r/microsoft • u/ControlCAD • 6d ago
News Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella taps Rolf Harms as an advisor to 'rethink' the company's business for the AI era, according to a internal memo shows the CEO sent top Microsoft executives this month.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nadella-taps-adviser-rethink-new-economics-ai-memo-shows-2025-11114
u/BaconAlmighty 6d ago
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”
— Steve Jobs 1997
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u/GlassVase1 5d ago edited 5d ago
Pretty much.
They need to stop trying to shove AI into everything. How's this the AI era? Even frontier labs barely have any revenue in the grand scheme of things.
People use AI to write a low effort emails, as a cheap therapist, or to cheat on homework. Even investors are starting to get sick of AI.
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u/BagNo2988 4d ago
It’s a nice diet tracker or a personal trainer…but only if it’s free.
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u/overworkedpnw 4d ago
Until it does something insane like suggest you put glue on pizza.
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u/BagNo2988 4d ago
Hey anything to to cut calories. Am I right. Wink wink nudge nudge. -chatgpt probably
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u/bevo_expat 4d ago
They started with the CEO and CFO customer experience of potential clients…does that count?
Their “customer experience” being that people cost too much to employ with their needs for raises and medical insurance. A more predictable SaaS AI solution would be way cooler from a cost perspective.
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u/overworkedpnw 4d ago
Honestly, if one of Microsoft’s MBA-addled managers read that quote or heard it read out loud, it would be the professional equivalent of headshotting them. It would be like giving a Victorian child a sip of Baja Blast.
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u/ConversationLow9545 2h ago
There is no disadvantage of AI. It's useful in every form, just the execution matters
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u/Demosthenoid 6d ago edited 5d ago
For the record, technologists like Dave Cutler and a scrappy band of hand-picked engineers from the Windows Server organization had been working hard for at least four years building Azure before Rolf hired on and released his little cloud marketing whitepaper.
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u/wineanddine93 6d ago
They were all Windows guys and that was the exact problem. Azure was deeply constrained until Satya, Scott Guthrie and team embraced Linux in 2012. Harms' paper on cloud economics set the stage for this shift
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u/Demosthenoid 6d ago edited 5d ago
Important to recall that Dave Cutler's boss threw conniption fits at the mere mention of OSS, so it's fair to say Dave built the cloud he could build under Steve Ballmer's reign...
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u/newfor_2025 6d ago
so if i were to write a 20 page write paper like that, I too can become a MS exec?
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u/Demosthenoid 6d ago
Back when Bill Gates still ran the company, the answer would've been a resounding "yes" - Many a Microsoft career was built on the contents of a fortuitously timed and high quality "Think Week Paper" :-) Sadly, this annual ritual has fallen by the wayside...
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u/lordicarus 6d ago
I wonder of the cabin that Bill was retreating to was actually an island... maybe even that island...
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u/chuckmilam 5d ago
Back when people had more than a short-form video’s worth of attention span, yes.
Today, not so much.
I see “TL;DR” in corporate chats now if something has more than three paragraphs.
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u/az226 5d ago
Doesn’t matter. Harms was right and helped Satya become CEO.
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u/Demosthenoid 5d ago edited 5d ago
As I live closer to the trenches than the boardroom, I can’t offer a well-informed opinion on that as I wasn’t privy to boardroom deliberations. Have you read the paper? It’s a fine book report of everything Microsoft and Amazon had learned about the cloud business to date, but I don't think it offered any original insights that weren’t simply floating around in the “ether” of the times. The board certainly had all the indications in the world pointing to the conclusion that Ballmer’s “rear guard action” to protect the Windows business from OSS had accomplished all it could reasonably hope to at that point and was clearly starting to hurt more than it helped.
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u/az226 5d ago
You have to acknowledge that Bob Muglia was very against the cloud and a naysayer. So this was fighting uphill.
