Comment by kemotep

2 days ago

Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.

There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.

There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?

Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.

It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.

And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?

161 comments

kemotep

Reply
marssaxman  2 days ago

> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active".

  • hightrix  2 days ago

    To further your argument, look at the XBOX. It is impossible to tell which is the latest model by name alone. Where the playstation is simple, the latest is the 5, the previous was the 4, and the one before that was the 3.

    • joegibbs  1 day ago

      The Xbox One.

      "Oh you mean the original one?"

      No the one that came after the 360.

      "The third one?"

      No that was the second one, the One was the third.

      "OK what are they on now?"

      The Series series.

      "The Series series?"

      Yeah the X and S. Don't confuse that with the Xbox One X or S, or the 360 S.

      "Right but what's the difference?"

      The X is better than the S because X is a bigger letter. But they run the same games, but they're different. They're the same though.

      2 replies →

    • pezezin  1 day ago

      To be fair, only Sony follows a consistent naming convention. Nintendo's console names also defy any logic, as did Sega back in the day.

      8 replies →

  • binsquare  2 days ago

    Some musings from someone who has not worked in microsoft but has in big tech.

    This often happens because the people inside are incentivized to build their own empire.

    If someone comes and wants to get promoted/become an exec, there's a ceiling if they work under the an existing umberlla + dealing the politics of introducing a feature which requires dealing with an existing org.

    So they build something new. And the next person does the same. And so you have 365, One, Live, .Net, etc

    • josephg  2 days ago

      Google Plus was the same. Lots of unrelated google products were temporarily branded as part of google plus for some reason, including your google account and google hangouts (meet).

      1 reply →

  • canucker2016  2 days ago

    The Dev Tools division had Quick- prefix for some tools before settling on Visual- once VB took off.

    Then there's DirectX and its subs - though Direct3D had more room for expanded feature set compared to DXSound or DXInput so now they're up to D3D v12.

  • moomin  2 days ago

    There’s got to be solid reasons why they do this and have done so for so damn long. At the very least institutional reasons. At best, actual research that suggests they make more money this way. But as a consumer, I hate it.

    • estimator7292  2 days ago

      Marketing has too much power. They get some hairbrained scheme to goose the numbers and just slam a mandate all the way down the org. Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion.

      3 replies →

    • Nevermark  2 days ago

      Perhaps the "consistent" naming helps them shove more through the Enterprise door.

      If a large company has bought into "Co-Pilot", they want it all right? Or not, but let's not make carving anything out easy.

      Just a thought.

      2 replies →

    • cornonthecobra  1 day ago

      It's because Microsoft isn't a software company. They're a marketing company that happens to make software and a few other bits.

      We're now on the back end of that, where Microsoft must again make products with independent substance, but are instead drowning in their own infrastructural muck.

pixl97  2 days ago

>Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions

Microsoft cannot and will not ever get better at naming things. It is said the universe will split open and and eldritch beast will consume the stars the day Microsoft stops using inconsistent and overlapping names for different and conflicting products.

Isn't that right .Net/dotnet

  • ksec  2 days ago

    Exactly. In the 50 years history of Microsoft, Office ( Year ) was perhaps the best they did.

    Nadella might have fixed a few things, but Microsoft still have massive room for improvement in many areas.

    • adventured  2 days ago

      Nadella has the golden ship taking on water right now. He has entirely botched AI top to bottom. He has screwed that up to such a degree that it would be difficult to overstate. If he doesn't correct these mistakes extremely soon, he'll unravel much of the progress he made for Microsoft and they'll miss this generation of advancement (which will be the end of their $3 trillion market cap - as the market has recently perked up to).

      There is no tech giant that is more vulnerable than Microsoft is at this moment.

      Most document originations will begin out of or adjacent to of LLM sessions in the near future, as everything will blur in terms of collaborating with AI agents. Microsoft has no footing (or worse, their position is terrible courtesy of copilot) and is vulnerable to death by inflection point. Windows 11 is garbage and Google + Linux may finally be coming for their desktop (no different than what AMD has managed in unwinding the former Intel monopoly in PCs).

      Someone should be charging at them with a new take on Office, right now. This is where you slice them in half. Take down Office and take down Windows. They're so stupid at present that they've opened the gates to Office being destroyed, which has been their moat for 30 years.

      7 replies →

  • i80and  2 days ago

    I remember when everything was "Sign in with .NET Passport" as a yoot and just being like "what the hell are you talking about"

whobre  2 days ago

Not that I disagree, but this is nothing compared to the ".NET" craze in the early 2000s. Everything had to have ".NET" in its name even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual .NET technology.

