The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.
Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month’s promotion. It doesn’t seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It’s some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella’s mouth. I don’t get it, but it’s very consistent with Microsoft.
The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.
M$‘s priority is to draw new people on their products and make people upgrade to higher tiers. Existing users are none of their concern. There are business models who will put the product team to focus on existing users. One way is an open source product run by the users community, another way is product relying on the effect of word of mouth.
