Basically every company is seeing a revenue decline in 2023 compared to last year. Even Apple reported a revenue decline of 5%. Meanwhile Microsoft is showing about 10% revenue growth in almost all their products, and the take-away is that we should see this as mediocre?
If anything the hype around Ai, the success of other parties and the sorry state of Ai in these organisations is the real mediocre part.
I am not conviced "Wall Street" is fooled, expectations of growth for the tech giants is low for a reason. Yet somehow, despite the message that mass layoffs send, they continue to be money printing machines.
I don't agree with the comparison between Microsoft and Google, MS has many more successful revenue streams, whereas Google still relies on ads for ~80% of its revenues, I think Google business is not yet in danger, but maybe more fragile.
The anxiety to hype AI and ride on the public fascination with chatGPT is a sign a weakness. These are not VC funded startups anxious to collect stars on github as a success metric.
Unless they come up with concrete, viable, legal and profitable AI based business models soon it could also be misleading their investors.
So does the media. Covid, the war in ukraine, and inflation have been exhausted and they needed a new arc in their never-ending drive for clicks. So they came up with ai. Their only redeeming quality is that soon after they will publish stories on how ai companies steal our data and content.
