From the Editor’s Desk: Spectacle and Substance ⭐

My wife and I spend a lot of time sitting at bars, both here in Mexico and in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. This isn’t about drinking, though that obviously occurs. It’s really about socializing with the others alongside you and behind the bar. We’ve made more friends than I can count during these experiences, and we have many stories. One of them reminds me of a tech topic I’ve been quietly obsessing over lately.

Like any business, bars have busy and slow times, of course, and that creates a paradoxical situation for us. We want these places and the people who work there to be successful, and that can only happen if they’re busy. But we also really enjoy when our favorite bars are slow, with few patrons, because that lets us spend time with the bartenders and others who work there and get to know them better. We exchange stories, and here in Mexico, especially, we exchange drinks: I can’t count how many times bartenders have racked up shot glasses in front of us, joining in themselves in a sign of affection, appreciation, and friendship.

On a previous trip, we were hanging out at one of our favorite bars on a particularly slow night, and the talk turned to Mexican-based wines and alcohols. A bartender friend kept offering me various drinks, including the mezcals he knows I don’t like because they’re smoky. It’s just not my thing. Regardless, on this particular occasion, he slammed a bottle of mezcal on the bar and insisted that I try it.

“You know I don’t like mezcal,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” he replied. “But you should like it!”

I laughed and agreed, as I knew this was one of his favorites and he just wanted me to enjoy it too. “I should like it,” I replied. “The problem is, I don’t.”

This reminds me of the way Microsoft has spent the past three years—and, yes, it’s been three very long years—jamming Copilot down its reluctant customers’ respective throats. But even more so, it reminds me of that thing I’ve been obsessing over recently. Which is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s increasingly insistent posture on what he sees as the future of the company.

Satya Nadella is blogging.

The man who gave up most of his CEO duties to Judson Althoff last October, who to my mind ceded the rest of those duties to CFO Amy Hood years ago, apparently has so much spare time in “founder mode” (gross) that he’s now committing his thoughts to the printed word. This is a man, I will remind you, who cannot speak effectively, whose robotic presence is far more distracting than it is inspiring.

I’ve tried to avoid discussing this in detail because I find it so revolting, though I did succumb to at least mentioning it by burying this fact in an editorial about another topic entirely. But as noted, I am obsessing over this. Obsessing over a man I do not trust or like, a man who let Windows wallow for years before turning his attention to it and finally enshittifying it thoroughly. His words matter, if only for the clues they give us to what is going on in that hollow dome of a head. He does ostensibly run Microsoft, after all. And he did inform his staff, between a now uncountable series of layoffs, that anyone who still works at Microsoft and doesn’t believe in AI fully can just leave, full stop.

I am not an AI denier. I am, however, a consumer advocate. And I write for Microsoft’s customers, primarily, though really for anyone who uses personal technology products and services. I mention this only because I do not write for Microsoft. And that means I’m free to speak my mind, and even to disagree with those things this terrible company does to its own customers.

Is there anything more terrible than Copilot?

It’s difficult to say, mostly because there are so many other things one might complain about too. But aside from the missed opportunities here, given that surely some of Copilot’s features are useful to some people, I’ve rarely seen Microsoft or any other company turn such a blind eye to the needs of its own customers and then turn around and blame them for the failure of the product none of them seem to want. This isn’t just enshittification. It’s a cancerous form of enshittification that somehow taints everything it comes in contact with.

Copilot is terrible.

As bad, perhaps, Copilot is incredibly unpopular. Except for GitHub Copilot, which is not the same thing as the Copilot(s) I am discussing here, you can’t find a single poll or survey of users in which Copilot even warrants a mention. Copilot isn’t just less popular than ChatGPT and Claude, it’s apparently less popular than AIs no one has even heard of. Some of them might have been dreamt up in a parent’s basement for all I know. It doesn’t matter.

But Nadella keeps pushing it on us. He’s like a single tiny man, standing arms outstretched on the beach as a towering tsunami bears down on him. And his one blog post—yes, he’s only written a single post since the blog’s inception in December—represents what I would call his central delusion. That Microsoft can somehow escape becoming nothing more than infrastructure, another IBM.