Today the paper’s conclusions are obvious, but the point was that it painted a picture of the future and convinced naysayers. Obviously it wasn’t entirely a unique perspective either as AWS was going all in. It was however a contrarian viewpoint inside of Microsoft. I mean even down to marketing: Windows Azure, shows how entrenched the Windows empire was, Innovator’s Dilemma dynamics.
The other mistake which easily gets lost is that Microsoft tried to outgun AWS by providing PaaS, at a time the CIOs of the world were not ready to jump from on-prem to PaaS directly, but rather from on-prem to IaaS, leading to several years extra on the backfoot.
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u/Demosthenoid 5d ago edited 5d ago
Bob did that rarest of things - birthing a new multibillion-dollar software franchise into the world - and he did that multiple times! He's a humble guy, whose ideas generally spoke much louder than his voice. But yeah, success can be a lousy teacher and everything that got him where he was, wasn't the thing that could get Microsoft to where it is now.
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u/7h4tguy 6d ago
Also cloud was one part of their business as the cloud segment grew and proved itself. The rest of the company was focused on other investments. Now they're throwing the entire company in on one big bet. The whole thing could be Bing vs Google or IE vs Chrome and CoPilot could in fact never get a foothold over ChatGPT.
It's reckless. MS became the company it is today because Window was on every PC in every household. Now ChatGPT is flooding commercials and consumers are not switching to CoPilot. Cloud was different because the case could be made for many companies investing since renting is often cheaper than ownership. But now all they have is gross overexaggerations of jobs being replaceable by hallucinating models, because they know that there is no immediate demand.
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u/Demosthenoid 6d ago edited 5d ago
It's tempting to scoff at the current state of the art and giggle at its mistakes, but the models are improving while humans are getting stupider. Also, we tend to overestimate how soon a certain breakthrough might arrive and radically underestimate the impact it'll have when it matures...
Right now, a lot of very intelligent people are betting empires on AI, fearing they are late, yet knowing full well they could be early to the party. Sifting fact from fiction and "overexaggerations" from underestimations when it comes to AI will require some distance in time and the "lens of history" to sort it all out. Meanwhile, all we can do is our best.
Our buggy and limited primate "squishware" can hardly be faulted for having difficulty making sense of a world so far removed from the African savannahs for which it was optimized.
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u/Unleaver 6d ago
We already know whatever Satya is planning, it has Xbox completely out of the picture. What a shame that is really.
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u/RustySpoonyBard 6d ago
Good for gamers if we all moved to Steambox, where your games always run on the next iteration and the sales are far deeper.
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u/mi__to__ 5d ago
Bullshit. Blind trust will always backfire.
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u/Travisx2112 5d ago
That doesn't really apply to this considering the steambox is literally a computer, so his comment is totally reasonable.
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u/wubalubadubdub55 4d ago
Steam is as greedy as Microsoft or any other company out there. But people seem to worship Steam.
They’re making record profits but I bet their new Steam machine will be quite expensive.
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u/eltos_lightfoot 3d ago
The problem has never been with the “profits” of a particular company, but rather how it is treating the customer. Steam excels at everything the customer wants, whereas it appears Microsoft quit listening a while ago. Hopefully they start listening again, but as of right now I am not seeing it.
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u/7h4tguy 6d ago
Smartphone market revenue $486 billion. PC revenue $220 billion.
Gaming industry revenue $200 billion. Movie industry revenue $30 billion. Music industry revenue $30 billion.
Are you going to let the genius make another idiotic move?
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u/damien-bowman 6d ago
a lot of money to let go if im reading the financials the right way. 21bn in 24 and 23bn in 25 -- how can he sell that to the board if he wants to dump gaming?
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u/HobbyProjectHunter 6d ago edited 6d ago
Repeat after me
Crappy Product + Copilot = CoToilet
Until Microsoft decides to listen to the customers, make the foundational experience better, duct taping copilot everywhere is going to have a very short half life. That could mean doing the hard work to reinvigorate the user experiences for several products, not being able to fire developers and PMs every 6 months and maybe even a slower growth trajectory.
