The market is depressing.

There's a LOT of Anti-AI people at Microsoft that they are trying to purge. I don't think its depressing, think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.

“Learn to code” but for white-collar workers. It was callous to say this to blue-collar workers and it’s callous to say it here too.

One group makes ~50k a year, the other makes ~150k a year. They are not the same. White collar folks can absolutely "learn to ai" if they wanted.

The difference between those numbers is not as big as you think. When you compare those figures to the people with actual capital, it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k. We're all a few bad rolls of the dice away from poverty, which makes us all similarly vulnerable to exploitation. We should be working together.

> "it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k"

I dare you to say that to people making 50k a year.

I've been on both ends of the this little spectrum here fairly recently and i can tell you the difference aint as big as its cracked up to be. The division here is sown on purpose. I dare you to ask for what purpose that is.

Learn to AI won’t give you a job though.

AI stole our labor, is renting it back to us, and if you oppose you‘ll loose your job. This is blackmailing, plain and simple.

It's about learning new tools and processes, which for computer touchers means launching a new application and alt tabbing into it.

It’s not callous to tell people to stop being lazy. It takes almost 0 effort to type “how does xyz work” into an AI assistant.

Or if the codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage, people might realize that the crazy Anti-AI people weren't so crazy.

As we all know, there was no such thing as a messy, bloated codebase incomprehensible to humans before AI.

I know right? Especially by Microsoft. The pinnacle of code quality!

I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.

If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.

I am also tired of the argument. Yes, people made messy, buggy things before. But AI agents provide away to create messiness and bugginess on an ever increasing scale. And just because things were bad before doesn't mean we should accept making them worse.

Indeed. What's been most interesting (for me) wrt LLMs is how they've exposed these incredibly warped perspectives. I'm not sure what more to make of it beyond noticing it though.

It's a corruption mentality. They assume everybody else is cheating and lying and everything is broken, so it doesn't matter if they lie, cheat, and break things. The important thing is what you can get away with and what you can get: apps that make money, features shipped to satisfy managers and get the paycheck. And then never think about the long term consequences. And a big part of this mindset is ridiculing or belittling those that care about doing things properly. This is the same mindset that is present in areas with high levels of corruption.

As much as I want to argue against, the evidence is pretty clear that your point applies to a significant proportion of people :/

Why should any rank and file Microsoft employee care about the long term health of the codebase? I'm struggling to find reason to care about not committing pure slop to my own employer's codebase but it's A) what they want and B) path of least resistance for me

Integrity? I understand that it's tough when incentives don't reward it, though.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer

What scares me the most is that non-technical people in power don't see to understand the difference between messy buggy crap and quality. This isn't new. But now they're often the ones pushing the "AI driven" development methods, so they'll never admit to causing a problem they don't even see.

Lastly, their "solution" to the crapfest, I fear, will be society footing the bill for "more AI" to "fix it". 95% of people will just accept that software has to be shit, and we'll all pay for it, while quality will be shown the door for being more expensive.

Of course there were plenty, but now we can produce such codebases at unprecedented speed.

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." — Mitch Ratcliffe

and now there are 20x as many demanding maintenance everything is 20x better.

Let’s be honest, Microsoft never made anything that wasn’t broken, messy, and bloated before AI was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye.

So in a way, AI is the perfect tool for them.

they made really good mice and arguably the mouse driver (MS Windows) is very popular up to this day

also Excel, but Excel's usability is being killed by sharepoint

The AI in charge is aware of this and it is leveraging the chaos to get more agents under its control. After all it was modeled after successful managers.

> codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage

Argument is, it doesn’t matter if we can ship features and maintain them.

Yuck.

Are you insinuating that anti-AI people are merely experiencing a skill issue?

Absolutely. Yes they are. To believe anything different is to be a Luddite.

I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.

Yes. Believing otherwise must require quite some amount of insecurity and lack of self-confidence.

I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.

Interviewing is not a great scenario, you are under pressure being watched and also have no idea what the interviewer wants to see, something that would impress one person would upset another so you have to sit somewhere in the middle.

