Is Microsoft Really Doing This Badly?

I mean, really?

So Bill Gates was on Quora just recently. Well, OK - he nerds out on Reddit, that we know, so why not? Further, why not engage?

True, I never made any money out of my interactions with billionaires, that’s a fact. There have been a few, no, really, and very interesting they’ve been but no $ as a result. Clearly I’m not quite prime rank intellectual*, of the sort that gains annual subsidies to sit and think. But Jeff, Marc, even advised Elon on something once - and my aren’t I self-aggrandising.

So, why not interact? He was even grey ticked. And checking an AI it said that he really was grey ticked upon Quora. So, why not?

Anyway, so, a few days later the account was banned and so on. The tick turned out not to be a tick at all. Rather, the profile picture had a tick imposed upon it before being uploaded. Which is pretty clever thinking. And as we all know AIs only repeat what lots of people are saying. So, run a few pieces saying Gates is grey ticked on Quora in places we know the AI training bots go - say, Reddit - and you might get away with that answer for a bit.

So, anyway, it didn’t quite go as I thought it would. A reference to an old business colleague who had worked directly with Gates didn’t get referred to/answered which was a little odd. By the third answer on Quora he was promising to let me know about investment opportunities. Which, ah, OK. The one thing Bill Gates doesn’t require is access to my money. Given how much of it there is even taking all of it would be a waste of Gates’ time - as in that calculation that he’d lose money by stooping down to pick up a $100 bill (aha, aha, Bill, bill, see what I did there?).

Telling my wife this she said it was all obvious at one single point. When he said that I had to use Microsoft Teams to continue discussing matters with him. Wasn’t going to use Quora, nor regular email, had to be Teams. Maybe they’d worked out how to inject a nasty via a Teams conversation - after all, Microsoft products have always been known for their incredible coding and safety, right? Or something, that was the point for her when it was all obvious.

And, to be honest, that bit hadn’t really registered with me. For, you know, yes, it’s possible that Teams is doing so badly that they’ve got to drag Bill back to sell it copy by copy, right? Made sense to me at least.

*Yes, yes, thank you, not even back row of the Third Battalion, yes, I can make that joke myself.