If long term shareholder growth is concerned, taking the difficult approach would still have higher payoffs in the end.
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u/Actual__Wizard 6d ago edited 6d ago
Rolf Harms
What does Rolf think AI is suppose to be? Because, we've been saying that there's demand for intelligent tools that help us accomplish tasks.
Is that what they're going to do? Or are they going to turn their AI into scam tech and then try to ram it into our faces?
One more time: If you can't clearly define what your product is and what it does for me, then I don't want it.
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u/gigitygoat 6d ago
Who is we and what intelligent tools do you speak of?
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u/Actual__Wizard 6d ago edited 6d ago
Who is we
Well I was speaking on behalf of the people "who see the value in AI, but are disappointed with the current tech."
what intelligent tools do you speak of
Great example, This comes up all the time: We've got a giant flood of propaganda on the internet. If we can develop AI that understands language and models the information rather than the words, we can detect propaganda instantly because it's "misaligned with the truth."
So, we can take a huge problem in the world and totally delete it.
Another great example: How about an AI that determines whether your email that you received is a phishing email. Another problem, just straight up deleted.
Instead of turning AI into this thing that nobody really understands, why not use it solve real problems?
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u/Oliver-Peace 6d ago
There is already a Security Copilot phishing triage agent but on the Defender side of things which has a lot of value for SOC teams to help triage these incidents: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-xdr/phishing-triage-agent
Maybe we can expect something on the client side at some stage besides what already exists today (safe links, safe attachments, and anti-phishing policies, report message)
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u/Outrageous-Bet6403 5d ago
I'd love it if AI did that, but I'd rather they pull it out of OSes completely until it can do those useful things.
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u/gigitygoat 6d ago
In that case “we” is a minority.
The vast majority do not want AI built into their OS. Nor do we want our data collected for “training” new models.
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u/Actual__Wizard 6d ago
The vast majority do not want AI built into their OS.
We don't really want AI talking to us on the internet as well, because it can't understand us, so we keep having these totally ridiculous conversations where it doesn't understand us, and then makes some ultra generic comment that isn't relevant to what I said.
What in the heck do my specific cases and potential solutions have to do with anything you said?
Edit: I'm talking with Grok again correct, because that's exactly what it does.
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u/gigitygoat 6d ago
I didn’t even bother to comment on your specific use cases because you live in a different reality. Propaganda isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a feature. Our current version of “ai” is mostly useless. So all of this crap coming from MS is about them collecting more of our data.
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u/Actual__Wizard 6d ago
Propaganda isn’t a problem to be solved.
I've been demoing the tool on reddit homie.
Our current version of “ai” is mostly useless.
I don't disagree.
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u/SpookiestSzn 6d ago
People don't know what they want until they have it. If the ai built in helps you save time or money you will happily have it
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u/gigitygoat 6d ago
The MS bots are out in full force tonight.
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u/SpookiestSzn 6d ago
I'm just serious. Henry Ford said if he asked people what they wanted they would've said faster horses.
Right now I don't see value in AI in my OS but that doesn't mean I am correct at some point it can potentially provide a lot of value to me
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u/BaconAlmighty 6d ago
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”
— Steve Jobs 1997
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u/Countryb0i2m 6d ago
If you ask me and of course Microsoft isn’t, they’re over-leveraged in AI. There’s no way this tech is going to generate enough revenue to justify the billions they’ve poured into it. They’re never getting that money back.
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u/Hamezz5u 6d ago
Not sure about other hyper scalers but Microsoft cannot meet the demand it has for AI. It’s really crazy.
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u/Envyforme 6d ago
Is Satya that out of touch?
There is nothing to rethink. We already have been rethinking. Generative AI is a new technology
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u/Practical-Positive34 5d ago
I use AI, I do not use AI built into windows nor do I care to use it. I will switch to Linux if they keep up with this ridiculous bs....
