Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008 (finance.yahoo.com)

by dvfjsdhgfv 60 comments 88 points
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60 comments

[−] smuhakg 48d ago
Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot.

This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude!

This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That prevents the AI from meaningfully using tools or being multimodal or anything else their competitors have.

If they added a $200/month tier many of their issues would go away.

[−] batiudrami 48d ago
Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.

But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific packages) and it just can’t do it. It can read the spreadsheet and understand them just fine but outputs are garbled nonsense.

[−] khelavastr 48d ago
Copilot is actually significantly more reliable at technical tasks with SQL or C# than others, i've found. Do we have different use cases?

Copilot seems to hit the technical level I'm asking about much more reliably. It keeps a more grounded general semantic model.

[−] resoluteteeth 48d ago
You might be using different copilots since there are approximately three different Microsoft copilot products

Are you using the one that's part of Microsoft 365?

[−] khelavastr 41d ago
the copilot.microsoft.com one, and the Visual Studio one
[−] smuhakg 45d ago

> A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.

That isn't possible with the technology right now and it will not change. Multimodal computer use and long context for high quality outputs are expensive.

This is like complaining about buying an automobile because it's more expensive than a horse.

[−] 486sx33 48d ago
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[−] maltalex 48d ago
“Copilot” is not one product, it’s around 15 different products, seriously.

I think that people often compare apples to oranges by comparing the “copilot” they have in Windows/Office/Teams etc to Claude Code which is ridiculous.

A better product to compare Claude Code to would be “Github Copilot CLI”, but I haven’t seen the two seriously compared anywhere.

[−] SilverElfin 48d ago
It’s odd to me how much Microsoft over committed to Copilot. They added unwanted Copilot buttons to laptops. They renamed Office to Copilot. And in the end, it’s a terrible product anyways. They can only get away with this because of the control they have over OEMs, distribution channels, and the inability for consumers to opt out of all of thus.

Meanwhile startups can’t compete fairly because they don’t have the same channels to flood with their own branding.

[−] joe_mamba 48d ago
Copilot was by far the worst for coding. Not that the code snippets it would generate were not good, but due to the insane number of bugs in its UI. It would just spit out blank blocks thinking they contained code. When I asked it to repeat the steps which were empty, it would generate the same empty blocks like "here's your code" lol

How TF can you go to market with such bugs.

[−] browningstreet 48d ago
We have copilot at work integrated very deeply in our E5 landscape. It def sucks in Office, and I can break Copilot very easily when building small notebooks. It often crashes and the next page build in a notebook doesn’t come close to the previous iteration. That’s maddening.

But, the Teams integration for meeting summaries and in-meeting “what did Bob just say about the data center project?” prompts is magical and very useful. If you live in meetings or are trying not to. They need to put that team on rescue duty.

[−] joshstrange 48d ago
I have no interest in Copilot from Microsoft in general but I do like GitHub Copilot overall. That said, I’m _very_ interested in a viable alternative. I only use it for “fancy autocomplete” and have zero use for the agent/chat capabilities (I use Claude Code for that). It’s been a year or so since I looked at and tried alternatives but when I last did, copilot was the best IMHO.

What are people using as an alternative?

[−] whobre 48d ago
In stock price, no the earnings
[−] VirusNewbie 48d ago
Microsoft is one of the least likely large companies to benefit from an AI boom. They don’t have the capacity to support OpenAI and their own foundational models, they aren’t providing a compelling story for wrapping OpenAI, windows continues to suck…

OpenAI signed an agreement with GCP , that should say a lot.

[−] KnuthIsGod 45d ago
Microsoft consistently set the bar for mediocrity.

The office workers who use their products do so grudgingly, since Office and Excel are so baked into business ecosystems.

Nobody will shed a tear when the aging dinosaur finally dies.

Unfortunately it has been given a transfusion and a new name, Microsoft 365 Copilot or some rubbish.

[−] vrganj 48d ago
If one were to think a major stock market crash was coming up, led by the AI bubble bursting, but reinforced by the major self-own that is the Iran war, how would one best prepare ones investments?
[−] toomuchtodo 48d ago
https://www.lynalden.com/march-2026-newsletter/ (control-f “The Investment Implications of Chaos”)

Not investing advice, I’ve reallocated away from US domestic equities to international equities (VXUS) as a majority of a portfolio. This hedges against a correction from overweight Mag 7 exposure and US economic growth impairment from current policies (imho).

