Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions
Microsoft has carefully leaked the news of its BIG SALE of Copilot licenses to Barclays Bank! 100,000 seats! Fantastic! [Bloomberg, archive] That’s a few million dollars? If that. Microsoft claims …
160,000 organisations, sending 251 million messages! [...] A message costs one cent. [...] Microsoft is forecast to spend $80 billion on AI in 2025.
No problem. To break even, they can raise prices just a little bit, from one cent per message to, uuh, $318 per message. I don't think that such a tiny price bump is going to reduce usage or scare away any customers, so they can just do that.
How can we sell such incredible, one-of-a-kind pieces of priceless art at such low, low prices? Easy! We sell in volume!
/s
Remember Stephen Elop of Nokia’s “burning platform” memo in 2011?
I was entering high school in 2011, so no.
Nokia adopted Windows Mobile as their phone operating system — which failed in the market. Nokia used to own the phone market.
The only real experience I have with Nokia is my dad's Nokia 3310 (which he exclusively uses as an alarm clock these days) and nonstop memes about the 3310's supposed indestructibility. Kinda wild to me that Nokia once ruled the entire goddamn phone market.
Nadella going AI is going to be Facebook going Metaverse at the best.
And at worst...well, by my guess, its gonna be "Microsoft accidentally brings forth the Year of the Linux Desktop"
Nokia had great hardware, but crappy software (and I say that as a heavy Series 60 user back in the day). In a parallel world, Windows Mobile could have ridden that hardware to a glorious future, but it was transparent that Elop's acquisition was just part of a Byzantine internal Microsoft play.
The Burning Platform debacle was huge where I live and I remember it quite well.
It seems that Microsoft was planning on coasting on brand recognition, while the public correctly noticed the lack of any real synergy between Windows Phone and Microsoft's desktop computer software. Nokia's hardware was indeed top notch, but WP lacked a killer app, or indeed most apps at all. It missed the train and developers ignored it in favor of iOS and Android.
I doubt MeeGo would have managed to recapture the dominance Nokia had on the pre-iPhone market, but at least nerds like me would have vastly preferred it.
Well, the annoying part is that the burning platform talked by Elop was Maemo/Meego, which was full Linux. Without Elop and Microsoft we would have pure Linux running on phones today. Now we are stuck between two closed source OS for phones.
It was running Qt, so basically any KDE app would be portable on it quite easily.
I was working with Maemo and Qt Symbian in Nokia while this happened, and it makes me sad.
The biggest issue of Windows Phone was that it was even more closed than iOS, thus forcing you to use Microsoft's tooling for developing software. Yes, Android also have similar issues, and the fact that a shitty browsers are being used to run GUI apps is an insult to life itself, but still not as bad as forcing you to rewrite your app in C#, then use Mono to make it run on both Android and iOS. At least on Android, you can write a loader in Java to run your AArch binaries, and at least ALSA will be available for you alongside some other POSIX standards.
Never underestimate the ability of these companies ability to lobby government officials.
