cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1131961/former-microsoft-vp-says-microsoft-missed-the-ai-wave-like-the-internet-and-mobile-as-co

Context

He was replying to a tweet with the text:

In the past 6 weeks we have seen a rather strong shift for both Xbox and Windows implementing requested features after years of ignoring them.

This is great but…what changed for both of this massive orgs to suddenly start listening?

Let’s see…

1. You make Bing your biggest bet with AI. Not a single percentage point of user share goes up from that investment
2. You bet on Copilot with AI. Not even 3% of paying users use it, even when the distribution is massive, and it’s pre-deployed right in their faces
3. Then you hire the wrong people and assign them to jobs they are obviously not qualified to do. It gets worse.
4. Your OEMs invest on NPUs to then find out that nobody cares because not a single valuable use case was built for those in Windows/Office.
5. Your GitHub, which should be thriving in the age of AI, drops below 90% SLA
6. Your COGS go up significantly
7. Your shares drop significantly
8. The only thing you can brag about looks like an utilities company, not a software company
9. Shareholders start asking the hard questions

There’s a point where you start getting fun phone calls and an increasing number of voices start asking you to maybe listen to customers.

I say that as a very positive thing (I know I don’t sound like that, I’m grumpy by nature, can’t help it). This is actually positive: If you don’t push for change, change pushes you.

Hit Factory Reset might be what Microsoft actually needed, since Hit Refresh wasn’t enough. Even if it comes with a ton of disruptions.

Source: Mat Velloso on X/Twitter.

Mat Velloso who was most recently the Vice President of Product for the Developer Platform at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. He also led AI developer products at Google DeepMind (including the Gemini API and Google AI Studio). But before his stints at Google and Meta, Velloso spent over 12 years at Microsoft, where he served as a Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows and, interestingly, spent four years as the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.