Dumb as a Rock (Premium)

There’s an interesting phenomenon in marketing where it’s impossible to push the benefits of a new version of a product without casting shade on the previous version. After all, if the new thing isn’t much better than the old thing, why would owners of that old thing even consider upgrading?

We see this a lot in Big Tech, with Apple being the most obvious example thanks to its hyperbolic claims for even the most modest of upgrades. But it’s not just Apple. As technology evolves, we collectively move from one thing to the next, and it’s only when the past is firmly in the rearview mirror that it becomes obvious how silly we were to be fixated on a product or service that now seems quite quaint.

Today, AI is suddenly all the rage. Companies are tripping over each other, both to establish their superiority over competitors with new products, and to market AI incessantly in new feature updates to existing products. This kind of thing, too, is not new: throughout the history of personal technology, there were certain products or brands that briefly had the golden touch, with investors and speculators jumping all of the companies that marketed these things. Linux had that moment. Social media. And many others, of course. But now it’s all about AI.

Microsoft, a pioneer in exaggerating its use of AI, has been playing this game for years. At Microsoft, everything is AI, and you don’t have to have a keen insight into the internal workings of the company to know that this term is now tied to career advancement and project approval. The most skilled and ambitious employees and executives are moving, as always, from uninteresting legacy products and services to the new hotness. The rest are adding AI---or at least AI marketing---to those legacy products to keep them on the radar. If you want to get ahead at Microsoft today, you better be talking AI.

This, of course, is why decades-old functionality like spelling and grammar checking is suddenly described as AI, and it’s why Microsoft marketed the addition of Bing logos to the Windows 11 Taskbar and Search highlights pane as integration with “the new AI-powered Bing.” But there’s no integration: you type a query, Microsoft forces you to use Microsoft Edge even if you chose a different product, and you find yourself in a web browser; there is no Bing AI in Windows 11 (or in Microsoft Edge, for that matter). It’s just marketing.

It's fascinating to me that AI has arrived at this exact moment in history.

I’ve often wondered aloud why Microsoft, a conservative, slow-moving company under Satya Nadella, would so suddenly unleash the AI wars when this technology was widely known internally to be unreliable and even dangerous. One theory that’s emerged---that I don’t entirely agree with---is that Nadella, who previously worked on Bing, has long wanted to make up for that product’s embarrassing performance against the search market leader, Google, and that recent...