Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made the term Microslop go viral with his admonition to “get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication” when discussing Large Language Model (LLM) Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Microslop Trending
Nadella was attempting to set the tone for discussion of AI in 2026 with his “Looking Ahead to 2026” post.
Unfortunately for him, he succeeded.
Here’s the introduction to Nadella’s post:
As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there’s no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. Yes, another one. But this moment feels different in a few notable ways.
We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion. We are beginning to distinguish between “spectacle” and “substance”. We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed, but also the harder and more important question of how to shape its impact on the world.
We are still in the opening miles of a marathon. Much remains unpredictable. Amidst this “model overhang,” where capability is outpacing our current ability to use it to have real world impact, this is some of what we still need to get right
He followed with three bullet points, but it was the first one that got him in trouble and triggered the Streisand effect:
A new concept that evolves “bicycles for the mind” such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute. What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals. We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer.
The reaction on social media was immediate:
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— 눈 ︵ 눈 (@apathei) January 2, 2026
Nadella Follows in Pavan Davuluri’s Footsteps
Nadella’s Microslop debacle comes not quite two months after Windows President Pavan Davuluri stepped in a similar pile by tweeting the following:
Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at #MSIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Windows and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!…
— Pavan Davuluri (@pavandavuluri) November 10, 2025
These replies are representative of the response to Davuluri’s tweet:
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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) January 5, 2026
Forcing AI on Microsoft Users
Jez Cordon of Windows Central put Nadella’s Microslop kerfluffle in context:
(AI) is hard to avoid right now, particularly if you’re a user of Microsoft ecosystem products. Every single app, service, and product Microsoft has on the market now has some kind of AI integration, regardless of quality and usefulness.
Microsoft Copilot is the tip of the spear for the firm, powered entirely by ChatGPT and Microsoft’s savvy early investments in OpenAI. Its interface is pre-installed now on Windows PCs, and has a commanding position on most mobile app stores as of writing. It’s nowhere near as widespread as OpenAI’s ChatGPT service, though, and advancements in Google Gemini sees Microsoft’s old arch rival rapidly outpacing the competition — particularly in enterprise integrations, where Microsoft has its sights primarily set.
The oft-forced, oft-useless Microsoft Copilot integrations on Windows and other consumer products have people exploring alternatives more so than ever before. Entire governments are abandoning Windows for Linux, and there’s more interest in Linux consumer-grade distros than any time I can remember. Despite the noise about the degradation of quality in Windows, the price gouging on Xbox, and the apparent abandonment of Surface — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made no mention of any of them in a recent post to close out the year.
If you had any illusion that Microsoft might address concerns about any of its major product categories in 2026, Nadella’s “Looking Ahead to 2026” article offers an insight into the company’s focus for the new year, and yep, it’s all about AI.
It’s not just Nadella’s obsession with AI that is infuriating customers, it’s also the dramatic degradation of their flagship Windows product.
Windows 11 Driving Users to Flee
Matthew Sholtz at BGR has a piece headlined “Windows 11 Is A Broken Mess (And Microsoft Knows)” that ably sums up the situation:
It feels like very few of Microsoft’s customers are happy with the direction of the company, and you can certainly see evidence of these complaints when it comes to Windows 11.
Considering locking customers out of the upgrade due to TPM 2.0 hardware requirements, the operating system’s well-documented design issues, its many bugs, and constant breakages left for other companies to fix, there appears to be a lot of anger stewing over Microsoft’s rather poor handling of Windows 11. Worst of all, Microsoft is well aware of its users’ complaints, yet few changes in terms of user satisfaction have been issued. The warning signs are clear. Why isn’t Microsoft listening to its users?…Copilot’s usage statistics paint a dire image; user visits have been falling since 2024. Then again, Copilot is supposedly the “fastest-growing” Microsoft 365 product, according to the president of Volt Technologies (a Microsoft partner), and many more businesses are set to adopt the tech for their workforces in 2026. Still, this claimed growth is potentially explained by the fact that many of these partners pay employees to adopt the tech by offering bonuses.
The backlash from users remains clear, and many are choosing to ditch Windows 11 altogether, with a 70% increase in Linux installs across distros compared to 2022. Users are leaving Windows 11 in droves, and others are taking advantage of Windows 10’s recently announced extended support. Yet Microsoft still isn’t listening to consumers; instead, it’s continuing to chase AI and the money involved in its partners’ adoption of the tech, which could very well lead to a significant valuation drop if things don’t go as planned.
Microsoft intended to muscle its enormous user base (many of whom are corporate, educational, or government users who have limited ability to influence which software they are forced to use) into switching to Windows 11, even if that meant buying new PCs. Unfortunately for Microslop, er Microsoft, that effort seems to have stalled (chart via XDA):
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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) January 5, 2026
Zac Bowden at Windows Central has more on the state of Windows 11:
Support for Windows 10 ended in October, and this year was the perfect time to strengthen Windows 11 as a viable replacement for millions of users. Instead, Microsoft spent most of it shoving the OS full of half-baked AI features, all while letting the quality bar slip and shipping new bugs and issues on an almost monthly cadence.