2026 will be a pivotal year for AI, he tells us, though it’s unclear why we should trust a man who can’t seem to deliver a single AI product that anyone wants. Consider the following.

“We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion,” the post begins. “We are beginning to distinguish between ‘spectacle’ and ‘substance’. We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed, but also the harder and more important question of how to shape its impact on the world.”

Consider the word “we.” When he writes “we” there, is he referring to the industry? Or maybe the world at large? Or is he referring specifically to Microsoft, the company he supposedly leads?

I’ve obsessed over those sentences because I feel they hold the key to understanding this man and his misguided strategies. Where you fall on this question matters. And it troubles me. Consider that same quote, but written as I read it, from the perspective of Microsoft.

“Microsoft has moved past the initial phase of discovery and is entering a phase of widespread diffusion. Microsoft is beginning to distinguish between ‘spectacle’ and ‘substance’. Microsoft now has a clearer sense of where the tech is headed, but also the harder and more important question of how to shape its impact on the world.”

If I am correct, then we have a crisis on our hands. I think we all vaguely understand that Microsoft has moved so quickly to distribute AI, often branded as Copilot, in so many places throughout its technology stacks, and to as many customers aa possible, that it literally has no idea what it’s doing. Mistakes were made, some small like the constant reworking of Copilot in Windows 11, and some big, like raising Microsoft 365 pricing to help afford the datacenter buildout it’s undertaking while destroying our country and our planet. This is Meta/Facebook’s ridiculous “move fast and break things” philosophy, but writ large. And that is precisely what Microsoft’s customers do not want.

As I write this, Microsoft is the fourth biggest company in the world by market capitalization, though it’s fair to point out that the top five or so of those companies change positions just as often as which AI model is perceived to be the “best.” As with the weather in New England, if you don’t like the current winner, just wait a few minutes. It will change.

But customers of the world’s biggest companies don’t expect them to move fast and break things. When you’re as big as Microsoft, doing so is the equivalent of Godzilla visiting Tokyo, a seismic, cataclysmic event that impacts millions. Microsoft’s customers are conservative and slow moving and they expect the same of Microsoft: Move deliberately and do not break things.

But that’s not what we’ve gotten over the past three years. What we’ve gotten is an avalanche of AI features, some worthwhile, for sure, but the majority unwanted, unloved, half-baked, and ever changing. And not as opt-in features we get for “free” for all the money we’re already throwing at the software giant, but rather as a combination of free and extra-cost services that are enabled by default and only changed to opt-out or configurable after enough people complain. Which they have, every single time, and in droves.

That Microsoft might only now, three years later—seriously, three f#!king years later—finally be figuring out this thing its jamming down our throats isn’t just depressing, it’s insulting. Nadella was dumb enough to use the word “slop” in his blog post, which I almost understand, except that he uses the reference to blame his own customers for the problems. We—Microsoft—needs to “get beyond the arguments of slop vs. sophistication” when it comes to discussing AI, as if the two were inseparable. We, the real we, see both sides of AI quite clearly, at least most of us do. There is both slop and sophistication, and not owning up to that is just one reason why this man is not a great leader. A great leader would own up to the mistakes and the misdeeds. A great leader would stop harming his own customers.

AI is “messy” and “unpredictable,” he writes, and dependent on the “scarce energy, compute, and talent resources” that Microsoft, to my mind, is actively and purposefully wasting. Those terms are all in that post, spread apart as if in some Mad Libs from a nightmare realm.

And I am obsessed. Quietly, no more.

“You know I don’t like Copilot,” we collectively tell Microsoft literally every single day.

“Yes, I know,” Nadella replies. “But you should like it!”

OK. But you should also do right by your customers and not just by your shareholders, Wall Street, and the corrupt, corpulent “government” you’ve bent your knee to, forever destroying your soul. You should deliver products and services that provide such good value that paying for them is a no-brainer. You used to do that. I remember. I bet a lot of you reading this do, too.

Oh, and let me clear up the debate I noted above. Satya Nadella is absolutely, 100 percent, talking about Microsoft when he writes “we” in that blog post. If you read the full thing, and I have, to my heart’s and soul’s collective distress, there is no doubt.

And that sucks.

So, yeah. Satya Nadella is blogging. Great.