Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008

(finance.yahoo.com)

76 points | by dvfjsdhgfv 14 hours ago

7 comments

  • smuhakg 12 hours 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 11 hours 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 11 hours 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.

      • 486sx33 10 hours ago
        [dead]
    • maltalex 10 hours 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.

      • manquer 5 hours ago
        In the context of knowledge workers, It is really about Claude Cowork against Microsoft Copilot suite for all their applications, which is what the OP is referencing ?

        Github Copilot can use Claude APIs and has its own problems and challenges.

        Microsoft AI performance is primarily not being affected by Github - while significant is much much smaller part of the enterprise revenue stream and their DAU compared to their Office suite apps.

        Same for their PR exposure. It is lot more likely to here about Copilot in the office context than Github outside of small niche's like this forum.

      • quantummagic 6 hours ago
        That's on Microsoft for their choice of naming/branding.
        • maltalex 5 hours ago
          Absolutely. They've made the same mess with "Copilot" as with ".NET" in the early 00's [0]. Everything was ".NET" from consumer oriented services (".NET Passport"), to "Visual Studio .NET" without anyone understanding what ".NET" was.

          Now it's "Microsoft Copilot" which is different from "Microsoft 365 Copilot", which is different from "Copilot Chat" and from "GitHub Copilot", and the many other flavors.

          It's a mess.

          Still, their developer-focused offering seems to be "GitHub Copilot", which among other things includes "GitHub Copilot CLI" [1], their terminal-based agent. It's not bad.

          [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

          [1]: https://github.com/features/copilot/cli/

    • browningstreet 4 hours 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.

    • SilverElfin 6 hours 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 11 hours 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.

  • whobre 12 hours ago
    In stock price, no the earnings
    • esalman 3 hours ago
      Kind of ongoing theme in tech industry and beyond. "Investors" will punish every stock unless company announces mass layoffs. My company is posting 10% year over year growth yet stocks keep falling.
  • vrganj 13 hours 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?
    • gljiva 11 hours 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
    • dehrmann 12 hours 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.
    • VohuMana 12 hours 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 9 hours ago
        Did you hear this advice from 100 broke people or one lucky schmuck?
        • integralid 16 minutes 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.

    • iugtmkbdfil834 13 hours ago
      Dunno, but yesterday was the first time ever I felt confident shorting nearly across the board. Nearly.
    • chistev 12 hours 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 10 hours 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 12 hours 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.

    • LeFantome 11 hours ago
      Other than buying oil futures, probably selling to cash and getting ready to buy when it hits the fan.
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 13 hours 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.
    • toomuchtodo 13 hours 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...

    • gedy 12 hours ago
      You can go all cash so not risking leverage via shorts, etc. But a lot of folks think that's dumb. I feel better being in cash right now as the mental stress of big loses in middle age is not worth the missed gains if I'm wrong. To each their own.
      • testing22321 12 hours ago
        You don’t think the US dollar will take a dive along with US stocks?
        • teeray 7 hours ago
          If your debts are also denominated in USD, their value will be fixed relative to your cash assets. This assumes a fixed rate, of course, but a 30 year fixed is common in the US and makes up a substantial portion of most folks’ debt.
        • suzzer99 8 hours ago
          I have a big chunk in FXE (like owning Euros) precisely for this reason.
        • JoshuaDavid 11 hours ago
          What specific thing(s) are you worried that USD will take a dive relative to?

          Then once you have an answer to that question, that might point you towards what you want to be long.

          • 9dev 8 hours ago
            Traders could start buying their oil using Yuan, for example. That’s not a theoretical anymore
            • pfannkuchen 59 minutes ago
              What percent of dollars are tied up in in-flight oil transactions? And I suppose also in accounts that will be used for oil transactions in the planned future? That’s the mechanism for that supporting the value of the dollar, right, like, increased dollar demand via being used for oil market transactions?
          • vrganj 10 hours ago
            How would buying Euros compare in terms of exposure?
          • readthenotes1 9 hours ago
            The USD could take a dive against: yuan, eu, gbp, rial, gold, silver, platinum, WTI, SPY, etc.

            Only a few of them will matter on a day-to-day basis if you're currently in the US with assets valued in USD.

            • vrganj 9 hours ago
              Couldn't you just exchange your EUR for USD as needed? Use it as your reserve currency?
  • pjmlp 9 hours ago
    Which is why they now are finally listing to customers.
  • VirusNewbie 12 hours 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.

    • keeda 8 hours ago
      OpenAI also signed an agreement with AWS. And Anthropic has signed on with Microsoft as well as GCP.

      The underlying dynamic is that no single cloud provider has the capacity required to host all the demand, so the frontier AI labs have no choice but to diversify for their infrastructure needs.

      • ledauphin 4 hours ago
        can you elaborate on this? diversifying compute doesn't create more compute - is it that the different LLM vendors have different peak times and so spreading themselves over more compute vendors spreads peak load?
        • jamwil 1 hour ago
          Huh? If I need 10 bananas and my local shop only has 5 bananas available I need to go to multiple stores to satisfy my ravenous banana craving.
          • integralid 3 minutes ago
            Yes but if there are three banana shops around and there are five banana addicted people living nearby the number of bananas available on average for every person is not 15.

            In other words, if all ai companies need more compute that a single provider can provide, then there's just not enough of it. So the question "why everyone partners with everyone" must have a different answer.

    • chris_money202 12 hours ago
      Once we are able to run language models on any consumer hardware with good T/s Windows will become an absolute powerhouse just like it did in gaming with DirectX. Any application will be able to be AI infused and the API to do so will be consistent and free to the business offering it.
  • rvz 14 hours 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 13 hours ago
      With any luck they've missed their exit dumping window.
    • x0x0 12 hours 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 10 hours 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 9 hours 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 11 hours ago
        [dead]