Those caught on because they’re basically addictive drugs. Furthermore, while it may be hard to remember at this late stage of the game, those services did have genuine value to some users at the beginning. Today’s versions of those products have gone through countless iterations since then, each one reducing value to the end-user and increasing value to the data buyers and advertisers, like the proverbial “slowly boiling the frog”.

I think it is that its not useful for the end customer. Every anecdote I’ve heard about LLMs helping someone with their work were heavily qualified with special cases and circumstances and narrow use cases, resulting in a description of a process that was made more complex by adding the LLM, which then helped them eliminate nearly as much complication and effort as it added. These are the stories from the believers.

Now add in the fact that almost nobody is on a paid service tier outside of work, and all the paid tiers are currently heavily subsidized. If it has questionable utility at today’s prices, the value will only decline from there as prices rise to cover the real costs to run these things.

If it doesn’t do anything useful, I don’t think any amount of shoving in front of people is going to amount to much uptake beyond some cursory fiddling to determine its uselessness.

People hand out flyers to every passerby too, and nearly all of those end up in the nearest trash bin.

I think that Microsoft will continue in some form regardless of what happens with this bubble because they have huge amounts of physical assets and cash on hand.

That said, their market position in any given sector they’re in might not be as invincible as it seems. There are corporations that were titans of their industries, including technology, that either don’t exist or are ghosts of their former selves all in far less than a lifetime.

Kodak, Xerox, Bell Labs, IBM, and Yahoo all looked like unstoppable juggernauts when I was a kid, and my own kids haven’t even heard of some of them.

If they’re still using the computer then they’re still paying with their data, just like if you subscribe to Netflix, you’re still a customer. The fact the you already conceded to paying doesn’t negate your ongoing payments.

I can’t speak for a company of 30,000, but I know tons of companies with a couple thousand employees or less that could, without a doubt, write their own tools in house to do the bits and pieces of SalesForce they actually are using for far less than they are spending on SalesForce. As they grow, their SalesForce costs grow linearly or worse, while an in-house tool’s grow at a decreasing rate.

Any company that size or larger already has some kind of technology division that can be grown to accommodate the development.

For those really big companies, I imagine their SalesForce bill is so high they might have potential alternative options I can’t even imagine at those prices.

Nothing more.

You are buying it with your personal data and granting them access to your computer. Even if you don’t think that’s not worth much, it is still not free. You’re just paying with something other than money.

There are billions of us. We can do many things at once.

This may not matter as much as nuclear disarmament, but it matters to everyone that owns one of these cars.