"It look like you are running a business. Need help with that?"

 I've frequently had goes at Microsoft. There is something so intriguingly gauche, possibly even jejeune, about their advertising. They make highly sophisticated products but somehow the marketing people either do not grasp how they work or they just dumb everything down because they think their customers are dumb. The title of this piece recalls the horrible helper "Clippy" that at one time popped up whilst using Microsoft software.

In 2014 I analysed their ludicrous claims about helping F1 drivers to win races. A few years previously it was fun to demolish their email offering, or at least the anti-spam feature. And I have moaned about Windows often enough. 

But this is 2025. AI is the big thing. Everyone is doing AI. AI is going to solve all our problems. Although, for Microsoft, finding cures for diseases, improving food production, making stronger and lighter materials do not seem to be priorities. Assisting gormless business people making presentations and showing them how simple documents work, yes, that has been the key element of the ads that pop up on my screens. Here is a nice example of what I mean.  

 Microsoft's AI offering is called Copilot. In the example above, we see a casually dressed, youngish, man staring at his phone while apparently requesting Copilot to explain something to him. What, my friends, can we deduce from this picture? You know my methods - I shall now apply them.

The man in the picture is, it seems, studying an Excel spreadsheet cunning entitled "data". Yes, that's going to a be big help when trying to find it in a few months time. Those of us who have actually designed  finance related spreadsheets  would name this something like "Mfg Division, 2025 Q3 Projection" so it tells us what it is. But this is to nitpick a bit. The fascination this image holds is that our bearded friend cannot work out the structure or formulas from which the calculations of profit (or "profit driver" in MS speak) are made.

He cannot see them or get into the details of the formulas behind them because, although this must be a fairly complex document (or he would not need help with it), he is trying to make sense of it whilst standing up and using a tiny phone. No financial analyst does this. They work on a big screen, the bigger the better and they will do so sitting a desk where they can consult documents, make notes, perhaps work simulaneously on other computer applications. You cannot do this on a phone, however smart, because either they only display one thing at at time or your big sausage fingers make typing a nightmare. 

So it is no wonder that to him it is just a needle in a haystack job (and why he keeps a small haystack on his desk, where it is in danger of spilling over into his coffee mug, is surely a question for HR). He is like a mechanic who, trying to undo a bolt, selects a small screwdriver and jabs it randomly at the offending fixings. 

I hold that, if this guy cannot see where the profits are being made, then he should not be doing this job. There is a job he could do instead - sweep up that bloody haystack.