A.I. News The enormity of Microsoft's Windows Phone shut-down mistake is becoming increasingly clear in the AI era

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

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https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/the-enormity-of-microsofts-windows-phone-shut-down-mistake-is-becoming-increasingly-clear-in-the-ai-era

Hello friends. It's time for your semi-quarterly rant about Windows Phone, brought to you by the CEO of Not Letting Go, Jez Corden himself. But hey, hear me out — we might actually have a compelling case here.

I wrote recently about how Microsoft all too often seems to follow patterns of short-term thinking. Obviously, this isn't always true, given the rise of cloud services and Azure as the income modality du jour for modern Redmond. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to make this whole article rhyme, but grab a cup of tea and indulge me in this latest whine rant.

Microsoft has placed billions of dollars in bets on AI as the future of human-computer interfacing, and nobody can really fault them on this bet. This is a great example of Microsoft most likely getting something right, even if nobody is actually using Microsoft Copilot and similar tools according to recent surveys. But maybe that's simply because most people aren't aware of it yet, or why they might even want to use an AI tool like Copilot or ChatGPT. Either way, I think we can all agree generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are going to have some role to play in daily life, even if it's not necessarily Microsoft's tools that you use.

And indeed, therein lies the problem.

I've written before how I don't think Microsoft will be the one who mainstreams AI tools with consumers, even if their tech ends up powering the back end delivery for some of these tools in the future. However, increasingly, even that is looking unlikely.

An Apple-shaped hole has started to appear in Microsoft's AI strategy, as increasingly, Microsoft has hitched its AI future to partners like OpenAI and NVIDIA, in lieu of home-grown innovation. Microsoft is building its own tools and features, but we've yet to really see anything that isn't at least in part built on OpenAI's technology. And increasingly, OpenAI is flirting with Microsoft's biggest rival to the reported alarm of CEO Satya Nadella.

So, what does all of this have to do with Windows Phone? Well, dear reader, let's talk about it.

The enormity of Microsoft's Windows Phone shut-down mistake is becoming increasingly clear in the AI era

Microsoft has an Apple-shaped AI nightmare on its hands, as OpenAI realizes the limits of partnering with Microsoft.

www.windowscentral.com

 

[TairikuOkami]

I really liked Microsoft Lumia 650, my first smartphone ever, though updates were done MS way, so you had to upgrade to each version, you could not just upgrade to the latest one.

 

[oldschool]

This appears to be a well-reasoned view of where MS is currently and its future outlook. Too bad they continue to make these half-hearted attempts at new features, and everything else for that matter.

 

[NormanF]

All because Microsoft panicked and ditched the Windows Phone before it was ready.

It did what Google does: launch a product and then abandon it before it has a chance to mature and gain market acceptance.