"Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession

9 months ago by bwhough to c/technology

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned an AI-heavy blog post to close out 2025, leading to widespread mockery and a brand new moniker for the big M.

Rhaedas 182 points 9 months ago

CEO proves that CEOs can be replaced by AI.

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1984 121 points 9 months ago

The company is now run by Copilot and its in charge of naming products.

The rdp client was renamed "Windows App", remember? So this is a step up.

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vrek 38 points 9 months ago

Microsoft can never name products... Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox one, Xbox series x, Xbox series s... Hell I'm currently watching agdq and can't tell you the best one, imagine a grandmother trying to buy a gift for her grandchild. Atleast it's Playstation 1, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Playstation 5 obvious which one is newest. Or Windows 3.1, nt, 3.1 with workgroups, 95, 98, 2000, me, xp, 7, vista, 8, 10, 11...wtf?

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pinball_wizard 11 points 9 months ago

At least 2000 is both the largest number, and the best OS, in that group. :)

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vrek 4 points 9 months ago

I tend to like every other one... 3.1, 98, 2000, xp, 7, 10...maybe 12?well see of the pattern continues.

I find Microsoft releases a good os... Gets drunk and comes up with crazy ideas... Refines ideas into usable os.... Gets drunk and more crazy ideas... Repeat

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JGrffn 1 point 9 months ago

I think the trend died with 10 as soon as tech companies stopped being afraid of fucking their customers over.

Edit: I saw this trend too, I start at XP due to my age but those are the OSs I liked.

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SweatyFireBalls 9 points 9 months ago

Totally agree with you, but I would say that the original name made some sense. It used directx and the code name was directx box which became Xbox. Ideally edgy for the market at the time too, I think.

Despite being an avid gamer, I'm not even sure what the release order was after xbone. Being a grandparent or parent and doing it? Fuck that.

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vrek 3 points 9 months ago

I didn't consider direct x to Xbox connection but it makes sense... After the initial release it's insane. You want to be next generations idea of gaming, make it understandable to a non-gamer cause they are likely buying it. Hell Nintendo entertainment system vs super Nintendo entertainment system... Which is better? Which will make your granddaughter or grandson happy?

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phlegmy 6 points 9 months ago

Don't forget the xbox one s and xbox one x, which were after the xbox one (the third xbox, not the first xbox), but before the xbox series s and xbox series x.

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leftzero 5 points 9 months ago

Bob.

Microsoft Bob.

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iturnedintoanewt 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah but the equivalent in the xbox series would be naming some of the games xbox too.

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Strider 1 point 9 months ago

With windows there aren't so many (consumer) versions on the market at one given time.

However, the Xbox stuff is so messy that me as a gamer has no idea nor interest which is the latest or more powerful (see PS 'pro').

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red_bull_of_juarez 1 point 9 months ago

It's probably a new manager for each iteration and they need to leave their mark by choosing a different name.

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Bytemeister 7 points 9 months ago

It's so fucking bad.

I'm currently having an issue on my work machine where my Windows App doesn't close properly, and will hang the next time I try to connect to a virtual desktop unless I kill it in the task manager.

Imagine the crazy vague answers you get when you search for "Windows App won't close".

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Cricket 4 points 9 months ago

The rdp client was renamed “Windows App”, remember?

Wait, let me say that this is not accurate without defending Microsoft (fuck them). The rdp client hasn't been renamed, to my knowledge. What was renamed to Windows app was the other product very confusingly named "remote desktop client", which was a Microsoft Store app meant to access things like Azure Virtual Desktop, their cloud Windows service, etc. Yes, incredibly confusing product naming from Microsoft, as usual.

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1984 4 points 9 months ago

Haha that is actually even more funny. :)

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Cricket 1 point 9 months ago

True! :)

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echodot 66 points 9 months ago

I don't understand why shareholders keep this guy's CEO he's absolutely terrible at his job. They need to go back to having an actual engineer as CEO, someone who understands what the hell is going on and doesn't keep getting distracted by the next shiny bauble.

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Alaknar 72 points 9 months ago

I don’t understand why shareholders keep this guy’s CEO he’s absolutely terrible at his job

What are you talking about? Under this guy's tenure the MSFT share price skyrocketed. What else would shareholders care about? He's doing an excellent job, as far as they're concerned.

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Sineljora 1 point 9 months ago

IMO, Satya isn’t the same anymore. His disabled child died, and he gave a speech about pushing forward to investors at the time but no longer cares about accessibility. Now, he’s got ai-induced psychosis so he doesn’t care about azure, office, Xbox, linkedin, GitHub, etc. Unless it has Copilot in it, because he’s invested in openAI.

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Alaknar 7 points 9 months ago

Mate, have you seen the valuation of companies handling AI or hardware that AI requires?

Shareholders are creaming their pants any time someone says "agentic" or "AI".

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fibojoly 3 points 9 months ago

Oh dear. That sounds like a super-villain origin story. "I just wanted to develop an AI capable of bringing back my dead child to life!" Another broken soul with too much power...

