If only Microsoft products would look like their demos

It’s an impressive demo, but:

  1. It won’t be available to Microsoft 365 Family subscribers
  2. It won’t be available to Microsoft 365 Education subscribers
  3. It won’t be available to Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscribers

#1 and #2 will be Microsoft’s decision. #3 will be due to Enterprise admins switching off anything remotely useful. Case in point was a customer who switched off Forms, just because.

5 thoughts on “If only Microsoft products would look like their demos”

  1. None of these demos are realistic because they don’t show Microsoft thrusting unwanted content in the user’s face: frivolous “news” articles, Bing, offers to import favourites, various browser settings to “enhance” one’s experience, Bing, offers of more content, oh yes and Bing.

    I fired up Skype this morning and the first thing it did was start a “chat” between me and Bing. Launching Edge is a relentless slog as well – it’s such a shame. Microsoft doesn’t need to do all this nonsense, the technology speaks for itself.

  2. Hmmm. How about….

    @Volker – how about at some random point in the future you ask Co-Pilot to write a post for your site? Would we be able to spot the post?

    Writing a generic tech post is probably easy, but can AI generate a post that includes your particular style of highlighting the really important elements and infuse that post with your whit? I think we’re a very long way off from AI replacing good writing.

    Dull dull inoffensive business BS – I’m sure MS has that covered.

    1. That’s an interesting thought. I think that >90% of the readers would not be able to tell the difference in the writing style, the highlighting, the whit (sorry). Even the signature moves like editor-refuses-to-give-back-award, PR agencies that phone it in, SONOS becoming more disconnected from the original users, handheld devices/with pen etc. should be in the generated posts. These are all features on the surface level and can hence “easily” be learned by today’s LLMs.

      What none of the high performing models from today know, is a world model. The rules how things really are, like physics, what is cause and effect, not just correlated words, not just how we speak about it on the surface.
      A hard case would be to start a new(!) theme that is not just one step away from what Volker wrote about before.

      A new theme like 3D printing, Clubhouse, etc. That’s where the prompt comes in. If it were Volker to come up with the new idea and then write a five sentences prompt that talks about what the new idea should look like that could work. Like “a new theme on 3D printing, from the basics, in a practical manner, explained to a beginner audience, following along Volker’s own progression and told from that perspective to make it engaging and relatable. Today downloading from thingie and creating a first model with a, b, c.”

      This would especially be easy if the model to be used were to fine-tuned first, i.e. trained on the vowe.net content, before prompting it.

      (Well, photos would not be created as part of the article today, but semantic placeholders could be. And let’s revisit this deficiency in December again :))

  3. … and working with them would be as smooth and easy as the demos…

  4. Your remark regarding #3 does not resonate with me at all:
    Of course, technically Enterprise Admins disable functionality – they have to because they are the only ones capable from a permission and service responsibility perspective. Typically they do not do that because of their own interes. Enterprise Admins act on requests by corporate functions.
    There are plenty of valid reasons:
    1) Functionality has effect on overall support effort but is not part of internal/external cost calculation. Especially for service providers new functionality changes a carefully contractually agreed on balance between cost and effort.
    2) Corporate governance – this can range from security concerns towards end user change management. Too many new functionality introduced over a short time may overwhelm non-IT folks.
    3) Worker’s council and data privacy: There are binding rules and some have to adapted for new functionality. I worked in a large DAX company and at the start, we had to disable Forms, because there was an already a written worker’s council agreement regarding survey tools. Some details just could not be met with Forms at the start. It was however re-enabled again when the agreement was revised.

    => Do not blame Enterprise Admins. Corporate Policies are much more complicated and in my experience these decisions are not taken at a technical level.

    My expectation is that this functionality will be provided as an add-on license, so with an additional price tag. Corp Microsoft 365 licenses (E3, E5) are not exactly cheap and can be quite a large share of the “default per user IT workplace” cost. It will be interesting if business will decide to spend additional money here.

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