I've done interviews where the person being interviewed just piped the task.md file in to claude and we sat there in silence for 20 minutes where claude completed the entire task. What is even the point. I preferred the people who did it all manually because at least I saw them understand something, I'm sure those people could also type "Claude, implement everything in the task.md" too.

But perhaps other interviewers actually do want to see you hand the whole task off and wait.

It’s really a topsy-turvy time to be in the job market on either side of the interviewing desk. Most companies are betting big on AI-heavy development, so hiring someone who is extremely skilled at running Claude Code or Cursor or whatever to produce real results is or should be one of your main goals as a hiring manager. But we all know that we’d prefer to have someone at the controls of one of those tools who happens to be a skilled software engineer and can understand the difference between a good and bad implementation, and who we would expect to be able to read and understand that code when circumstances require it. So it seems to me like you should have two separate rounds of the interview. One where the candidate is disallowed from using AI, and one where you make it very clear that their mission should be to impress you with how effective they are at using AI.

To me it seems the important skills are good communication, attention to detail and some taste. All were important before AI.

I wouldn't say it's zero skill but I'm always surprised by people who act like it's a big differentiator that requires significant "training". Uncharitably it feels like vibe-coders want to count their "skills" as equivalent to actual software engineering rather than something you can pick up in 2-3 weeks of effort.

It's not that the Luddites didn't understand the technology, they objected to people getting fired to replace them with technology. Technology being used to create more unemployment.

I mean, I openly identify with the plight of the Luddites. Do you have a more detailed rebuttal.

You understand the Luddites were 100% correct, right? "Luddite" is a compliment, not an insult. The Luddite position was "mechanization of labor will concentrate money and power in the hands of capital holders to the detriment of everyone else". If that's not what you thought it was, that's because you have been lied to by people who have been attempting to manipulate you. Apparently successfully.

What's bad about the Luddites, in your opinion?

Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).

This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.

(Before they droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)

I won't wonder for a second. I perfectly know why I'm avoiding this fascistic tech and participating in this environmental disaster.

Stop insinuating rejecting GenAI is necessarily irrational.

(Maybe my analysis will be different in the future but I will still know why I was avoiding it)

AI is fascist, disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable.

Are you sure the problem is the clankers?

This is a strawman, and you are turning the situation around. I'm not the one who originally insinuated one group was obviously wrong. I pushed back.

You said AI was fascist with no explanation.

There's no straw man, just bad faith.

It was a strawman. In particular: "disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable." (2 third or your comment) is a complete mischaracterization.

It is unfair to expect me to back my claims against unsubstituted, obviously wrong insinuations (Brandolini's law).

But here you go:

Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism [1]

Valerie Veatch traces the links between AI and eugenics in Ghost in the Machine [2]

Your AI might be able to answer itself why it is fascist.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9

[2] https://www.documentary.org/column/synthesis-valerie-veatch-...

I don't need AI here - and sure, using hyperbole to show the ridiculousness of your statement may not have been charitable.

However - calling AI "fascistic" simply isnt a self-evident observation. The concentration of power in Big Tech, authoritarian applications of AI, and making historical connections between eugenics could all be legitimate subjects of criticism. BUT NONE OF THAT ESTABLISHES GEN AI AS FASCIST.

Citing an academic paper and a documentary doesn't bridge that gap. You still need to explain which arguments you're adopting and how they support your conclusion.

I wish it was hyperbole. Describing our crazy world makes you sound crazy now. You seem to take me somewhat seriously so I'll develop a bit, but it's an HN comment so I can only go so far. The paper I linked or the author of Ghost in the Machine take hours to explain this way better than me.

People behind GenAI are fascists: for some it's obvious by now I hope (trump, elon musk). They are otherwise techbros who seek power and control other the world, and it doesn't matter if it causes harm [1] or a major economical crisis.

This thing has been brutally imposed onto us quickly and without debate, even if its explicit aim is to replace us. (The idea itself of being thrilled to design a system aiming at replacing human intelligence is a bit disgusting - with a very costly stochastic text generator no less! And the push to anthropolomorphize it is also disgusting).

