an OS that’s on its last legs. They didn’t miss any AI wave, they forgot they were an OS company first and decided to stop investing in their gateway.
And now Alphabet is trying to integrate AI into a new AI based operating system, Aluminium, while at the same time thinking they aren’t a search engine company and giving up their cash cow as well.
Microsoft built the OpenAI partnership and then watched OpenAI launch DeployCo with 150 forward deployed engineers to cut Azure out of the enterprise services layer. Their own partner is eating the high margin work that used to make Microsoft Microsoft.
Internet and mobile were waves. AI is a *manufactured and premature* wave at best. But Microslop managed to screw it up both ways – worse than the competition and particularly badly force fed. Good job.
At least with MS I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to but Android put Gemini on my Samsung phone and now everytime I bring up maps in the car Gemini gives me this long speech introducing itself. It’s super annoying and it is absolute garbage.
Were they really late to the party? I felt like Microsoft was actually first, before Google and Apple. Copilot entered everything in Windows pretty darn fast.
Copilot cant code properly to save its life, it’s such a joke
You know for a company that drops the ball on some major shite they’re doing reasonably well.
Imagine what could have been though.
Great. How about firing your VP of AI who keeps making BS prediction. You can recoup same of that AI costs
They do this for every new tech. They show up early, underinvest in UX, refuse to iterate, and poison their wells.
for reference see zune, gfwl, windows mobile, HoloLens, windows MR, Cortana
No, they didn’t “miss it.” Apple missed it, and is somehow reaping the rewards for it. Microsoft tried to get on from day one, but kept fumbling.
Honestly, fucking up the AI hype machine might be the smart play in the long run.
Microsoft had (and still has) so many angles to succeed. If I were still a stockholder (I’m not), I would be very disappointed. Just picking one little corner of the world: Microsoft Foundry Local. It could be important for secure, local AI. It could support all the latest models. It could be deeply integrated into the OS. Unfortunately, it is not.
I work in the AI field and use the tools (not Copilot) every day. I always think that if Copilot is the way many people interact with AI in the workplace it is of no surprise to me that they hate the damn thing… it’s useless and poorly built
So you’re saying the Zune of the AI world.
Copilot is fucking ass man. They went all in on deep integration when all devs really want is autonomy and agents that do whatever the fuck they want.
Why the fuck would I trust a blackbox…especially one that costs an arm and a leg
Anyone know how to change the Copilot key back to CTRL?
MS should break the company into multiple parts. And of course they’ll probably say that there are multiple parts already but they’re not really multiple parts. The most important part for most of us would be the operating system part, and those people should be rabid about making sure that the operating system is rock fucking solid and fast. And every time that anybody from any other part of the company wants them to make their operating system shittier they should tell them to go fuck themselves.
And because Microsoft is never ever ever going to do that, we must as soon as we can find another system that allows us to get our work done we’re gonna tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves.
Microsoft had exclusive commercial access to the strongest general-purpose AI model at the time by far, GPT-4, for almost a year before any competitors could match its capabilities, and they wasted that advantage.
You have to understand that these corporations are complet echo chambers where for the sake of a promotion, people will push the team, product, company in a shithole just to get their lil win at all costs
Let’s not even touch ego, good luck convincing most EMs that no, they are wrong, not like that.
The entire tech sector deceserves to burn, so a few can revive and drive innovation for actually useful stuff
It still blows my mind how Copilot sucks at helping you troubleshoot Microsoft software. “How do I do X?” And it tells you to click a button that very much is not there.
Clippy was ahead of its time. Too bad it was annoying and mostly unusable.
It really is like Steve Jobs said. They just have no taste. The Windows 11 rollout with Copilot via the billions invested in OpenAI is the best example yet of just how tasteless and wreck-less Microsoft’s implementation can be.
I think what it boils down to is, they have such a monopoly they can avoid to be tasteless and wreck-less.
Microsoft hasn’t actually innovated in over 20 years.
Can I use AI to format indentation, lists, and numbering in MS Word in May 2026? No.
What changed at MSFT in the last 12 yrs?
Think hard.
Switching over to Linux this week was seamless for me personally. I keep meaning to switch back over to archive the old OS properly, but everything just works and I don’t care to see windows again
Maybe they should’ve listened to instantaneous, consistent, and widespread backlash and saved a ton of money in the process.
You didn’t miss the AI wave. You anticipated an AI wave that any reasonable human being could have told them wasn’t going to happen
We have access to Copilot where I work. I setup a really simple prompt where I import a report, have it grab particular data from it and then have give it to me in an excel file. It actually gives me the excel file maybe 60% of the time. I have to say “Where is the excel file?” or “You didn’t provide me the excel file.” Like 3 times then close it and go back into it to actually get it to give me the file. In the amount of time it takes to do that I could just grab the data myself like I was before we had access to Copilot.
Microsoft could gain a crazy amount of consumer support if they simply stripped away all AI and didn’t use it.
Make solid products *that work* and stop jamming stuff no one wants down our throats. They would cement their user base instead of making everyone jump ship while they continue to botch their AI implementation and waste mountains of money.
Yeah, but then there’s still time to be early for the next wave….the one where we wave AI bullshit goodbye.
You missed nothing, people DO NOT WANT AI.
instead of being shoved in everyones face you should have just left it to be a neich thing or strickly for business.
>Microsoft missed the AI wave like the internet and mobile, as Copilot scales back in Windows 11
How can you ‘miss the wave’ for a feature that very few people give a shit about. What is it with technology people from silicon valley who are addicted to the smell of each others farts to the point that they’re that out of touch regarding what normal people use technology for. The biggest winner out of all this has been Apple who decided that digging a big hole in the ground, filling it up with hundreds of billions of dollars, dousing it in petrol then setting a lighter to it was maybe a bad idea. The second winner in all this was Google who did the initial research into generative pre-trained transformers but decided to let someone else burn billions before seeing whether it was worth turning from something that is theoretical into something useful.
Edit: An the AI fanboys are out with their bots, why aren’t I surprised, less than 1 minute.
I mean copilot is on one part of why windows 11 is as bad as windows vista
Because the only people nailing it as a societal integration rn are the Chinese. No corporatist forcing down their throat & promising to end their careers, just open models that can be run locally to be integrated logically & appropriately.
But stocks gotta go brrr