Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, has shared his opinion after recent pushback from users online that are becoming frustrated with Copilot and AI on Windows. In a post on X, Suleyman says he’s mind blown by the fact that people are unimpressed with the ability to talk fluently with an AI computer.
His post comes after Windows president Pavan Davuluri was recently met with major backlash from users online for posting about Windows evolving into an agentic OS. His post was so negatively received that he was forced to turn off replies, though Davuluri did later respond to reassure customers that the company was aware of the feedback.
Never seen someone with a mind so easily blown.
At the idea of customer choice and feedback, no less; like those things are somehow BAD.
Microsoft is truly the king of putting out a product that no one wanted or asked for, then wondering why no one wants it. I’m sure they will soon begin the second phase of any Microsoft product: spending a small country’s GDP marketing it to try to get people to use it, despite it being prominently displayed on approximately 5 billion operating systems already.
A tried and true strategy to piss through more money than god to justify spending more money than god building the thing that no one wants. Looking at you, IE and edge.
Don’t forget cortana!
What about that 365 bullshit?
Forget what?
I think it’s an old UK only model of ford that they stopped making in 1982
How could I when I’ve been being notified it’s existence for the better part of the last decade?
Cortana was great on WP before they dumbed it down for W10 and then killed it. It gave you daily summaries in the morning and was able to do basic assistant stuff like reminders and simple queries pretty well. Then W10 came and it became just a shitty web search.
I hate tech companies and the general public’s collective amnesia of functioning digital assistants, so I’m co-opting this as a copypasta.
Google Assistant was great on Android before they dumbed it down for Gemini and then killed it. It gave you daily summaries in the morning and was able to do basic assistant stuff like reminders and simple queries pretty well. Then Gemini came and it became just a shitty web search.
You know what I want MS to do? Remove all the extra crap and just be a simple OS. The desktop should use 500MB or so of memory, boot should be a few seconds, and launching programs should be a few seconds. Don’t do any weird caching nonsense, I don’t need tens of GBs of OS nonsense, just give me a simple OS.
I have that w/ Linux. The only value Windows provides is app compatibility. Stop trying to be anything more than that.
Man, can you imagine how good a bare bones version of win 10 would be? Drop all the useless software and telemetry services, only run the 3 or 4 background services that people use, and use flat window decorations like win 8. Essentially a modernized windows XP. Would be rad.
There’s multiple projects out there for it. Windows 10 Ameliorated is/was an open source project of PowerShell scripts you run against the installation media (and I think afer install, it’s been a while) to get LTSC Windows 10 stripped down as much as possible.
It’s what I run in a VM for my work’s VPN connection software (and then for the RDP session too). Keeps an extra level of separation from my personal stuff.
I could probably get things working in a Linux VM, but it’s not worth the trouble for me.
Yes, very true. It would be so nice to be able to get that as an OOBE behavior rather than a hacked together set of registry hacks and patched executables. Not denigrating the devs of these projects, they do an amazing job out engineering Microsoft’s attempts to stop them. It’s just absurd that the primary/only option for the operating system of a set of devices as ubiquitous as personal computers is such advertisment riddled shit with no ability to even buy out of it.
spending a small country’s GDP marketing
Not to mention the energy demand of a similar small country
In a scale of 1-10 how likely are you having conversations about AI with copilot to your colleagues ?
10, about how I hate it and wish it would go away.
Sounds like people like talking about AI, time to push for even more of it!
Well my guy have you actually used and I mean really sat down and used your burning pile of slop for an excuse of an OS? I bet you haven‘t because you don‘t have to. Your assistants have to deal with that and they get paid to not complain about it. Meanwhile you get paid to waste oxygen and have lost touch with reality to the point you‘re no longer able to contribute to society in your current position. How sad.
Hey don’t make fun of him too much, he might have to buy another yacht to make himself feel better.
Holy fuck. I have to paste shit from reports into Outlook daily and that stupid fucking menu that pops up asking about if I want the formatting to match, that you can’t get rid of, drives me crazy.