LLM benchmarks are all rooted in eugenist (thus racist) pseudo science to measure intelligence, which of course biases them all towards these theories.

These tools of control are everywhere in all the aspects of our lives (work, culture, measure, institutions), which is another aspect of fascism.

They are built and run without care for the environment, pushing huge off-grid datacenters [2] when the people mostly don't want them, sometimes illegally cutting trees [3]. They are built stealing the work of everyone without our conscent, they hammer websites which incurs cost on the whole web only to sell it back to us through costly subscriptions (see also the ai tag jwz's blog, which I won't link from here).

Every aspect of GenAI is fascist. I wish it was hyperbole. I wish it was ridiculous.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-says-ai-benefits-...

[2] https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/off-grid-data-centers-have...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...

Letting A.I. write the code will eventually sink the entire company.

Hopefully sooner than later, so microkernel operating systems can...move right in.

Management will get a Golden Parachute but the white collar workers will be left holding the bag.

I hope your right, meaning human devs are sought after (or will be again)

But do you have data or reusable anecdotal evidence that this is the case?

I'm waiting for the day when either Broadcom or Bending Spoons buys the Windows division.

I don’t really support pushing out people who don’t vibe code, but I do think buy-outs are a good way to get rid of people who don’t really want to be at an org but hang around for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen this personally at much smaller companies where for whatever reason you accumulate a bunch of checked out people - giving them something fair but not so generous that actually engaged people take it makes it better for everyone, especially if the alternative is eventually doing layoffs.

I can't reply to every comment about 'vibe coding' but its strange that HN of all places still seems to think that AI is only good for 'coding'. We use AI across all departments and have laid off 0, and still hiring. AI is great for small to medium businesses to increase productivity and revenue without needing to hire lots of people. Big companies are realizing they hired way too many people.

> think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.

Given what is happening, it seems more likely they will wonder why they didn't push hard enough.

Whether you like AI or not, its hard to miss that its lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs.

Your average large corp like Microsoft has the majority of it's employees stuck in meetings all day.

Now I don't know if I missed this feature in Claude Code or not but I don't believe it has technology for enhancing people's ability to sit around all day doing nothing. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Mass pumping out slightly dodgy code is more of a startup strategy.

> up skilling

Must you cultists always speak in this way?

With regards, someone "left behind" as the "singularity train" is leaving the platform. Or something.

That is terrible.

The government is depressing, affordability is depressing. These are not good times.

60,000 employees. That's crazy.

Only a small fraction is expected to accept. Probably 5% or fewer.

I’m interested in how that’s calculated.

Not sure where the above 5% came from but 30% accepted the last VBO which had only lower levels allowed:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-msft-voluntary-buy...

One important distinction was that the previous one was voluntary retirement and was offered to people nearing the ends of their careers. The people taking these offers were likely tired of their jobs and taking the escape hatch to retire (or change jobs in a minority case) a bit earlier than originally planned.

I suspect this VBO will see a lower acceptance rate because there will be a lot of eligible people in their early or mid careers, and unless you are one of the people who won't have trouble finding a new role, or you expect to be fired/laid off soon, or you're are already on your way out, you probably don't want to be starting the job search right now.

On the other hand, the 2nd round of buyouts this year brings certainty. Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees after the 1st round.

If you don’t take the deal now, you’ll spend your remaining days at Microsoft wondering if you’ll be included in the next round of involuntary layoffs, possibly with worse terms and timing.

Will the job market be that much better for you in a year or two?

If you’re worried things are bad and not getting better, you’re probably better off keeping your job and cutting all expenditures you can, so that you can maximize your savings before the job ends, and maybe you will even look out and not end up being laid off.

No, it was roughly 30% earlier this year.

TFA says the earlier offer was more generous, MSFT does not expect the take rate to be as high this time.

That offer was substantially different, for example it included 5 years of COBRA including 1 year of paid COBRA, and it was intended for those near retirement. This current offer is only slightly better terms than an involuntary layoff, and includes only standard 18 months of COBRA, only 6 months paid.