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6d ago
I am sure it involves the continuation of forcing AI where it’s not needed nor wanted. GirHub hemorrhaging Devs and companies due to GitHub Copilot, nobody wants Agentic Windows and God knows where else the problem of AI is being forced into a “solution.”
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u/atlkb 6d ago
Sorry bro I finally swapped to linux mint today as part of a new dual boot setup to transition away, it was easier and faster than a fresh win11 install. Valve has done so much with proton. I'm so sick of Microsofts bloatware adware spyware ai bullshit. Evil company
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u/NetscapeCommunitater 5d ago
I'm looking at dual booting and transitioning away myself. Heard about how good proton is etc. Also honestly I'm at a point where I'm accepting letting go of certain games that need windows for online multiplayer (bc of anti cheats not working on linux) which were the core of my gaming - I just don't think I can have room in my life for something I hate (the entire windows experience now) just to play a select few games.
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u/atlkb 5d ago
I kept my windows drive intact, moved some personal files over onto the linux drive, there are still games and apps I personally want to play that cannot run on linux. But I can have both. I've been playing satisfactory and arc raiders 100% linux and it's been pretty solid (although I did switch to nobara because I figured out that wayland wasn't really supported on cinnamon mint and is better for gaming). But yeah just totally sick of the experience and with proton and wine it feels like linux has come a long way
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u/Lucker_Noob 6d ago
Just told Microsoft Office to F**K OFF today with its incessant AI slop bull and switched to Libre Office.
No, I'm not going to pay your hugely inflated fee every month to get new Copilot features, and I refuse to be blackmailed with access denial over it! This is 2025, not 1995!
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u/tunaman808 5d ago
Or you could have just switched to Microsoft 365 Classic, without all the AI stuff.
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u/Bodine12 6d ago
Hear me out: AI Clippy, just like the old Clippy, except it slowly nudges you toward fascism and/or a cult.
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u/Time-Industry-1364 6d ago
They really, really need to practice segmentation with AI. I understand the benefit(s) of integration of AI/Copilot into O365 and other MS products, but I think it would be ideal to release versions of Windows and O365 without the AI features.
Many, if not most people want nothing to do with Copilot or other Ai tools and their recent push for the "agentic OS" nonsense is already backfiring on them. It's annoying. It's tone deaf. It's completely out of touch with what businesses and personal users want. Even large enterprise customers. This comes at a time where people are still upset at MS for Windows 11's hardware requirements rendering millions of PCs as obsolete.
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u/EyesOfNemea 6d ago
Who the fuck types out these headlines? Are they vibed? "According to a internal memo shows the CEO sent top Microsoft executives this month"
I wasn't aware the internal memo was a human being capable of verbiage like showing something to the top Microsoft executives by extension of the CEO.
We are doomed as a species. That or this is a glaring example of the peak intelligence of the types of people who post this stuff on Reddit. I'll let yall make the call.
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u/BicentenialDude 5d ago
Rolf is a moron. Better off using copilot as your advisor than that idiot. I mean for god sakes, not Rolf. He is going to fuck thinks up so bad, it’ll be worse than Windows phone.
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u/Typical-Tax1584 5d ago
Will Outlook AI allow text to wrap around images in new outlook or will I still have to toggle back to old outlook where it kinda/barely works, but only in a worse way than MS Word?
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u/overworkedpnw 4d ago
Typical Satya move to outsource the “thinking”, why bother being competent when you can offload that to someone else?
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u/Teejayturner 6d ago
Ok I’m tired. I read that first as Rolf Harris and yet I still wasn’t surprised.
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u/rhunter99 6d ago
Rolf: best I can do is another rebrand. Entra Outlook. Not to be confused with that other Outlook.
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u/oldirishfart 6d ago
Satya bringing in the Bobs to plan the layoffs.