And! And! You want a sync button? It’s not just hanging out anymore, you have to find it. Don’t like more clicks? That’s ok, use the F key. But not F5 like is standard on browsers! Enjoy pressing F9.
First world problems but they’re mine!
I’ll bet I can make your left eye twitch.
Are you ready?
A “large” amount of information.
Bitch, my computer has 128 gigabytes of RAM. It’s a tiny god. The fact that I have as many as 100 cells copied to the clipboard (which is the threshold that triggers this stupid message, if you’ve ever wondered) is not even a rounding error. I’m sure this was marginally important in 1982 or whenever this was first coded into Excel, but today my computer could lose an entire megabyte of memory or maybe even ten down between the couch cushions and neither of us would notice.
There is still no setting to disable this dumbshit message.
OMG yes… I wrote a macro that copies thousands of rows and then closes a file and I had to add a step to copy just one cell before closing to work around this stupid message.
i heard one of the biggest complaint, is the taskbar is right in the middle and you cant alter it in the settings. our work is using the ugly W11 right now on thier computers.
I have to paste shit from reports into Outlook daily and that stupid fucking menu that pops up asking about if I want the formatting to match, that you can’t get rid of, drives me crazy.
Every other piece of software: ctrl+shift+v pastes without formatting.
Microsoft software: ctrl+shift+v does nothing, if you want to paste without formatting you have to use our menus (for some reason).
And on the subject, apparently in a Google document you can not right click to paste without having some add-on installed. Ctrl+v works fine, the context menu shows you paste as an option, but if you try to actually paste through the context menu you get an error saying you need to install an add-on. What the actual fuck?
Probably because they insist on replacing the browser’s right click menu with theirs, and web pages can’t just grab the clipboard contents for security reasons.
Ctrl+Shift+V does actually paste without formatting in ip to date Office products. I do it a lot.
I think part of the problem is they all use Win 11 Enterprise, which actually isn’t that crappy because all of the bloat can be configured and disabled and most likely their IT department has done that.
They should be forced to use Win 11 Home for a while to see how everyone else is viewing things.
is thats what businesses use? our work uses computer with windows 11, seems very unweildy, and sitll has bloat(from news)
You know what would impress me? That I would be able to start using my computer when I boot it in the morning.
As it stands I have to wait some 5 to 10 minutes before the mouse pointer decides to cooperate with me. And god forbid I attempt to start a Teams meeting, either the camera, mic or screen share will not work at all.
What the hell is this dumbass operating system doing that is more important than responding to the damn user?
Same machine, booting Linux, lets me start working right away. No stuttering, no freezes. Go figure.
It’s sad that all of those things were solved problems 20 years ago.
Like, Skype was usable on pretty much any computer with a webcam in 2006. Computers booted in a couple minutes with their spinning disk drives.
The tech is faster, more reliable, higher resolution, etc, but the software is fucking ass.
Using electron for seemingly every app will do that.
Yeah I doubt that’s the issue on a PC with 64GB RAM.
Probably more to do with the fact that every app is now designed to gather as much data as possible to build an ad profile on you.
Yup, and Linux probably boots faster. On my NVMe w/ full-disk encryption (not through the disk’s microcontroller, through an outside FS), I boot to desktop in like 5 sec or less, and the desktop is fully usable. If I want to launch a program, I type the name and hit enter, and it launches in a couple seconds.
My M3 Mac is a little worse, since it gets confused about launching an app vs looking for a file, and it takes a bit longer to boot (20-30 seconds?).
But my SO’s Windows machine is something else. It takes a minute or two to boot, and after that it takes a minute or two to “settle.” I have no idea what it’s doing, but I generally get up and get a drink or something when my SO asks me to get something pulled up. Why is it so crappy?
xxx@xxx:~$ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 1.514s (kernel) + 3.331s (userspace) = 4.846s graphical.target reached after 3.328s in userspace.My machine is instantly usable in <5 seconds.
