Quotations tagged microsoft
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[Microsoft] said it plans in 2025 “to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.”
For comparison, the James Webb telescope cost $10bn, so Microsoft is spending eight James Webb telescopes in one year just on AI.
For a further comparison, people think the long-in-development ITER fusion reactor will cost between $40bn and $70bn once developed (and it’s shaping up to be a 20-30 year project), so Microsoft is spending more than the sum total of humanity’s biggest fusion bet in one year on AI.
Having worked at Microsoft for almost a decade, I remember chatting with their security people plenty after meetings. One interesting thing I learned is that Microsoft (and all the other top tech companies presumably) are under constant Advanced Persistent Threat from state actors. From literal secret agents getting jobs and working undercover for a decade+ to obtain seniority, to physical penetration attempts (some buildings on MS campus used to have armed security, before Cloud server farms were a thing!).
— com2kid
OpenAI and Anthropic focused on building models and not worrying about products. For example, it took 6 months for OpenAI to bother to release a ChatGPT iOS app and 8 months for an Android app!
Google and Microsoft shoved AI into everything in a panicked race, without thinking about which products would actually benefit from AI and how they should be integrated.
Both groups of companies forgot the “make something people want” mantra. The generality of LLMs allowed developers to fool themselves into thinking that they were exempt from the need to find a product-market fit, as if prompting is a replacement for carefully designed products or features. [...]
But things are changing. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be transitioning from research labs focused on a speculative future to something resembling regular product companies. If you take all the human-interest elements out of the OpenAI boardroom drama, it was fundamentally about the company's shift from creating gods to building products.
In fact, Microsoft goes so far as to promise that it cannot see the data collected by Windows Recall, that it can't train any of its AI models on your data, and that it definitely can't sell that data to advertisers. All of this is true, but that doesn't mean people believe Microsoft when it says these things. In fact, many have jumped to the conclusion that even if it's true today, it won't be true in the future.
We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone.
The open secret Jennings filled me in on is that OpenStreetMap (OSM) is now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world’s largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written. The four companies in the inner circle— Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft— have a combined market capitalization of over six trillion dollars.
We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it.
Look at Sony, or Microsoft, or Google, or anyone. They still don't get it. They're still out there talking about chips, or features, or whatever. Or now they're all hot for design. But they think design means making pretty objects. It doesn't. It means making a system of pieces that all work together seamlessly. It's not about calling attention to the technology. It's about making the technology invisible.
Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.
Microsoft was slowing development of new versions of Internet Explorer in the hope that Web-based applications would not be able to compete with Windows applications, and Windows applications would keep people locked in to the Windows operating system. Thus XHTML2 was developed with no expectation that the leading Web browser would ever implement it.
And that is why, in 2009, when developing in Microsoft .NET 3.5 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on a Windows 7 system, you cannot include
/com\d(\..*)?,/lpt\d(\..*)?,/con(\..*)?,/aux(\..*)?,/prn(\..*)?, or/nul(\..*)?in any of your routes.
Let's try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now - as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.
The greatest coup Microsoft pulled with Internet Explorer was putting the word "Internet" in its name. It sits there, on the desktop of every new Windows computer, and it says "Internet". So you click it. [...] What better way to beat a browser with the word "Internet" in its name - a browser that seemingly can't be beat no matter how hard we try - than the Internet Company itself making a browser?
Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.
In a recent [ASP.NET] MVC design meeting someone said something like "we'll need a Repeater control" and a powerful and very technical boss-type said: "We've got a repeater control, it's called a foreach loop."
Schools and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of the range of free-to-use products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to use them.
— Becta
From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again. [...] The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.
The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.
— Tim Bray
Everyone applauds when Google goes after Microsoft's Office monopoly [...] but when they start to go after web non-profits like Wikipedia, you see where the ineluctible logic leads. As Google's growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them.
The companies that couldn't beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft's strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.
My own favorites were Cuba voting "yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan's "yes" vote, even though OOXML as defined isn't able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.
I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system - it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.
Open source is neither an industry fad, nor a magic bullet.
Does the idea of redefining the role of the Internet browser appeal to you? Do the terms HTTP, RSS, Microformats, and OpenID, excite you? If so, then this just might be the opportunity for you.
Could someone please send, to whomever the hell teaches communication skills/techniques at Microsoft, a copy of the Chicago Manual, and perhaps a sixth - grade grammar text? I swear, there's almost no one from that company who can write a proper English sentence.
Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.