Everything Microsoft has done when it comes to Windows this year has eroded the platform’s reputation in ways that I haven’t seen since Windows 8. Today, it feels like people hate Windows 11 with a passion, much more so than they did when 2025 first started.…Of course, the issue that made headlines the most this year is AI, as Microsoft falls over itself trying to make Windows 11 a frontier platform for artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, this effort feels like it has been prioritized above everything else, including quality of life and overall platform stability.
Copilot has forced its way into almost every surface and intention on the platform. Heck, even Notepad now has a Copilot button, which is something literally nobody has ever asked for. Microsoft’s AI intentions feel obsessive and forced, almost as if the company is just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Under the hood, Microsoft has been moving to make Windows 11 agentic. It unveiled the agentic workspace, along with a set of APIs that will allow AI developers to build tools that can automate workflows on your behalf. Sounds great on paper, until you read the fine print and discover that it comes with serious security implications and warnings.
Nadella’s Microslop imbroglio reflects his decision to cannibalize Microsoft’s flagship product in the interest of staying competitive in the AI race.
Microsoft’s Hallucinated CoPilot Christmas Ads
It’s not just Nadella’s personal communications either. Microsoft’s Christmas ads for CoPilot seem to have fictionalized the app’s functionality, according to Antonio G. Di Benedetto of The Verge.
Don’t try the above at home.
Cannibalizing Windows for CoPilot
I’ve written before on Google’s decision to gut their incumbent search business in pursuit of AI dominance, but Alphabet’s recent leap-frogging of OpenAI’s ChatGPT with the the third iteration of Gemini shows there may be a viable business rationale behind that decision.
With Microslop, er Microsoft, I am not so sure that they are making a sound decision.
Nadella’s Culture of Fear Driving Microslop Direction
The Verge makes a case for Nadella’s motivations: fear.
From their piece titled “Satya Nadella is haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI era“:
“Our industry is full of case studies of companies that were great once, that just disappeared. I’m haunted by one particular one called DEC,” said Nadella. Digital Equipment Corporation once ruled the world of minicomputers with its PDP series in the early 1970s, but it quickly faced competition from IBM and others that made it irrelevant. It also made some strategic errors by betting on its own Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) architecture instead of the emerging Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architecture.
Nadella’s first computer was a VAX, and all he wanted to do when he was growing up was work at DEC. “Some of the people who contributed to Windows NT came from a DEC lab that was laid off,” said Nadella. “I think about that, and I think about what it takes for a company not to just thrive at one time, but to continue to actually have the smartest, best people who are going to only work if they’re going to have the opportunity to get both great economic rewards and great job opportunities.”…Microsoft still generates around one-fifth of its annual revenue from productivity software, but Nadella said that “some of the margin that we love today might not be there tomorrow.” It’s a stark warning to Microsoft employees that a platform shift is underway, and one that is already causing big changes inside Microsoft.
Seems reasonable enough, but there may be a different set of ideas driving Nadella’s decision making.
Nadella and the ‘Growth Mindset’
Ed Zitron wrote about that in November of 2024 in a piece he called “The Cult of Microsoft“:
At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called ‘The Growth Mindset” that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job performance is judged.
I am not speaking in hyperbole. Based on a review of over a hundred pages of internal documents and conversations with multiple current and former Microsoft employees, I have learned that Microsoft — at the direction of CEO Satya Nadella — has oriented its entire culture around the innocuous-sounding (but, as we’ll get to later, deeply troubling) Growth Mindset concept, and has taken extraordinary measures to institute it across the organization.…The “growth mindset” is Microsoft’s cult — a vaguely-defined, scientifically-questionable, abusively-wielded workplace culture monstrosity, peddled by a Chief Executive obsessed with framing himself as a messianic figure with divine knowledge of how businesses should work. Nadella even launched his own Bible — Hit Refresh — in 2017, which he claims has “recommendations presented as algorithms from a principled, deliberative leader searching for improvement.”…Like any messianic tale, the book is centered around the theme of redemption, with the subtitle mentioning a “quest to rediscover Microsoft’s soul.” Although presented and packaged like any bland business book that you’d find in an airport Hudson News and half-read on a red eye to nowhere, its religious framing extends to separation of dark and enlightened ages. The dark age — Steve “Developers” Balmer’s Microsoft, with Microsoft stagnant and missing winnable opportunities, like mobile — contrasted against this brave, bright new era where a nearly-assertive Redmond pushes frontiers in places like AI.…Your career at Microsoft — a $3 trillion company — is largely defined by the whims of your managers and your ability to write essays of indeterminate length, based on your adherence to a vague, scientifically-questionable “mindset theory.” You can (and will!) be fired both for failing to express your “growth mindset” — a term as malleable as its alleged adherents — to managers that are also interpreting its meaning in realtime, likely for their own benefit.
Great, another Tech overlord devoted to some sort of semi-religious ideology and using those precepts to drive his decision-making.
Regardless of what Nadella actually believes, his actions put off more than a whiff of desperation.
Yeah this is likely because Microsoft is making so little selling 365 Copilot (8m active paid licenses in aug 2025) and they need to find a way to pretend it’s popular https://t.co/TY9kAplazJ
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 5, 2026
I’ll follow up with a post about Microsoft’s complicated relationship with OpenAI on Wednesday.
Google wants me to use the keyword Microslop a few more times so here we go: Microslop, Microslop, Microslop. Apologies to my human readers.
