Morale at Microsoft is Terrible (Proprietary Plagiarism Machines Have No Future, LLM Slop is a Bubble)
The media - including Microsoft-connected media - currency mocks Microsoft for shoving "Copilot" slop into Excel while at the same time cautioning users not to use it if they care about accuracy
Looking through the news today, it seems apparent there's a "bad economy" problem, not an "Artificial Intelligence (AI)" or "hey hi" problem. The latter is just a smokescreen that bribed media uses to distract from the former.
We see stories about half of a company being laid off [1], a de facto "Microsoft India" [2-3] having layoffs again, and Microsoft staff throwing away their careers to participate in what they call an "Intifada" [4] (Microsoft has been trying to cause workers to resign, creatively or not). Meanwhile, the mainstream media speaks of a 'serial layoffs' wave [5] and even slop profiteers like The Register MS (albeit SJVN in there) admit the bubble is bursting and the bursting has only just begun [6].
The slop sceptics/critics are going to have lots of "told you so" moments. A lot of fake "value" will be shaved off. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Developer Rec Room lays off 'about half' its staff
Developer Rec Room, the team behind the namesake user-generated content (UGC) driven social game, has laid off "about half" its staff.
Announced yesterday via the official site, CEO and co-founder Nick Fajt wrote that both he and CCO and co-founder Cameron Brown made the decision, which they called a "business necessity based on the financial trajectory of the company" that doesn't reflect on the individuals affected.
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TCS layoffs: IT employees union holds protests [Ed: Microsoft India (proxy)]
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Discarded Like He Never Mattered: TCS Lays Off 14-Year Old Manager Without Severance Pay, Employee Calls Ordeal ‘Heartbreaking’
A user on Reddit has shared a new update wherein a manager with over 14 years of experience got fired without severance pay and was asked to leave immediately. He called the entire ordeal ‘unfair, unethical, and heartbreaking’, while also mentioning that he was ‘discarded like he never mattered.’
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Microsoft president responds to protesters breaching HQ, 7 arrested
The Redmond Police Department (RPD) arrested seven people Tuesday at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, where protesters entered the president’s executive office.
Hours after the breach, Microsoft President Brad Smith held a media briefing, saying the company is “working every day to get to the bottom of what’s going on.”
“Microsoft is not a government or country, it’s a company,” he added. “We will do what we can and what we should, and that starts with ensuring our human rights principles are upheld.”
Smith said the group—including two Microsoft employees and one former Google employee—stormed the office, planted listening devices, and wouldn’t leave.
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Why 'serial layoffs' are a new job-market norm for workers
Human-resources leaders are grappling with a new workplace phenomenon that's causing disruptions in employee morale and company culture.
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The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon [Ed: But this publisher is being paid to inflate it]
There tend to be three AI camps. 1) AI is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will transform the world. 2) AI is the spawn of the Devil and will destroy civilization as we know it. And 3) "Write an A-Level paper on the themes in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet."
I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think, and you're still not going to get an A on your report.
You see, now that people have been using AI for everything and anything, they're beginning to realize that its results, while fast and sometimes useful, tend to be mediocre.
[...]
Why? Because a chatbot "forgets context, doesn't learn, and can't evolve." In other words, they're not good enough for mid-grade or higher work. Think of them as a not particularly bright or trustworthy intern. That may be good enough for $20 a month, but – spoiler alert – AI costs will have risen by ten times or more by next year. Will bottom-end AI be worth that to you? Your company?
[...]
The only problem was that mistakes kept happening. ChatGPT-5 has proven to be a dud. Or, as one popular Reddit rant put it in the OpenAI subreddit, normally a hotbed of ChatGPT fanbois, "GPT-5 is awful." I agree.
[...]
I was around for the dotcom crash, but many of you weren't, so here's a quick history lesson. The NASDAQ saw a 77 to 78 percent collapse. Many companies didn't survive. Many others that you may think of as being too big to fail, such as Cisco, Intel, and Oracle, lost over 80 percent of their market value.
Glancing at today's market, I see that all the AI companies have seen severe pullbacks, with Palantir leading the way down with a 17 percent drop in value. Even Nvidia has fallen by 3.9 percent. This isn't a bubble popping, not yet, but you can hear the air hissing out.