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/27/stocks-trump-iran-nasdaq

https://totalrealreturns.com/n/VTI,VXUS?start=2025-01-20

https://www.apolloacademy.com/sp-500-concentration-approachi...

[−] 2OEH8eoCRo0 48d ago
I think a crash is coming and I do nothing. I rebalance my stock/bond split and keep a large emergency fund as per usual.
[−] dehrmann 48d ago
Either you need the cash now and are already in short-term treasuries or you're it it for the long-term and you'll be laughing at this question when the Dow hits 100k.
[−] gljiva 48d ago
One should either weather out the storm or if one wants to cash out soon or manage their portfolio more closely they would pick the defensive assets they trust the most and hold until they stop thinking the stock market crash is coming up or stop trusting those assets. If they really think the crash is imminent, maybe investing some excess money into shorting the market while setting trailing stop loss would be a fun activity that might turn profitable
[−] csomar 47d ago
If you genuinely think these two events will shake the foundations of the US economy, then no investment is really going to protect you; you can't expect a system to shield you from the very thing that's breaking it.

There is crypto but even that got infiltrated by institutional wall street money. There are off-shore jurisdictions but the recent Iran war has showed these can be very vulnerable at a moment notice. There is China, but a Taiwan invasion could reduce your assets there to zero.

Honestly, I think the best bet is crypto/Bitcoin, by far. It operates across borders and still relatively insulated from government reach. Unlike gold, oil, or anything physical, it can be moved without physical visibility.

[−] chistev 48d ago
If everyone (most people) think the same, shouldn't you do the opposite?

Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. Etc.

[−] Ekaros 48d ago
I don' think that logic is intended for the top... It is what you should do when you are closing to bottom or are recovering already but most of the market does not yet see it.

Being greedy at the top will take longest time to recover. Catching the falling knife.

[−] vrganj 48d ago
That might be the case if the market was completely abstract and removed from ground truths.

My feelings about these things don't come from markets.

[−] VohuMana 48d ago
The advice I have heard is if you think there will be a significant drop in the market you liquidate all your holdings while they are still high and then rebuy when the price is low. Granted this is a gamble though, if you’re wrong then you just sold all your stock and are no longer participating in the market plus you need to pay capital gains tax
[−] readthenotes1 48d ago
Did you hear this advice from 100 broke people or one lucky schmuck?
[−] integralid 48d ago
This is significantly safer than shorting that some people here suggest.

You can't lose money sitting on cash. While when shorting your potential loss is infinite.

[−] jakogut 47d ago
Mistiming the market is losing out on potential gains, which is losing money compared to sitting on cash. Cash doesn't grow.

Most people are best off investing in index funds and forgetting about it for 10+ years.

[−] pjmlp 48d ago
Which is why they now are finally listing to customers.
[−] rvz 48d ago
This is a leading indicator for what is to come after the IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic this year.

and it is not good.

[−] throwaway132448 48d ago
With any luck they've missed their exit dumping window.
[−] x0x0 48d ago
spacex is particular is desperately searching for a bagholder. Leveraging the obvious synergies between rockets (a mediocre business), xai (a horrid business), and social media that lost more than half it's already modest revenues...
[−] Ekaros 48d ago
SpaceX has reasonable business in it. Not a hypergrowth one, but one which should be solid in long term.

To get that to work they just would need to discard Musk and most things with him. Stop trying to make starship a thing, dump everything attached to it. Make a long term plan to improve the core lift capacity with actually achievable improvements.

[−] x0x0 48d ago

> To get that to work they just would need to discard Musk and most things with him

I'll have a pet unicorn shitting rainbows before Musk leaves one of his toys or we see in-orbit leading-edge (or anything close to it) processor production. SpaceX is a decent albeit capital intensive business if it's valued at $100-200B. At the proposed $1.5T+ valuation for this dog... the bagholder search is on.

[−] dirtbagskier 48d ago
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[−] smartcc 47d ago
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