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froh42 20 points 9 months ago

Are you wishing back for Ballmer? IMO things were even worse, then. When they built a new version of Windows that was so bad they threw it away after a few years and botched together Vista as a quick save.

Or for Gates? Who just missed and overlooked this newfangled internet thing in the 90s until they slammed the brakes and used loads of money to turn things around?

Or the Microsoft that successfully hollowed out monopoly regulations paving the way for the tech bro style off business we now have?

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BeardededSquidward 12 points 9 months ago

But engineer don't make dividends go up. Engineer know to reinvest, and stock holder sad not get more money.

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oppy1984 11 points 9 months ago

He's generating profit, that's all that matters to the shareholders.

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echodot 4 points 9 months ago

Is he?

No one is buying the Xbox, quite possibly because no one can tell if it's a new generation or not. I don't think any AI company has yet posted a profit. Market share for Linux has increased in the last 2 years and most of that is from people moving away from Windows.

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BeardedGingerWonder 17 points 9 months ago

Are you being serious?

Have a look at the MSFT share price in 2014 when he took over ~$45/share and now ~$470/share - of course investors love him, he's 10x their investments since he was appointed.

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bearboiblake 2 points 9 months ago

Share price and profit are two very different beasts and only really have a loose connection to one another. Plenty of companies lose money left and right but still have high share prices.

The share price is just what the stock market feels a company is worth. It's almost 100% vibe-based.

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oppy1984 11 points 9 months ago

Their business is B2B now. Nadella is focused on that, gaming is a nice side business to him, and the home user wasn't profitable enough to care about keeping.

Right now my fortune 500 employer is all in on Microsoft, they pay for around 200,000 Microsoft business licenses and about 2/3's of those PCs also have a 365 business license, plus they have Microsoft servers with their own individual licenses in every state and almost every country. And that's just one company, think about how many companies are all in on Microsoft and you can see why B2B is what he cares about.

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supersquirrel 6 points 9 months ago

Their business is B2B now.

That and mass surveillance such as with Palestine and Microslop's Azure used by Israel to obscure individual culpability in deciding who to murder next.

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MonkderVierte 7 points 9 months ago

Their business is by a vast majority in the cloud now.

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ThirdConsul 1 point 9 months ago

Midjourney is profitable.

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ivanafterall 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah, he seems really, really bad at this.

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dependencyinjection 2 points 9 months ago

Didn’t he start Azure? Like the reason MS have so much money still.

At making shareholder value he seems pretty good at that and that’s all that matters.

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FireWire400 2 points 9 months ago

Didn't he start Azure?

Nah, that was Dave Cutler.

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dependencyinjection 1 point 9 months ago

Not correct either. Maybe my wording was poor, several people were there at the start of Azure.

Nadella is the reason it’s the second largest cloud provider next to AWS.

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FireWire400 1 point 9 months ago

But he didn't "start" it, at least not according to Wikipedia

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ZILtoid1991 55 points 9 months ago

"Micro$haft" and "Micro$hit", two former snarl names aimed at Microsoft, got a real challenger.

(The dollar signs are intentional.)

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slag 63 points 9 months ago

Why not both moment:

Micro$lop

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possumparty 12 points 9 months ago

fuckin' brilliant.

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ZombieMantis 3 points 9 months ago

Bravo 👏

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Agrivar 0 points 9 months ago

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prole 51 points 9 months ago

Imagine being in charge of one of the wealthiest corporations to have ever existed, and yet unwilling to write out a statement without a fucking llm

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xthexder 15 points 9 months ago

It must be hard to admit he spent billions on a slop machine. Sunk cost fallacy is probably one of many things they're fighting.

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peetabix 6 points 9 months ago

It will become the norm. Our CEO uses ChatGPT a lot. He used it to write a Christmas email to the whole company. All of his correspondence it devoid of any personality.

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GenosseFlosse 10 points 9 months ago

Your company can save a lot of money by replacing him with an used laptop that only opens chatGPT on startup.

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Jason2357 8 points 9 months ago

https://replaceyourboss.ai/ Be the change!

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Rookeh 3 points 9 months ago

You are assuming that they have a personality to begin with.

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SomeRandomNoob 48 points 9 months ago

If Microsoft is now Microslop, then the CEO should be called sloperator

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0_o7 10 points 9 months ago

Copilot is Slopilot

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SkaveRat 7 points 9 months ago

the vice is the sloppy second

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falseWhite 3 points 9 months ago

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NoForwadSlashS 1 point 9 months ago

Chief Executive SloppySir

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falseWhite 47 points 9 months ago

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Suavevillain 45 points 9 months ago

I love this for them. They refuse to change course so it is on them.

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FreddiesLantern 19 points 9 months ago

They worked hard for it, and earned it.

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nutsack 34 points 9 months ago

it would be pretty interesting if Microsoft made the next version of Windows a Linux distro with a Windows emulation layer

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FLP22012005 24 points 9 months ago

With Edge running on top to render all user interface elements.

