Inc. Magazine May Find that Its MSFT Software No Longer Works

August 20, 2025

No AI. Just a dinobaby and a steam-powered computer in rural Kentucky.

I am not sure if anyone else has noticed that one must be very careful about making comments. A Canadian technology dude found himself embroiled with another Canadian technology dude. To be frank, I did not understand why the Canadian tech dudes were squabbling, but the dust up underscores the importance of the language, tone, rhetoric, and spin one puts on information.

An example of a sharp-toothed article which may bite Inc. Magazine on the ankle is the story “Welcome to the Weird New Empty World of LinkedIn: Just When Exactly Did the World’s Largest Business Platform Turn into an Endless Feed of AI-Generated Slop?” My teeny tiny experience as a rental at the world’s largest software firm taught me three lessons:

Intelligence is defined many ways. I asked a group of about 75 listening to one of my lectures, “Who is familiar with Kolmogorov?” The answer was for that particular sampling of Softies was exactly zero. Subjective impression: Rocket scientists? Not too many.
Feistiness. The fellow who shall remain nameless dragged me to a weird mixer thing in one of the buildings on the “campus.” One person (whose name and honorifics I do not remember) said, “Let me introduce you to Mr. X. He is driving the Word project.” I replied with a smile. We walked to the fellow, were introduced, and I asked, “Will Word fix up its autonumbering?” The Word Softie turned red, asked the fellow who introduced me to him, “Who is this guy?” The Word Softie stomped away and shot deadly sniper eyes at me until we left after about 45 minutes of frivolity. Subjective impression: Thin skin. Very thin skin.
Insecurity. At a lunch with a person whom I had met when I was a contractor at Bell Labs and several other Softies, the subject of enterprise search came up. I had written the Enterprise Search Report, and Microsoft had purchased copies. Furthermore, I wrote with Susan Rosen “Managing Electronic Information Projects.” Ms. Rosen was one of the senior librarians at Microsoft. While waiting for the rubber chicken, a Softie asked me about Fast Search & Transfer, which Microsoft had just purchased. The question posed to me was, “What do you think about Fast Search as a technology for SharePoint?” I said, “Fast Search was designed to index Web sites. The enterprise search functions were add ons. My hunch is that getting the software to handle the data in SharePoint will be quite difficult?” The response was, “We can do it.” I said, “I think that BA Insight, Coveo, and a couple of other outfits in my Enterprise Search Report will be targeting SharePoint search quickly.” The person looked at me and said, “What do these companies do? How quickly do they move?” Subjective impression: Fire up ChatGPT and get some positive mental health support.

The cited write up stomps into a topic that will probably catch some Softies’ attention. I noted this passage:

The stark fact is that reach, impressions and engagement have dropped off a cliff for the majority of people posting dry (read business-focused) content as opposed to, say, influencer or lifestyle-type content.

The write up adds some data about usage of LinkedIn:

average platform reach had fallen by no less than 50 percent, while follower growth was down 60 percent. Engagement was, on average, down an eye-popping 75 percent.

The main point of the article in my opinion is that LinkedIn does filter AI content. The use of AI content produces a positive for the emitter of the AI content. The effect is to convert a shameless marketing channel into a conduit for search engine optimized sales information.

The question “Why?” is easy to figure out:

Clicks if the content is hot
Engagement if the other LinkedIn users and bots become engaged or coupled
More zip in what is essentially a one dimension, Web 1 service.

How will this write up play out? Again the answers strike me as obvious:

LinkedIn may have some Softies who will carry a grudge toward Inc. Magazine
Microsoft may be distracted with its Herculean efforts to make its AI “plays” sustainable as outfits like Amazon say, “Hey, use our cloud services. They are pretty much free.”
Inc. may take a different approach to publishing stories with some barbs.

Will any of this matter? Nope. Weird and slop do that.

Stephen E Arnold, August 20, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Business strategy, Marketing, News, Publishing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.