❯ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 14.565s (firmware) + 5.778s (loader) + 2.920s (kernel) + 3.307s (initrd) + 3.972s (userspace) = 30.544s graphical.target reached after 3.926s in userspace.You’re letting me down firmware!
What the hell kind of hardware are you running, son? Is your system waiting for the superconducting magnets of your particle accelerator to cool? Is your 400 lbs Honeywell tape drive running self-assessment tests? Is the communications array realigning to restore the connection to your hidden villainous moon base? What is taking fourteen seconds?
That’d at least make sense, this is a (literal) black box. Seriously, my monitor takes long enough to wake that it’s at the boot loader screen by the time it’s ready.
I found a post on Reddit claiming it’s a RAM thing, and I should enable XMP to avoid it. But I’ve already got XMP enabled so I need to poke around it again.
And also disable the 5 second delay in the bootloader, not like I’m ever using that fallback option.
The usual suspect in this scenario is crappy USB devices, hubs in particular. Unplugging all USB devices and rebooting to check the difference is always a solid and easy first diagnostic step. If that turns out to be the issue you can add them back piecemeal to isolate the offender(s).
Back when I used a HDD in my laptop, I was able to get my boot down to 20s or so. I don’t understand what MS is doing…
I completely trust Systemd to accurately report on itself, the same as I trust American cops to police themselves.
Yup, and Linux probably boots faster.
Someone once wrote something that compiled the Linux kernel on bootup with TinyC. Even this would be faster.
Install an outbound firewall and be horrified by how much Windows phones home and how much telemetry it continuously exfiltrates without your consent.
5 to 10 minutes before the mouse pointer decides to cooperate with mr
This is not a typical experience, you have some kind of hardware issue or corruption / incongruities in your OS deployment.
you have some kind of hardware issue or corruption / incongruities in your OS deployment.
Windows, windows is the corruption you’re looking for.
That’s very funny to say, but Windows 11 boots faster than Linux on my disk boot machine. I do have full disk encryption on Linux tbf, but Windows is very fast from cold off to login screen.
It’s a shit OS I’m forced to use for work, but it boots very quickly.
His boot time in Linux says it’s not a hardware issue. Just sayin’
Is this “git gud”, victim blaming, or a mix of both? Ignoring the comma splice.
You’d think if there was a janky bit of gear in there
- Windows would tell you about it
- Linux would suck the same.
Neither appear to be the case.
Or perhaps it could be something other than malice?
This person is putting up with a misbehavior they don’t have to live with. They’re presenting the perception that it’s due to the nature of the operating system.
My Toyota engine dies when I idle, therefore all Toyotas and fundamentally flawed.
Flawed logic, no? And yet, when it comes to tech, plenty of folks apply the same type of thought pattern.
You’re right that one would think the issue is as it seems on the surface. Computers are actually a bit more complicated than that.
One fail mode of memory is the occasional bit flip silently corrupting data in the background. As time goes on and new data is written to a disk, things can get weirder and weirder over time.
We don’t know if Windows and Linux are sharing a physical disk (I hope for their sake they aren’t) and we don’t know how old the Linux deployment is, so it’s possible it hasn’t had the opportunity to get progressively messed up enough yet.
Another key variable is that the Linux environment might not be interacting with every single piece of hardware, or that the structure of those interactions could result in symptoms manifesting differently or not at all.
I’ve had situations where a MacBook’s keyboard and trackpad were completely functional in Linux and Windows, but absolutely dysfunctional in any MacOS based environment. The fix? Replacement trackpad cable.
At the end of the day, the situation they’re describing is not common for the OS and indicates something is very wrong.
There’s plenty to complain about with Windows, but if this were a typical experience people would not be putting up with it.
A device with those symptoms coming through my shop is statistically likely to be leaving with replaced parts, a component level repair, or at the very least a complete OS and Driver reinstallation after passing extensive diagnostic testing and behavioral isolation.