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Gluek 3 points 9 months ago

Edge running Chromium inside, loading windows web app from Microsoft website every startup

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Rcklsabndn 2 points 9 months ago

I just threw up a bit at the thought.

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serenissi 8 points 9 months ago

I think it'd be a full screen ai client app running on linux, probably on cage. why bother with the nt and win32 and whatever middlewares. linux is externally maintained. saved dev money can be used for power/ram bills instead.

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anon_8675309 5 points 9 months ago

Well, if they let AI write all the software I bet it will be. I’m sure it’s been trained on the Linux source code.

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haribar 4 points 9 months ago

Or throw their support behind certain distros with said emulation layers, maybe even a desktop environment like Plasma with a "Microsoft theme".

Honestly I think it is a great idea either way.

Regardless of their commercial goals, if they put their weight into supporting the Linux ecosystem we'd undoubtedly benefit as a whole. For instance from common upstream bug fixes and increased user adoption of Linux by their remaining loyalist customers.

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Wrrzag 3 points 9 months ago

Yes, until they do like Google with android

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Alaknar -5 points 9 months ago

That would never happen. The entire reason why Windows is not as power efficient as MacOS or some Linux distros is the backwards compatibility that it brings. People laugh at the fact that you can still find icons and .dlls from Windows 95 (or, probably, even 3), but that's exactly one of the reasons why this OS is so massively popular, especially for enterprise users.

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nutsack 6 points 9 months ago

I'm sorry but this is just not true. The legacy support within Linux is insane and it's one of the hallmarks of the operating system.

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mholiv 14 points 9 months ago

What are you talking about? Linux has virtually no backwards compatibility at all. Maybe one or two years max. The kernel is fine. The weak point is glibc.

You literally need to recompile applications constantly to stay compatible with glibc. Otherwise they just don’t work.

The good news is that distros are constantly providing freshly compiled versions of open source applications.

The bad news is that actual binary backwards compatibility is non existent. Try running a binary compiled in 2005 on modern Linux. You’ll just get a ton of glibc errors.

Windows lets you run applications compiled in 1995 on modern desktops.

Linux is great and it’s what I use. But we can’t claim backwards compatibility as a strength. Maybe a binary compiled today with musl might run in 2036 but musl targeting is quite rare.

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Alaknar 4 points 9 months ago

Linux has excellent legacy support for Linux.

Now run a 1998 obscure Windows vendor custom app. The vendor went out of business 30 years ago.

Not to mention that it would kill the entirety of existing IT automation, the entirety of centralised system management, and lots more.

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dtaylor84 5 points 9 months ago

Actually, Linux has better support for legacy Windows apps (through wine) than for legacy Linux apps.

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froh42 1 point 9 months ago

Your best bet to run it probably is on Linux with Wine. Or if it is MS themselves , they already have their own Win32 to Linux translation layers, for example DB2 for Linux runs that way.

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ICastFist 29 points 9 months ago

I'm sure the shareholders will be suuuuper happy to learn that Micropilot Copilot 365 Copilot Azure Copilot Copilot Teams Copilot is now on 111% of every WinCopilot install, which will totally mean great profits.

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73rdnemesio 14 points 9 months ago

But just in case, let’s lay off 5-10% of our workforce again this quarter just to further drive home how profitable we are!

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Sunflier 28 points 9 months ago

Found Copilot randomly installed on my computer after the latest update. Couldn't uninstall it fast enough

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ChogChog 11 points 9 months ago

inb4 they name System32 to Copilot so you can’t delete it.

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Atropos 6 points 9 months ago

Watch me!

User has disconnected

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mrgoosmoos 3 points 9 months ago

same here. I uninstalled so much bloatware that automatically installed in the past six months without my permission

they're driving us away

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acosmichippo 26 points 9 months ago

I vote to forecfully rebrand them as Macrosoft.

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gravitas_deficiency 44 points 9 months ago

Macroslop would be better

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Rekall_Incorporated 7 points 9 months ago

Macroslurp

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MajinBlayze 19 points 9 months ago

Apropos of nothing, there's a studio that makes porn games called neversoft, and I think it's a brilliant name.

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desmosthenes 9 points 9 months ago

and tony hawk games

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MajinBlayze 3 points 9 months ago

Far as I can tell, these are different companies

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desmosthenes 4 points 9 months ago

. >< well the good neversoft then - the spike through an eyeball

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samus12345 6 points 9 months ago

I'm only familiar with the one that made Spider-Man for PS1.

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beemikeoak 4 points 9 months ago

Microslurp! We make software slurplier!

Agh, could you make it a little shittier?

Sure!

Microshit! We make shit softer! We put our shit on your computer, your phone, your favorite netflix server. Everywhere! We make our shit softer and put it everywhere!

That's it!!!!

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MonkderVierte 0 points 9 months ago

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Washedupcynic -3 points 9 months ago

Do you know why it's called MicroSoft? The founders and CEOs decided to name the company after their penises.

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bearboiblake 1 point 9 months ago

🙄