Windows Strafed by Windows Fanboys: Incredible Flip
December 19, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
When the Windows folding phone came out, I remember hunting around for blog posts, podcasts, and videos about this interesting device. Following links I bumbled onto the Windows Central Web site. The two fellows who seemed to be front and center had a podcast (a quite irregularly published podcast I might add). I was amazed at the pro-folding gizmo. One of the write ups was panting with excitement. I thought then and think now that figuring out how to fold a screen is a laboratory exercise, not something destined to be part of my mobile phone experience.
I forgot about Windows Central and the unflagging ability to find something wonderfully bigly about the Softies. Then I followed a link to this story: “Microsoft Has a Problem: Nobody Wants to Buy or Use Its Shoddy AI Products — As Google’s AI Growth Begins to Outpace Copilot Products.”
An athlete failed at his Dos Santos II exercise. The coach, a tough love type, offers the injured gymnast a path forward with Mistral AI. Thanks, Qwen, do you phone home?
The cited write up struck me as a technology aficionado pulling off what is called a Dos Santos II. (If you are not into gymnastics, this exercise “trick” involves starting backward with a half twist into a double front in the layout position. Boom. Perfect 10. From folding phone to “shoddy AI products.”
If I were curious, I would dig into the reasons for this change in tune, instruments, and concert hall. My hunch is that a new manager replaced a person who was talking (informally, of course) to individuals who provided the information without identifying the source. Reuters, the trust outfit, does this on occasion as do other “real” journalists. I prefer to say, here are my observations or my hypotheses about Topic X. Others just do the “anonymous” and move forward in life.
Here are a couple of snips from the write up that I find notable. These are not quite at the “shoddy AI products” level, but I find them interesting.
Snippet 1:
If there’s one thing that typifies Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella‘s tenure: it’s a general inability to connect with customers. Microsoft shut down its retail arm quietly over the past few years, closed up shop on mountains of consumer products, while drifting haphazardly from tech fad to tech fad.
I like the idea that Microsoft is not sure what it is doing. Furthermore, I don’t think Microsoft every connected with its customers. Connections come from the Certified Partners, the media lap dogs fawning at Microsoft CEO antics, and brilliant statements about how many Russian programmers it takes to hack into a Windows product. (Hint: The answer is a couple if the Telegram posts I have read are semi accurate.)
Snippet 2:
With OpenAI’s business model under constant scrutiny and racking up genuinely dangerous levels of debt, it’s become a cascading problem for Microsoft to have tied up layer upon layer of its business in what might end up being something of a lame duck.
My interpretation of this comment is that Microsoft hitched its wagon to one of AI’s Cybertrucks, and the buggy isn’t able to pull the Softie’s one-horse shay. The notion of a “lame duck” is that Microsoft cannot easily extricate itself from the money, the effort, the staff, and the weird “swallow your AI medicine, you fool” approach the estimable company has adopted for Copilot.
Snippet 3:
Microsoft’s “ship it now fix it later” attitude risks giving its AI products an Internet Explorer-like reputation for poor quality, sacrificing the future to more patient, thoughtful companies who spend a little more time polishing first. Microsoft’s strategy for AI seems to revolve around offering cheaper, lower quality products at lower costs (Microsoft Teams, hi), over more expensive higher-quality options its competitors are offering. Whether or not that strategy will work for artificial intelligence, which is exorbitantly expensive to run, remains to be seen.
A less civilized editor would have dropped in the industry buzzword “crapware.” But we are stuck with “ship it now fix it later” or maybe just never. So far we have customer issues, the OpenAI technology as a lame duck, and now the lousy software criticism.
Okay, that’s enough.
The question is, “Why the Dos Santos II” at this time? I think citing the third party “Information” is a convenient technique in blog posts. Heck, Beyond Search uses this method almost exclusively except I position what I do as an abstract with critical commentary.
Let my hypothesize (no anonymous “source” is helping me out):
- Whoever at Windows Central annoyed a Softie with power created is responding to this perceived injustice
- The people at Windows Central woke up one day and heard a little voice say, “Your cheerleading is out of step with how others view Microsoft.” The folks at Windows Central listened and, thus, the Dos Santos II.
- Windows Central did what the auth9or of the article states in the article; that is, using multiple AI services each day. The Windows Central professional realized that Copilot was not as helpful writing “real” news as some of the other services.
Which of these is closer to the pin? I have no idea. Today (December 12, 2025) I used Qwen, Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Gemini. I want to tell you that these four services did not provide accurate output.
Windows Central gets a 9.0 for its flooring Microsoft exercise.
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2025
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