Microsoft, the graveyard of ideas

Do you remember the kids in school who desperately tried to be cool but every single attempt made things worse? They had money to buy cool things but they always missed the mark. In the tech world, that kid is Microsoft. Rich parents but never cool, never hip despite infiltrating every tech party and throwing money left and right.

The latest? Vibe working.

I'll give you a moment to process this before you continue reading.

Back in 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion into the crazy new startup called OpenAI and later in 2023 it gave OpenAI another $10 billion. The association with the cool AI kid made Microsoft relevant again or at least that was the perception. Microsoft bought itself access to the latest tech which everyone was talking about. Right away, Microsoft started working hard to incorporate this awesomeness into its products.

First, it had to rejuvenate the sales of PCs. Adding a new processor - the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) -  to the PC created the AI PC. That on its own did nothing. There had to be support from Windows OS. Microsoft happily obliged by creating another marketing term - the Copilot, your 'everyday AI companion'. The deja vu of Clippy, a piece of software which made it to the top 10 of the most hated programs sprang to mind, a memory which Microsoft desperately tried to erase.

But once you start traveling the AI roadmap, you can't stop. Microsoft introduced Recall, which was built into Windows 11 with the promise to 'search across time to find the content you need.' The way Microsoft built this amazing time machine was to scrape your screen and keep taking snapshots. Snapshots which would include anything and everything on your screen including sensitive data like health information or banking. Yes, it was a Total Recall.

And then, another term escaped the labs and we were introduced to Vibe Coding, which is supposed to help especially non-technical people produce millions of lines of software. Basically the software will write itself driven by instruction from people who can't operate a microwave.

Since Microsoft is driven by marketing messaging, it was just a matter of time before the team came up with Vibe Working.

This new product was introduced to the market by Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group. She introduced it with: “Today we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat.” Hard to understand what exactly it is, but let's go with the flow. Next one - “In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts.” Now we are adding even more buzzwords to the mix.

Still no idea. What is it going to do? Now, Ms. Chauhan is getting into this tightly choreographed language dance, where she's trying not to insult its user base by calling them stupid and at the same time trying to tell them that they need help because they are not that smart. “It’s designed to make the complex parts of Excel more accessible to users that aren’t experts.” And “It’s not just simple assistive short answers, but board-ready presentations or documents,” “It’s work, quite frankly, that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.” Quite frankly, you are not an expert on Excel, and you never produced something remotely presentable to the board of our company. Something which a junior straight out of an MBA program does without a problem.

To assure you about how good the product is Ms. Chauhan assures us that “We have spent a ton of time making sure that the validation loop on all of these sub-agents is pretty tight.” Only to reveal that “Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench,” which is still below human accuracy of 71.3%. Do I read this correctly that this new MBA wonder kid is only 7.2% better than a coin toss?

Not to worry, it gets better.

The best part of this announcement was the revelation that this new thing will be powered by AI built by Anthropic!! Yes, a major competitor to OpenAI. The OpenAI to which Microsoft shoveled billions of dollars. The OpenAI which just this week reached a $500 billion valuation.

It was the heart sinking sentence - I love you, but ... “We are committed to OpenAI, but we are starting to explore with the model family to understand the strength that different models bring and understand how we build the best composition for our product.”

A thought - We have here OpenAI with its amazing ChatGPT, which is 'basically' operating on the PhD level - as we are told. A PhD level which should be much higher than a freshman from a major consulting firm. And yet, it can't produce a board level document. That PhD level AI is replaced with something much better. Something which is only 7% better than coin toss. Something which “delivers best-in-class, AI-generated spreadsheets and documents right in the apps millions of people rely on every day at work.” In translation - Microsoft makes sure that it can consistently deliver misery to millions of people around the world.

The recurrent pattern? Microsoft, an unimaginative company, where the marketing department is in this never ending nightmare to spin nothing into something. A company where the word 'innovation' is used as an excuse to increase price for products which haven’t changed in years. A company which is desperately trying to buy its way in. Every attempt is worse and worse.