I really don’t get this strategy. I get why it’s all over Office, VS, and elsewhere: MS wants to train AI to replace all office workers.
But paint? How does this make them money? Do they expect people to subscribe to Paint, or to windows as a whole, in order to access this AI? Because seemingly few people want it, and most feel put upon paying for an AI feature they don’t want or use. I think they’re going to lose business over it. Real business, Business business, who re-up their 3000+ licenses of Office every year. They’ve already lost my business, but that’s nothing for them.
But again, who do they think is paying for AI in Paint? In particular, who’s paying enough to cover the costs of it? because AI is expensive!
It feels like product managers trying to keep their projects from being canceled. Something similar happened in the Copland era at Apple where everyone tried to tie their project to Copland to keep themselves employed.
This is such an insightful answer. I totally forgot about MS’ famously toxic internal culture. Some bureaucratic piece of middle managed budgeting goes out informing the PMs that products not involving AI get 70% of their previous budgets and suddenly notepad has AI-assisted writing prompts and Minesweeper is asking if you’d like to play Global Thermonuclear War. It all makes sense now!
