A few days ago, Davuluri shared his excitement about it on his official X handle. He seemed very eager to reveal what the company has in mind at the upcoming Ignite event regarding the agentic OS plans.

Unfortunately for Microsoft and Davuluri, the response has been overwhelmingly negative, so much so that the comments on that X post have now been disabled.

Made me laugh. :)

      • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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        4 months ago

        Funny thing is that is not likely. The shareholders of microsoft (and most blue chip companies) have not really asked for anything other then endless profits lately. This endless drive into shit seems to be almost entirely driven by weird sales pitches and executives chasing a sunk cost.

        • Kyden Fumofly@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          The general idea is that whoever left behind in AI tech will vanish or lose power the next decade. Like Yahoo and other companies during the 2010+. So Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft compete now and they don’t care about users. Their focus is enterprise market and the future domination.

          Shareholders of Microsoft push AI.

          Competitor Shareholders push AI.

          Shareholders of hardware push AI.

          Enterprise pushes AI.

          • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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            4 months ago

            Ha, like 5% of the time. Most of the time its cluster fuck after cluster fuck and visits from the good idea fairies.

            Not saying there should not be innovation, but innovation for nothing but to be able to say you are doing innovation is a cancer.

            • frongt@lemmy.zip
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              4 months ago

              Yes, that’s why I wrote “innovation” and not innovation. I’m not sure if there’s something that better communicates the Dr. Evil air quotes.

        • willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 months ago

          That’s just a longer way to say, yes, the shareholders asked for it.

          Just because they didn’t ask it in letter form or explicitely that doesn’t mean much.

          Look, if M$ does this ‘agentic’ move and its shares drop 20% overnight, then, and only THEN, you’d be right to say the shareholders did not ask for it.

          Are shareholders punishing or rewarding these moves?

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Sorry for being an idiot, but what is an agentic OS?

    Whatever it is, it sounds fucking stupid.

    The OS doesnt need to be a focus. the OS is best when you completely forget its existence and can just do things without worry.

    Which is why Windows 7 is the best operating system microsoft has, and seemingly will, ever produce.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Windows 10 had a better kernel than 7. Unfortunately, that kernel was packaged with the rest of windows 10.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      “Agentic” is the buzzword to distinguish “LLM will tell you how to do it” versus “LLM will just execute the commands it thinks are right”.

      Particularly if a process is GUI driven, Agentic is seen as a more theoretically useful approach since a LLM ‘how-to’ would still be tedious to walk through yourself.

      Given how LLM usually mis-predicts and doesn’t do what I want, I’m no where near the point where I’d trust “Agentic” approaches. Hypothetically if it could be constrained to a domain where it can’t do anything that can’t trivially be undone, maybe, but given for example a recent VS Code issue where it turned out the “jail” placed around Agentic operations turned out to be ineffective, I’m not thinking too much of such claimed mitigations.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      Wild guess:

      Log everything the user is doing. Have clippy interface prompt the user to take some work off their hands. Do some web searches, start storing a dossier about the ‘project’. Give the user a rough outline to complete their project based on a trained llm and some web searches. Ask the user if the outline looks good. Ask the user if they’d like some help completing some of the steps. Burning through tokens the whole time, storing telemetry with 100% knowledge of what they user does/wants to do. Selling that exact data to project management software companies and companies that write middleware to do this work. Bind everything together into a virtual notebook where users can return to any content at any step.

    • HubertManne@piefed.social
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      4 months ago

      I mean I would love a linux distro that had a local agent that could answer queries. I view it as sorta like graphics compared to command line but if it needs networked resources outside of it doing its own searches. No thank you.

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      This is really just a guess but… I think “agent” in this context means a personalised AI.

      Training gen AI models requires huge amounts of resources. Its not practical to train an AI for your personal use.

      Creating an agent is something like, taking an existing model, asking it to keep your entire browser history in mind while you ask it to do your homework.

      IMO its actually one of the big limitations of gen AI, but somehow the word is supposed to mean the opposite. As in, the current approach has reached a dead end requiring exponentially more resources for less and less improvement. So because we can’t make a model that just knows or learns everything, we have to make agents that know lots about specific things.

    • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Which is why Windows 7 is the best operating system microsoft has, and seemingly will, ever produce.

      hear hear!

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        was such a good operating system.

