Latest example:
Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496465)
Not only the rename is absurd, but the page (office.com) looks heavily vibe-coded
For the last year or so all orders from leadership have been "build more AI, show AI usage" even above things like stability and reliability.
There was no recognition from leadership over what use cases worked or not, and they appeared to believe their own hype.
To complement this, there is near to no long-term accountability for upper leadership for failure, so even as features underperform and strategy turns out to be a flop, they will continue to make millions a year, having layoffs every 6 months, and then acting surprised pikachu when morale is down and top engineers are looking to the door, since salary is barely competitive even if you are a top performer getting special stock awards.
Half of the people are just talking about layoffs and other are keeping thier mouth shut. There is sense that execs are making one bad decision after another. Xbox division knows this very well, the trust in that division is near zero, but now it has spread to even the orgs which were doing decently well.
Product quality is also completely dogshit/dogslop, we have done nothing in last 2 years except making our products worse. We do hear reports of boomer companies moving to Apple every now and then, and these rumours are increasing. Windows 11 is a disaster, Copilot is an convenience no one asked for. Users are contacting support every day asking how to disable all these features but execs keep ignoring users. The consensus among top guys is that customer is wrong and we need to teach them.
Trusting stock market more than the customers is now the industry standard.
1. Saying "AI" makes stock price go up
2. Make all things AI
3. Stock price will go even more up
As for everything else, subordinated to the aforementioned.
Since last year? Burning themselves into the ground has been their M.O. for the last decade and a half, at least.
I'd argue enshitification started in earnest with Windows 8.
AI just enables them to speed up the process dramatically.
Microsoft would be such an easy fix to get back on the right path, but Nadella is not going to do that, and nobody is going to make you or me the CEO.
Why treat workers right, properly resource teams, and build quality stuff on a roadmap that looks beyond the next quarter when you can just treat your workers, product and customers as if they're all disposable trash.
Basically the standard Fortune 500 playbook with few exceptions.
>...but Nadella is not going to do that, and nobody is going to make you or me the CEO.
That's a good thing. When they eventually fail completely and sell their assets, it'll be a source of cheap datacenters for the competition—at least assuming demand eventually chills out.
10 and 11 are the evil shit. 11 especially so.
Office 365 app suddenly is not called that. It's called copilot. When you open it it just shows chat. No files, no word, no documents. You have to try hard to find your files back.
So suddenly an app that you used to edit word documents and print PDFs is completely gone with no warning. Word doesn't exist. Even Office doesn't exist :D How are clients supposed to navigate that shitshow?
I wonder if all this shoving of AI down peoples throats could trigger a bit of a backlash around vendor software updates / proprietary software in general. There's this huge infrastructure of Windows Update, chrome auto-updates, app stores and SaaS that predated and enabled all this... and people accepted it when they were getting bugfixes and security updates out of it, but now it's getting used to take away the features they wanted and replace them with worse and worse versions of crapware.
All of a sudden... the free software world of updating when _you_ want the new version, and being able to fork the old version if you want, starts to look pretty great.
I just found that it's called "myopia" in English, while trying to find how short-sightedness is spelled.
Multiple generations knew what Word and Office was. That beats even twitter rename fiasco.
The sooner they drown the better for everyone and the industry.
So most people.
Get out of MAANG. There is no decent one, only different flavors of evil and abuse. Integrity is worth more than money. Form a worker-owned co-op consultancy with other decent people and create enduring stability.