You’re right, I hate windows and especially 11 but even my shit spec work laptop running 11 boots to desktop in under a minute.
I literally don’t turn my computer off because even with an SSD windows takes so long to boot up properly. I still have to restart it every few days because memory management is shit.
I literally don’t turn my computer off because even with an SSD windows takes so long to boot up properly.
I admin several hundred Windows PCs so I’m pretty confident in saying that your computer is either a moldy potato, something is wrong with your hardware, or you have a very unusual software load. A modern Windows 10/11 desktop should go from power off to logon screen in < 30 seconds and from logon to desktop in < 30 seconds. Even an 8th Gen Core i5 with 8GB of RAM, a SATA SSD, and a full stack of security software will be ready to use in 60 seconds or less.
Whatever your problem is it ain’t “windows”…and I’m typing this comment from my home PC running Linux.
My win 11 pc (decently modern Ryzen 5600G) used to boot in 10~20 seconds, and then suddenly was taking 10+ minutes to boot. The problem? An external hdd. Removed that and instantly went back to 10~20 seconds boot. The people above 100% are having some sort of issue and just don’t know.
And Windows isn’t telling them. That’s part of the issue. If Cortana could tell them “this boot was slow because your video driver missed an update necessary for other system packages. Would you like me to show you how to fix that now?” that would be a win for your typical user.
Now THIS is a usecase that I can get behind. Microsoft shouldn’t be forcing AI, and instead just develop an optional tool for diagnosing PC issues. Problems logged in Event Viewer are not easy to understand, and an AI could be what is needed for making the unreadable into something actionable.
I do have several external harddrives, three monitors, and a MIDI keyboard. But “this computer will run fine as long as you don’t use the usb sockets” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement itself.
I have a Win11 PC sitting here with a Core i5 8500t, 16G of RAM, 1T M.2 SATA NVME, attached to a three position KVM. Hooked to that KVM are three monitors (2 x DP, 1 x HDMI), wireless keyboard & mouse, Creative USB T60 speakers, and a USB WebCam (logi 970e). Since it’s a PC I use for work it’s Entra joined and InTune managed running Managed AV, MDR, and a DNS Filtering Agent. Oh, and the drive is encrypted with BitLocker.
So I basically have as much USB attached crap as you do, sans hard drives, and it’s going through the USB Hub that’s built into my KVM.
Time from power off to usable desktop for that machine is under 40 seconds.
Your external hard drives are a likely culprit. I’d guess that they are either on an older interface or your PC is set to do a full AV scan of attached drives at boot.
Don’t get it twisted, Microsoft and their products piss me off on a daily basis. I’m not defending them.
10 minutes??? Did Linux just won by literally doing its own thing?
Lay off the coke man, talking to a computer isnt impressive when the average persons hydro bill goes up each month to support your bullshit
God I love that movie.
I don’t want to talk fluently with a computer, I want it to do things deterministically in a way I as a human being cannot. If I want a discussion, I have it with a human being.
Call me old fashoined, but i like my computers to do exactly what I yell them to do.
Best typo ITT by far.
Exactly, if I wanted a discussion with a computer, I wouldn’t have gotten married.
As has been said elsewhere about everything Microsoft is pulling:
If your LLM was worth using you wouldn’t need to force anyone to use it.
AI bros are beyond delusional.
Well the promise of AI is what they’re banking on: denying the skilled’s access to the wealth while not denying the wealth’s access to skill.
Come on guys, let us dominate everything while also denying you social security.
-The rich AI bros.
I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.
That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).
To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).
It’s impressive, just not particularly useful, and certainly not something most people consider a priority.
Windows still takes forever to delete files, has a search indexer that makes laptops too hot to touch, steals focus while you’re typing in a password, takes much longer than Linux to open a web browser, turns apps white and “Not responding” for no apparent reason, has an ugly and slow Start menu that doesn’t foreground the things you want, pops up needless crap like stock tickers and news stories while you’re trying to get on with other things, sneakily turns on settings you deliberately turned off, and hassles you continually to agree to things you already said no to. And it spies on you.