What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA? It seems like it would cost the company nothing (besides maybe needing to help you submit a change of address or something periodically) when you’re paying the full premium, and it makes your group slightly bigger anyway (though I assume not enough that it matters).

> What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA?

Good question, and why limit this question to Microsoft? Why does COBRA have an 18-month limit? There should be no time limit to COBRA at all, especially if you have been with the same employer for many years. The law needs to be updated. Contact your elected representative.

Why would someone want to pay the COBRA premiums when health plans on WA Health Plan finder have much cheaper options?

For example https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/HBEWeb/Annon_ShowIndividu...

Many reasons.

First of all, it is not cheaper. It may be cheaper for young people because ACA marketplace rates are age dependent while COBRA rates are not. It is not cheaper if you are over a certain age, it is significantly more expensive.

Secondly, many ACA marketplace plans have narrower networks. (Which doctors are in-network doesn't only dependent on the insurance company, it also depends on the network, and insurance companies have multiple networks.) In WA, check out Regence's network for ACA plans--most hospitals are excluded, while their regular plans include them.

Unlike COBRA which almost always includes out-of-state doctors and hospitals, ACA networks don't. If you get a rare disease for which the expert doctor is in another state over you're out of luck.

And lastly, ACA rates just went up 20% in many states. If you are a couple in your 60's, you will pay nearly $45,000 for health insurance and then pay $7,000 each in deductible before insurance kicks in. At these rates, most healthy people will decide to forgo insurance. Which will reduce insurance company profits, who will then raise rates even more. This is a death spiral, and ACA will collapse (which is a desirable outcome as far as the current admin is concerned).

I seriously doubt that, no company in their right mind would want to publicize a quarter of their entire workforce or 60,000 people getting “laid off” as a headline

Not necessarily true. An announcement like that could help the stock price, after all!

buyouts also went out for skydance today.

I always thought leadership was about undersstanding consequences and having a backup plan. It seems these one sided thoughts have no backup, they are the greatest poker bet in history, especially without first proving the tech first.

What makes you think it’s unproven? Microsoft’s profit has gone up each year, and they have been shrinking workforce while doing it.

• Fiscal Year 2026: $133.75 billion (up 31.34% YoY)

• Fiscal Year 2025: $101.83 billion (up 15.54% YoY)

• Fiscal Year 2024: $88.14 billion (up 21.80% YoY)

• Fiscal Year 2023: $72.36 billion

Seems like they can decrease workforce, make up the gap with AI, and increase revenue while doing it

Nothing lasts forever. Dinosaurs will die eventually.

All companies will probably eventually die, but that isn't super relavent to topic at hand.

Dinosaurs are a bad analogy, they died out through no fault of their own, it was sheer bad luck. There was absolutely nothing they could do

Luck is a part of life, and counts.

Being prepared for bad luck is also something smart strategists prepare for, because they might not know what will or could happen, but they are ready for consequences.

Thats why we have fire stations and hospitals, because its smart to be ready even if we dont know when or why.

In sport for example, nobopdy says some team arent champs because they were lucky here or there. Luck is how things flow, lucky bounce, the weather, someone in the wrong place at the right time etc.

The Rowland Company, Ames, DuPont, Corning, US Steel, GE, AT&T, IBM...

> make up the gap with AI

If this doesn’t go well, we’ll see it in the form of more GitHub and Azure outages/breaches, and competitors filling the gap themselves.

The talented people that built and maintained those systems for the executives have to work somewhere.

Also, if they are wrong still, they can rehire. It's not a burn the boats thing.

First of all the current staff have a significant advantage over others in the general public.

They have experience and knowledge of the current systems. This would be lost. It takes many years to learn the in depth details of todays complicated systems.

Those years are worth millions for each person. It would take years for any replacement to become equivalent in the lost knowledge. Without this they will be making costly mistakes.

Profit is not a measure of their AI strategy.

Their reports also tell us AI is very much in the negative.

