> Google's Bard got an answer wrong during an ad, which everyone noticed. Now the narrative is 'Google is rushing to catch up to Bing and making mistakes!
I think Brereton is missing the wider narrative. Microsoft has been executing very very well for the last few years. Azure has been on a tear, they've demonstrated great foresight with their first investment in OpenAI many years ago (which is now paying dividends), and they've made strong acquisitions. They've captured the AI lightning in a bottle. Google, has left people wondering if it can execute well. It's had a lot of flops, and a lot of project cancellations. When they announced LaMDA, they let the hype fizzle to nothing. The most we got out of that is some memeable material about a guy who wanted to get legal representation for their language model.
People have been positing about ChatGPT for search as soon as it was released. They (Google) have had months to announce _anything_, but waited until the last minute. When they finally had a chance to steal Microsoft's thunder, they flubbed something as simple as an ad. Now people are _really_ wondering if Google can execute anymore. Even I'm starting to wonder. Google is definitely rushing to catch up to Microsoft in a few areas now, and their stock reflects that reality now.
> Microsoft has been executing very very well for the last few years.
Indeed. ~13 years ago I'd have said MS would be mostly irrelevant by the mid-late 2020's as they missed the mobile bus in the 00's which Google and Apple have on lock down.
But MS knows one thing well: developers (Thanks Ballmer). Azure, Github, vscode - a full stack of tools developers can use to deploy software - without Windows! Very smart move as they can't fight Apple or Google on the front end, so go after the back end - the engines that keep the lights on and money flowing.
They're continuing this tooling trend with AI which they can integrate into their existing tools to accelerate development (copilot, etc.) Honestly, with all this tooling in place I would not be surprised if we see a Windows mobile/phone OS make a comeback.
If there is one thing Microsoft doesn't know or understand it's the open source developer. Buying github then stealing ip to bundle in co-pilot. Developers don't love Azure but large governmental orgs cto's do.
Well open source developers seem allergic to making profit and Microsoft is a for profit business, so I don’t think it’s a big surprises which market they are targeting.
Most developers work with open source languages / products. The market for closed source Microsoft sponsored languages gets smaller each year. I remember when many paid thousands for msdn subscriptions.
Presumably because they're all open source now?
C# is still in the top 5 according to TIOBE [4] (whether we pay any attention to that is shrug), but they reckon it's grown in usage in the past year.
Typescript is probably one of the fastest growing languages (in terms of usage).
[C#] https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang
[F#] https://fsharp.org/
[Typescript] https://www.typescriptlang.org/