Microsoft, if you’re looking to please users, those are all higher priorities for real users than any AI. But you’re not looking to please users, are you? Because Windows is for Microsoft, not for users.
It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,
I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).
For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.
I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.
I agree that they are useful for this. In fact, as a programmer I find them quite useful whenever I need a bit of a guided start on something that otherwise I’d have to trawl the internet to find. Once the LLM has given a pointer it’s easier to follow up with appropriate resources. And the LLM is useful for writing code when the code is predictable and you know reasonably precisely what you need, where the LLM really just saves you some typing and you know how to review it for correctness. Outside of these cases you have to be pretty careful how you use them.
But I don’t think LLMs are as useful a tool as the business people want them to be. Programming is unusual in that it involves very predictable patterns, and the aim is to find the most appropriate pattern for the task. And software documentation too follows very predictable patterns. Where an LLM has seen the exact same pattern many times, it will be good at producing it on demand. So programming and explaining software is a good use case for LLMs. But not many areas of activity are like this, and when you get out into all the nuance and complexity of other less formal domains, LLMs are so prone to slipping up that they’re much less useful.
I’ve tried getting LLMs to summarize notes for talks on complex topics, and they are not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to tidy documents and they’re not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to explain complex topics for someone who knows nothing, and they can be good at it but they can also be misleading, and you don’t know which one you’re getting unless you go to other sources you could have checked in the first place.
So I think they’re most useful for a quick orientation on a topic that points you to further sources, or for very highly formalized activities like programming. But they can’t be trusted for math or physics or law or medicine or literature or philosophy or complex decision making or psychology or any number of other areas.
Yeah. It technically very impressive and and can have very impressive results if used properly. But all of the excellent uses and technical marvels get vastly overshadowed non-technical management going “what if you could have a chat with your toaster as it toasts your bread? Genius.” The people at the top have no fucking idea what they have and thus they have no idea how to use it which is why they throw everything at it to see what sticks.
people are unimpressed with the ability to talk fluently with an AI computer.
I already communicate fluently with my computer. I double click an icon to communicate to my computer “open this”. I type into a search field to communicate “find this string”.
At no point do I want to communicate to my computer “log everything I do, then use those logs to give me something that isn’t what I’m asking for.”
Of course they will never define “fluent”. They can’t do that because then they’d be proven as lying hacks, or else setting a low bar that was met several years ago.
I already communicate fluently with my computer. I double click an icon to communicate to my computer “open this”.
Wish I could upvote this twice.
At no point do I want to communicate to my computer “log everything I do, then use those logs to give me something that isn’t what I’m asking for.”
Won’t stop them from trying to shove it down our throats.
principalskinner.jpg
Pro tip: when your customers don’t like your product, it’s not their fault. It’s yours, and the appropriate response is not complaining or incredulity that people don’t like it. The appropriate response is to change the product or scrap it completely.
“The customer is always right” might get misused a lot, but it is correct in this instance.
If a lot of your customers don’t like something, it’s not something wrong with the customers.
One of the older variations of the expression is, “The customer is always right in matters of taste.” Here we’re talking about reactions to reality, so it doesn’t quite apply directly, but still, these people are probably honest about what they feel.
He might be the dumbest ceo out there, and that is an impressive feat.
Nope. Ballmer is and always will be the all time king R. He’s the dude that had MS pilot away from handheld devices because nobody will ever use cell phones. This was when MS was the only credible mobile OS. He oversaw Vista, he oversaw 8, both of which were complete disasters.
Glad I covered my tracks with a well placed ‘might’ lol.
I forgot about that idiot and would love to go back to forgetting them.
C’mon… One more memory for the road…
Let’s throw a chair in his honour.
Stiff competition, that. This guy is just playing it safe, saying what his bosses want to hear.
Business Idiots. Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about how many business leaders are out of touch with users and their own products. They live in their own little pocket dimension with each other, and only really care about shareholders.