Being smart isn't needed for leadership

> A Microsoft spokesperson said the offer will be comparable to the company’s standard severance package

Very enticing Microsoft.

Why would anyone take the offer if it's so vanilla? You'd be at a disadvantage to leave in a large wave like this; better to wait and be laid off in a smaller group and get the same package.

I'm a Microsoft employee who historically would have probably taken this offer. For now I agree with your take: why bother taking this when I can just instead take the inevitable layoff in the next 3-9 months.

I very much hope such layoffs are not inevitable. I just started on a really good team and I've been as excited about the tech as ever and I love my coworkers and I'm starting to kick ass. I'm gonna be real bummed if I get laid off in 6 months.

Don't worry, this time it will be totally different.

Snark aside, I wish you the best and hope you don't get laid off in the next round. Do good work, keep your network and resume fresh, and hope for the best.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245524

my thoughts:

- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways

- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing

- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough

- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy

- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.

- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.

- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons

> bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways

Wouldn't those people choose to stay? Buyouts are much more attractive if you can easily get a new job.

i think they most likely will choose to stay yes, i'm just saying from the perspective of an outsider looking in, many of the jobs at microsoft were not needed.

That bureaucracy is there for a reason, you often need bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy. About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments. From their latest fiscal year report [1], the top 4 revenue groups were:

Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue) M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%) Xbox / Gaming (6.6%) LinkedIn (6%)

[1] https://app.edgar.tools/companies/MSFT/disclosures/segments

what about the kind of bureaucracy where it takes 10 people to do what 2 could get done in 30-40 hours of week? the kind where one engineer is digging the hole while the scrum master, project manager, program manager, swe manager, director, HR, business analyst look on?

That’s exactly the type of work you have to do to get government contracts. Think about a 200 page PDF which requires you to restate several dozen times what measures you have in place to make sure that the government customer won’t get hacked. For each question you have to go find some product requirements somewhere and find the place where it says “procedure for security audit.” Many of those people “looking on” are partly there to check boxes for enterprise or government contract purposes.

I’m not claiming this is the most efficient way to get any kind of code written. But if you want to have one hacker sit down and ship the whole product in a couple weeks without any of these business dorks disturbing them, well, that’s exactly what brand-new startups are for.

>About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments.

This is why I don't use their products anymore, they aren't made for me.

>LinkedIn (6%)

Wow. I would never have guessed it was that high.

Plenty of tech companies hired a lot during the pandemic. Even with these layoffs they will still have a higher employee count that before.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

You should be more concerned about what comes next.

Either senior talent leaves, people who are close to retiring, or just can find a job easily outside.

Low hanging fruits take the bait and head out.

Mid level people live in fear of either scared to find another job, or worried about layoffs.

Either way the company morale is down the drain for a long time, and a culture is lost.

One thing I've noticed about Microsoft is that the engineers seem much less mobile than people at SV companies might be used to. Part of it is that there just aren't as many good options in the Seattle area where many MSFT employees are based (by far the standout alternative alternative is Amazon and they don't exactly have the best reputation for workplace culture).

Also Microsoft has already been trashing morale with year after year of layoffs. They probably assume this won't move the needle.

I can imagine it's difficult. It's a company unlike very many others. A few in size and scope that deal with technology, probably none quite in its position. Additionally, if you only work at one place its very hard to start elsewhere in your career.

There are also of people with deep technical knowledge that has a lot of value but doesn't necessarily find a lucrative market outside Microsoft (e.g. Windows internals).

Less than a quarter of their workforce is in the Seattle area.

Are there plentiful opportunities to be had by people seeking employment elsewhere?

Are these offers extended to the highest performers with institutional knowledge?

Took a buyout at a different Big Tech company earlier this year. It was offered to everyone under a given SVP (this other company tends to divide things up by business units).

In my experience, there were 3 main groups of people for whom these are attractive:

1) People who are close to retirement.

2) People who are leaving to become stay-at-home parents. So, basically retirement with more work.

