The Brain that Wouldn’t Die

Bing on steroids. 

Google is obsolete. 

With one answer Google's value dropped billions of dollars.

These were some of the hot takes I saw from the last couple of weeks. One would think that after Microsoft's announcement more than a month ago of investing into OpenAI and including the ChatGPT into its products, the buzz would die. The topic kept coming back and it reminded me of the sci-fi movie from 1962, The Brain That Wouldn't Die (a B-movie ripping off Frankenstein, where a mad doctor keeps beings “alive” well after their official expiry date).

In my past post on Microsoft’s announcement, The circus monkey I illustrated why the excitement is misplaced and why this is a race to the bottom of the content swamp. Microsoft's relentless marketing machine is trying to keep the hype alive with examples of use cases: It will help sales people to write emails.

Let's compare, then:

Here’s a sales email that landed in my spam folder:

Hi [Name],

I hope this email finds you well. I am reaching out to you today on behalf of [Company Name], a leading provider of IT and Game Development registered in The Netherlands.

We are actively seeking new clients and opportunities to expand our business, and we believe that working with a professional business development company such as [your company] could be highly beneficial for us. We are looking for a company that can bring in new business and help us reach our goals by finding clients who are interested in our products and services.

I wondered what a sales email written by GPT3 would look like and gave it the following instruction:

“Write me an introductory sales email.”

The result:

Dear [Name],

I hope this email finds you well. My name is [Your Name] and I'm writing on behalf of [Company]. We specialize in providing businesses with innovative solutions to their most complex problems, helping them save time, money and energy by streamlining processes or creating new ones altogether.

Our team consists of highly experienced professionals who have a deep understanding of the latest industry trends and technologies that are essential for successful operations. Our goal is to help our clients optimize their workflow while improving efficiency so they can focus on what matters most – growing their business!

We would love to meet with you at your earliest convenience to discuss how we might be able to assist your organization achieve its goals more effectively through our services. Please let me know if there’s any further information I can provide before then; otherwise, please don't hesitate reach out at any time should questions arise during our conversation.. Thank you very much for taking the time consider working together - we look forward hearing from soon!

Best regards,[Your Name]

As you can see, both the person and the machine are hopeful about my well-being and both are missing the context and reason why I should be interested. Both texts are boring and are sent to scraped lists from the Internet with 'decision maker' as the key qualifier. You can imagine the response to an email blast like this.

Is this what Microsoft had in mind when it promised the integration of AI to Office365? In the above mentioned post, I described it as a publicity stunt with no real substance behind it. Perhaps there is another narrative to consider.

Microsoft wants to get a bigger slice of the online marketing dollars and it is targeting Google's main cash cow. It’s not doing that to win the search engine competition, but to bring enough attention to itself that advertisers are willing to spend more money on Bing, now that it has more traffic. As a side note: both Google and Bing are foremost advertising engines, displaying search results below the money making content.

Microsoft's strategy to deal with its competition is to create (or more often buy) a similar product with very minimum features set on the borderline of useless, and then bundle it with either Windows or Office for free. Then, day after day, month after month surround the competition, suck any oxygen from them and then migrate all the users to its platform. After that, it starts charging money for this add-on.

To name a few examples, past and current: Novell and Slack.

Microsoft is always coming from behind where it feels its competitive advantage or almost monopoly is threatened. That happened with browsers, that happened with search, that happened with cloud. Now that all Microsoft products are in the cloud, it is trying to integrate everything together - Office365 with search and with ChatGPT - to compete with Google.

This is the modus operandi of Microsoft and the recurrent pattern. The only difference this time around: Microsoft has picked on somebody who will punch back very hard.