        Didnt need regular reformats to keep it stable/keep performance. was easy to use. stayed out of the way. you never had to even think about the OS cause it was just so transparent and invisible to everything you had to/wanted to do.

    • Evotech@lemmy.world
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      Agent work can be pretty magical. I’ve been using cursor recently and the fact that it can just execute commands on your PC means you can just tell it to do something and it does. Troubleshooting as it goes

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    What I see time and time again are people saying “I HAVE TO use Windows at work, but I don’t use it at home”.

    So, logically that means Windows is losing market share to Mac and Linux, right?

    Well, no. What I see over the past 20 years is that people just stopped buying PCs for personal use.

    At this point, it really feels like if you’re over 55, you’re in the minority if you own a PC. If you’re younger than 30, you’re in the minority if you own a PC.

    And for 30-55 year olds, it’s simple. You grew up with PCs, so you’re used to them. Everyone else just sees it as “that thing we use at work”

    So, no. People dropping microsoft from their own personal lives doesn’t mean they switch to linux. It just means they use their cell phone or tablet to browse the web. Because for most people, thats all a pc is anyways. Just a machine to browse the web on.

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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      PC gamers under 30 would be considered a significant minority compared to other <30yos?

      Hmm… I don’t know. 30-50yos are raising kids right now. That’s a whole lot of 0-21orso year olds living in the bracket where people have PCs.

      Then you have college students filling the gap, who likely have a laptop at least.

    • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, I have like a dozen colleagues between 25-60 and I can think of maybe 2 that have a PC outside of their work laptops. And those are both gamers.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      Well even with your observation, it could well be losing share to Mac and Linux. The Windows users are more likely to jump ship, and Mac and Linux users tend to stick with the platform more, mainly because it’s not actively working to piss them off. Even if zero jump to Mac or Linux, the share could still shift.

      The upside of ‘just a machine to run a browser’ is that it’s easier than ever to live with Linux desktop, since that nagging application or two that keeps you on Windows has likely moved to browser hosted anyway. Downside of course being that it’s much more likely that app extracts a monthly fee from you instead of ‘just buying it’.

      Currently for work I’m all Linux, precisely because work was forced to buy Office365 anyway, and the web versions work almost as well as the desktop versions for my purposes (I did have to boot Windows because I had to work on a Presentation and the weird ass “master slide” needed to be edited, and for whatever reason that is not allowed on the web). VSCode natively supports linux (well ‘native’, it’s a browser app disguised as a desktop app), but I would generally prefer Kate anyway (except work is now tracking our Github Copilot usage, and so I have to let Copilot throw suggestions at me to discard in VSCode or else get punished for failing to meet stupid objectives).

    • Surp@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Definitely not to mac…I use mac and windows at work and Mac is by far the worst OS. It’s so damn locked down it’s obnoxious.

  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri had earlier hinted at such plans already about how the next evolution of OS will make it capable enough to “semantically understand you” as Windows will get “more ambient, more pervasive, more multi-modal”. Using features like Copilot Vision it will be able to “look at your screen” and do more.

    Since when did corpos try to reframe the word “pervasive” as something positive?

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    4 months ago

    Backlash is actually losing business, what they are really getting is a lot of whining from people who never do anything anyway.
    It was the same with Windows 95, XP, then Vista, then 8 and 10 and now 11.
    Very few who are used to Windows will abandon it just because it’s becoming a surveillance hellscape of forced updates, advertising and other annoyances.
    Microsoft is posting record profits on their way down, just like Intel did 10 years ago.
    That said Microsoft is still in a better position, and while Windows may lose relevancy, Microsoft has way more revenue coming from other sources than Intel had without X86.

    • Alaik@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      Ill be honest. I never expected to leave windows but here i am doing my homework on Linux.

      • 1984@lemmy.todayOP
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        4 months ago

        Its quite late now to learn Linux but its never too late.

        Its been my only desktop for like 15 years.

    • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      You say that, yet Mac and Linux grew quite a bit over the past couple years. It’s true, not everyone will drop Windows right after whatever bullshit they announce, but software and platforms are rarely abandonned over night.

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        4 months ago

        Doesn’t matter much what users do. Corporations are nowhere close to ditching Windows.

        No way to manage a fleet of Linux or Mac machines. Nothing comes close to the power of Active Directory and a bit of PowerShell.

