That is not a term you are too familiar with, but in the old days (really old days) it became important to clean the reeds of all weeds. Weeds take the nourishment away from the reeds. It seems trivial but when a farmer had to live from a one acre field the impact of weeds becomes irritating and almost damaging. It is that setting that gets us to the Guardian who gives us ‘Microsoft accused of damaging Guardian’s reputation with AI-generated poll’ The article (at https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2023/oct/31/microsoft-accused-of-damaging-guardians-reputation-with-ai-generated-poll) gives us “Microsoft’s news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week.” In my personal view it is a populist setting by a desperate joke (Microsoft).
Take a moment
You see, AI does not exist that is the first thing you need to realise. We do not have the technology to have AI at present. I believe in 10 years we will be able to do so. IBM has two elements that are still in their infancy. The quantum computer and shallow circuits are still not up to speed, but these two essential parts are missing everywhere. I stated before “Machine Learning and Deeper Machine Learning” are two elements and they are awesome, but they are not AI.
The second stage is that whatever Microsoft has, it is lacking data, they don’t have enough and their data is not clean. To be stupid and tasteless to give us a poll with the three options “murder, accident or suicide”, so whatever idiot (at Microsoft) playing spokesperson with the lamest of all excuses “We have deactivated Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles and we are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to help prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future.”
Stage Three
Stage three is painfully obvious. You see the two missing parts of any poll we see tends to be ‘Don’t know’ and ‘no opinion’, but that doesn’t fit the populist agenda of Microsoft. It wants to rock, rule and conquer and it is done emulating generals like Cadorna, Pillow, Haig, Ludendorff, McClellan and fear not, Microsoft has plenty of stupid people ready to emulate whatever they need to make their ego’s shine at the expense of everyone else.
The second part is that any poll is set to a hypotheses and the data once verified will result in top-line numbers. The hypotheses is based on insight and whatever Microsoft has can’t do that. In addition any poll needs to be overlooked and optionally revised. This is pretty much 101 in market research. Microsoft ignored it all, just like they ignore all the usual culprits and they care only for the bottom line. That is one of the clear results that this poll gives you. So, whatever idiot was linked to “we are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content” should not be in any IT business. This should never have happened. All the issues state that their was no proper testing, no proper oversight BEFORE publishing and those hiding behind “better to ask forgiveness then ask permission” will merely assist bringing Microsoft down (and that is fine by me).
And consider that in one swoop they also diminished Microsoft Start, which is about to make it market failure number eight. To lose market share to all these competitor eight times over. How long until the core subscriptions will also lose market share. Google and Adobe are ready to take over. In one article some time ago I made mention on how Adobe could set a much larger stage. A stage where Microsoft will only have Excel to rely upon. So how do you think they will maintain their $198,300,000,000 (2022) annual revenue when they lose fight after fight being short sighted and overlooking the obvious? I will let you ponder that but the results and evidence is showing up in more and more places. So how long until others figure out that Microsoft is pretty much the paper tiger we see, we admire the origami skills that were required to fold it, but we forget that any origami can be crushed with the hand of a child. The one obvious setting overlooked by all and especially people listening to Microsoft Marketing who will claim it is the prettiest and it has the sharpest claws of all the tigers in the world. Yet in the end a small child can crush it, not entirely unlike what Nintendo with its Switch did to the Xbox series X. Once you see that spin you will realise the parts I saw appear on the edge of my eyesight 3 years ago and I have written about it often enough. So when Adobe and Google make a partnership and we see that evolve Microsoft with its Office, its Office365, the connected outages, the Exchange server security holes and we can go on for some time. It is (as I personally see it) a diversifying screw-up of the highest kind and now that players like Adobe, Amazon, Google and IBM have their ducks in a row, they can start taking over Microsoft marketshare. This will not happen overnight, but before December 2026 Microsoft will be what we call an empty egg, all shell and no substance. That was the larger danger that they opened to everyone else and I reckon that a player like India will see their own indie developers take the first bites out of what was once a great company. They merely left it (as I personally see it) to greed driven executives, their biggest mistake. So when I made reference with the chihuahua stating “try Azure, Azure smells nice” I wasn’t kidding. We saw (a few months ago) “Microsoft’s Azure revenue is at least 25% lower than our previous estimates”, so was this fraudulent reporting (like the stuff Sam Bankman-Fried is found guilty of) or was this Microsoft ignoring the system missing part, something any market researcher knows from the get go (see Stage three). Your guess is as good as mine, but a drop of 25% is not a rounding error, it also gives me consideration why Microsoft was so desperate to partner up with Oracle. But Oracle has no master, it can optionally partner with Adobe, IBM and Google too. What it does show (to me at least) is that the Sybase engine that Microsoft bought in 1989 (I think) is no longer hacking it. It was once a contender, now it is down 25% and lagging massively behind Amazon.
Just like the weeds in the reeds, to be an eight time loser takes a particularly creative kind of stupid. But that is just me.
Enjoy Friday, the weekend and its 48 hour span are upon us.