Microsoft CEO: We’re moving from OS and apps to agents instead
12 points by ndegruchy
12 points by ndegruchy
We’re moving from building operating systems, devices for apps, to agents.”
My reading of this, along with them saying everything is going "cloud-native" ("thin client" I guess), is it explains the complete lack of investment and direction in Windows. It doesn't sound like they want you running anything locally, and they expect you will run everything on Azure.
I think they've been trying to do that for very long by now. I remember their first prototype of an OS that would run in the cloud. That was, like, 2009 maybe? So 17 years of failure. And I'm pretty confident that they'll fail again, this time loosing it all to Apple and Linux.
So giving up the one thing they have a gigantic moat in and moving to something that literally everyone else is already doing?
Give an agent a skill to create powerpoint slides, that's a big market immediately opened up in corporate environments.
Per Qualcomm, Solara is “a new chip-to-cloud platform where silicon, software and cloud come together to power AI experiences that are more personal, more aware and always with you.”
What does that even mean?
It feels like underpants-gnome level
AI -> cloud -> ?? -> profit!
With all these weird deals between the tech megacorps, maybe ?? isn’t even needed anymore. (At least on paper, or so the thinking may go)
Telemetry. It means telemetry. An AI stack designed from the silicon-up to optimise for marketing and advertising data.
Always-recording and always-online wearables like smart glasses and smart pendants (like the one featured in the video) will replace personal computing as we know it. "The cloud" will always have access to you.
The quote makes more sense if you watch the originating video with Nadella on qualcomms site.
I was confused, too, but I think I've cracked the code: it means that Qualcomm sells their chips to cloud data centers.
What could that possibly mean. Unless they're sunsetting Windows and Office it seems like just hot air.
In all seriousness, we've been told that Word and Excel are what the business world runs on, and even close substitutes like LibreOffice won't do for decades now. I do apologize if that sounds like sarcasm, but those are the words written on the topic. How on earth do you throw away allegiance like that, a business monopoly like that, for something as speculative as "AI"?
But please don't call them "microslop"!
I couldn't extract a coherent plan from that article, and I don't think the author is at fault. The behavior and articulated plan from the top just seems completely incoherent.
On the plus side, I don't mind that fewer and fewer people I might work with will have any reason to ask me to run windows.
It makes this prediction seem not so crazy... Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable
That actually seems perfectly logical to me, and I've wondered about this myself.
From a business point of view, you avoid needing an army of folks to write and test a special OS that needs all of it's own infrastructure (MSVC, etc.) and runs on and uses proprietary tech (e.g. PDBs for debugging). You lose lock-in, but it seems like they're bleeding marketshare already anyways.
Microsoft has had some dark periods in the past, but they've never been under such straight up bad leadership as they've been under Nadella. He's managed to bungle every single acquisition he's made at the helm of the company. Github, LinkedIn, npm etc... you name it, they dropped the ball.
Hmmmm what are the agents going to run on? Unless the agents know how to speak machine code now, it seems like they're going to need some kind of.... "system".... that they can "operate" on. I wonder what we should call that thing...... :thinking:
Windows is already a kind of "harness" or maybe a "set of tools" for a "human agent" to navigate (as are all operating system shells)... I'm actually confused what they are proposing beyond buying some chips from Qualcomm.
Every penny spent on this nonsense is a penny that could be better spent on improving their woeful desktop.