        Funny enough, I guarantee there will be GPOs and PS commandlets that let you disable the AI bullshit.

        EDIT: Apparently I’m addressing a crowd who has never managed a fleet. I’ll bow to your expertise.

        • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Corporations haven’t ditched windows because Active Directory and Group Policy had no equal. Now that Microsoft has slowly pushed everybody to cloud based identity, there’s really nothing stopping you from using something other than AD or even Entra ID

          • shalafi@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Identity management is only one aspect of AD. Very telling that all these rebuttals are thinking only in terms of what LDAP can handle.

        • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org
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          4 months ago

          A buddy of mine works for a fortune 500 company that started giving out MacBooks as the standard hardware this year. Apparently you need to jump through a bunch of hoops if you want to run Windows. I was shocked to hear it but Microsoft deserves to be humbled.

        • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          You can totally manage a fleet of Linux devices. Next to all servers run Linux. How the hell would you do that without appropriate tooling? We use Ansible for example - Which certainly isn’t a perfect solution, but a working one.

        • Deathray5@lemmynsfw.com
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          4 months ago

          A lot of servers run Linux. With VDI being more plausible the idea of giving laptops that are basically a “zero” has been floated.

          Last time I was in work it was in a secure environment so maybe that’s not widespread.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Welcome to the 1%. 😋
        Yes there are some that switch, and also kudos to those who try, even when they find it’s not for them.
        I’m just sad that the problems with Windows isn’t enough for more to abandon it? I simply don’t get “normal” people.

  • DupaCycki@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    In a few years Microsoft will just release Windows 12, with most of these AI features removed. Maybe they’ll do some user friendly tweaks too, but just a few. And most of Windows refugees will come back, praising Microsoft for listening to the community. Meanwhile there’ll be even more spyware and even less user control over the OS, but the vast majority will never notice that. That’s all it takes.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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      I think you are enormously overestimating their abilities to:

      A) reflect on poor management decisions that hurt users. They have increased their company valuation TEN-fold under Satya Nadella over the last 11 years, and his push to cannibalise the hosted-services partners and Gold partners with Azure/365 made them a lot of ground before then. They became the second company ever to reach a valuation of $3T back in 2024. If you think a (globally) handful of unhappy home OS users will cause then to change course - I don’t think so, certainly never been my experience with MS.

      B) win back most of the users they have lost to Windows. Why would those users return? They have what they need with their new solutions, and moving to them was a time and education cost that they have now fully paid, they’re invested. They’d have to have something very compelling to bring them back beyond, "hey guys we stopped being shit! ######for now "

    • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf
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      4 months ago

      Given MS has been testing Windows on the Cloud in the enterprise space for a while now, I wouldn’t be shocked if future major Windows versions, ie. Win12, became cloud-based.

  • FireWire400@lemmy.world
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    I can’t wait for that whole AI bubble to blow up. Shame it’s most likely not gonna kill Microsoft…

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    4 months ago

    Yup. Got two days off, and I’m going Linux. If i can actually replace windows for what I need, then it looks like i just freed up some space on my nvme.

    • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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      I’m jealous. There are a handful of windows-only pieces of software that I need, unfortunately.

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf
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    4 months ago

    This is why I’m glad PCs aren’t locked down like phones and there’s nothing stopping you from running an alt OS on the desktop yet.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      last windows install in my house was on my rarely used laptop, windows 10.

      As soon as Win10 was end of life I threw linux on it. First time in…god…30 years? Theres not been a windows PC in my house… Ran Windows from 3.11 all the way up to 7 happily (and then my laptop came with Win 10 from factory and, well, thankfully I only had to use it when traveling… )

      Main system has mostly been a breeze to use for years now, but I built it with Linux in mind and picked AMD parts and such to make the transition easier, which definitely helped me avoid major headaches.

    • 1984@lemmy.todayOP
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      The thing is, they all invested so much into Ai now so they have to use it everywhere even when people dont want it… :)

      Its going to wreck the reputation of windows even more…

  • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    If only my computer was constantly hooked up to cloud AI watching everything I do! -No one ever.

  • Cyrus Draegur@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    See, now that they’ve strongarmed everyone into using their new shitty OS and no longer using the old kind of okay one, they can change it however they want and all their users are stuck with it!

    (Excuse me while i cackle madly in linux)