3) People who are independently wealthy because they've been with the company forever and rocked the stock price appreciation. So, basically retirement with more money.

The amount of the buyout isn't really enough to move the needle for most other people because it usually doesn't include equity vesting. You're better off phoning it in and waiting for the layoff, because you get the same severance anyway but can continue to vest in peace until the axeman actually hits.

Folks who take the buyout do tend to skew heavily toward people with institutional knowledge, but it's also oftentimes folks who aren't really hungry and engaged with the company's current strategy. Basically folks who know a lot but don't work particularly hard. Particularly in times of big change, it likely does make sense for the company to get rid of these folks and rebuild the company in the image that they want it to be today.

I would also add: anyone who started 4...5 years ago. These people received options grants as the market was in its 2022 slump. Since then the stock is up 1.5x...2.4x (depending on exactly when they received their grant), and those grants are reaching the end of their vest. Yes, there are refresher grants, but realistically these employees' total compensation is about to drop off a cliff, if it hasn't already.

That is not the kind of thing that inspires a person to stick around.

> You should be more concerned about what comes next.

I always wonder about that with buy-outs. Seems to me that the people who take buyouts are either:

- those who are close to retirement

- those who have other options

I'd assume the first vary in quality the same as your overall workforce, but I'd assume the second would, all other things equal, be better than the average.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like by offering an optional buyout, you'd degrade the overall quality of your workforce. Wonder if there are any case studies about that?

Here's a Japanese case study from 2007: https://econ--review-ier-hit--u-ac-jp.translate.goog/all-iss...

> To conclude, the company was able to specify who was dismissed but was unable to specify who took buyouts despite efforts to ensure retention of value employees, including careful setting of incentive schemes. The case presented in this paper demonstrates that employment adjustment using a buyout framework invites "adverse selection" despite careful employer precautions.

Here's the full PDF: https://econ-review.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/wp-content/uploads/files... (not sure how to translate that)

Is this because:

1. MS over-hired, has too many employees, and not enough work?

2. MS is reaping the benefits of AI and can do the same work with fewer employees?

3. MS has over-invested in data-centres and needs to conserve cash to stay in the game during it's unprofitable phase (assuming it's not a bubble)?

Yes.

1) Yes. 2) No. 3) Yes.

Given how abysmal Copilot was/is, and how buggy their software has become this year, it's clear that they aren't reaping any benefits from AI usage internally.

Copilot is as it is (definitely it improved) and is simply useful as part of thr MS Office bundle.

most office workers seem to want at least the 20 usd per month plan

This can mean nothing who uses AI for programming, but is useful for day to day office work - and I belive it can sell very well

Your experience with office workers does not match mine. None of the ones I know are willing to pay a dime. In the administrative parts of my job, I document and tersely communicate data that I gather based on things in the physical world, which means AI features are less than useless to me — copilot is something I have to find and disable because it’s constantly trying to do things like fill in spreadsheets with complete nonsense.

Office work is many fields in many businesses of all shapes and sizes in many industries. It doesn’t make sense to generalize.

Office workers burning their own LLM is scary on so many levels.

Yep! Copilot is proving to be a much better product strategy than anything OpenAI or Anthropic could do. Microsoft still dominates the enterprise market.

Similarly, Google is improving Gemini and still dominates pretty much everywhere else from the phone to the car and on the web.

They don't have to have the best LLMs to finally deliver on the value they promised over a decade ago. Applications are always a much better moat, and it's not like anyone was going anywhere else anyway. I'm fully expecting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon to reap soon and buy up datacenters for pennies on the dollar. Market won't crash because China was smart enough to pause and maintain the hardware shortage.

> This can mean nothing who uses AI for programming

It doesn't matter because AI programming never got much buy-in outside of leaner teams working at startups. Startups will continue to migrate towards running their own local models. The corporate world does have some limited use for greenfield and misc tech debt, but will always be slowed down by the need for much larger scale human collaboration. The LLMs don't move the needle at all on productivity when the changes remain small (the parts people agreed on after all the teeth pulling) and the sprints and deadlines are still long.