Ask Paul：10 月 30 日問答

Happy Friday! This week, we get some sweet relief from the existential AI crisis, so perhaps this weekend will be more relaxing.
"Apple gives iPad mini its biggest update ever"

Because moving from an 8.3-inch display to an 8.5-inch display is a game-changer
⌛ Like sands through the hourglass
NickTech asks:

With Microsoft’s earnings analysis, you had noted about them shifting things around with accounting (such as expanding asset useful lives). Should we be concerned that Microsoft feels the need to employ these measures, or do you think we really are getting that expanded lifespan out of data centers and buildings?

We should be concerned. And while this doesn't make it OK, it's worth noting that Microsoft isn't the only company pulling out every accounting trick imaginable trying to make this AI push make sense to investors and shareholders. It's just that I cover Microsoft more closely than other companies, have done so for many years, and have seen how the transparency has gotten dramatically worse over time.

But the notion that any hardware--CPU, GPU, RAM, whatever--gets "more efficient" over time is patently ludicrous. I compare it to letting your car's tires get bald because there will be less friction with the street, making to more efficient. You know, until a tire explodes.

With Microsoft losing a lot of money on AI in general, and low commercial purchases of Copilot compared to OpenAI, is the company in trouble? Are they still able to coast on products widely used such as Windows and Azure, or is AI profitability finally the end of the road for that momentum?

There is no version of this story where Microsoft or any other hyperscaler will earn back the money they've flushed down the toilet in this mad big to maintain their market position. But that's not how accounting works. You can write down or write off losses in various ways and the slate is cleared. And that will happen here and with all these other companies. The smaller companies will simply disappear, either by going out of business or by being swept up by the Big Tech "too big to fail" companies. There will definitely be a reckoning, the only questions being "when?" and "how bad historically?" My guess is that it will be similar to the 2008 financial meltdown or the Dot Com boom.
"Save 87% on a lifetime license to classic Microsoft Office 2021 suite"

Or, save 100 percent and don't buy a product that exited support two weeks ago
📈 Office for the AI error, er er
Forty-Eight-K asks:

Any thoughts on the newly formed ndoc.ai from Rohit Patel? His outline on the sites founders notes is intriguing. Should be interesting to watch at least.

This is new, so I'm not entirely sure where it lands in the scheme of things. But if you think about the evolution of office productivity in recent decades, most of the shifts weren't all that dramatic, but we're starting to see some big change. When Google introduced Docs 20 years ago, it was sort of just a word...