There was also "Active" before that, but .NET was next level crazy...

isk517  2 days ago

>>Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information. It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.

Everyone I know who use AI day-to-day is just using Copilot to mostly do things like add a transition animation to a Powerpoint slide or format a word document to look nice. The only problem these LLM products seem to solve is giving normal people a easy way to interact with terrible software processes and GUIs. And better solution to that problem would be for developers to actually observe how the average use interacts with both a computer and their program in particular.

jug  2 days ago

The craziest thing was how Microsoft took the super established brand from decades, and renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365.

I'm not sure if it's named Microsoft 365 Copilot nowadays, or if that's an optional AI addon? I thought it was renamed once more, but they themselves claim simply "Microsoft 365" (in a few various tiers) sans-Copilot. https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-micr...

timr  2 days ago

> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.

I understand your point about naming, but it's always helpful to know what the products do.

mikkupikku  2 days ago

> so why should anyone pay for Copilot?

The execs buying Microsoft products are presumed to be as clueless as the execs naming Microsoft products.

dec0dedab0de  2 days ago

You are describing everything Microsoft has done since at least the late 90s.

  • bluedino  2 days ago

    Things were named fine back then. Small Business Server, Office, Frontpage, Internet Information Server, Visual Studio...

    • kalleboo  1 day ago

      That was back when they were going wild naming everything "Active". Active Desktop made sense, Active Directory? What made that "Active". ActiveMovie? It's just a video playing framework... ActiveX?? X?? ActiveSync, I don't want my sync to be active. ActiveStore was apparently a thing?

    • rvnx  2 days ago

      It's like ChatGPT, that goes with "Sora", instead of "Image Generation", which would have been very clear

rubslopes  2 days ago

> It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense.

It's unbelievable how bad they failed at this. If you do the same with Claude or ChatGPT via simple web interface, they get miles ahead.

9x39  15 hours ago

For being supposedly the same models with how close MS and OpenAI supposedly are, it's bizarrely bad.

I was trying to just get an Excel function dialed in with some IFs and formatting weirdness. The licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot built into Excel tried several times and failed miserably. One screenshot to ChatGPT (5.1?) and it was one-shot.

I'm not even sure it's the same models any more. It feels years behind. Maybe they limit it or cripple it somehow.

itissid  2 days ago

My colleague works in a functional role for a medium sized SaaS company(1000-5000 employees), working with banks, family offices, hedge funds. They use teams and copilot, they all hate it.

One thing that I don't know about is if they have an AI product that can work on combining unstructured and databases to give better insights on any new conversation? e.g. like say the LLM knows how to convert user queries to the domain model of tables and extract information? What companies are doing such things?

This would be something that can be deployed on-prem/ their own private cloud that is controlled by the company, because the data is quite sensitive.

  • ajcp  2 days ago

    Databricks Genie is excellent from my experience, and provides for all your listed requirements.

raincole  2 days ago

> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

AI really should be a freaking feature, not the identity of their products. What MS is doing now is like renaming Photoshop to Photoshop Neural Filter.

  • beart  2 days ago

    That's a great analogy, but could be taken one step further. Because Adobe would also have to rename the rest of their products to come close to what MS is doing.

      - Adobe Neural Filter Acrobat
  - Adobe Neural Filter App (previously photoshop)
  - Adobe Neural Filter Illustrator
  - Adobe 720 Neural Filter app
  - etc.

    By the way, why is app lowercase in "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app"? Is it not part of the trademark but even they couldn't deal with how confusing that was?

    • ikr678  1 day ago

      'app' isnt part of that trademark, but on other products (Windows App) it is.

      Searching the store or a company portal for one of these rebraned apps returns dozens of hits because 'windows', 'copilot', '365' and 'app' are all common words in most application descriptions.

nunez  18 hours ago

It's the same with Gemini for Google Workspace.

I asked it to create a slide deck for me, within Slides, based on a block of notes I wrote. It wouldn't do it. The chat assistant at gemini.google.com wouldn't do it either. They told me how to do it step by step though...which I knew how to do already. Useless.

I also tried the `AI()` Sheets function to fill a range in based on some other data in the sheet. It doesn't accept other ranges, even if you use the &CELL_REF& notation.

skfiehcusjcn  2 days ago

People already do pay for it: office 365. It’s just like getting cloud storage with the subscription. OneDrive has been one of the better cloud storage options for consumers.

Also, a great use is Microsoft Forms I was surprised with the AI features. At first I just used it to get some qualitative feedback but ended up using copilot to enter questions Claude helped me create and it converted them into the appropriate forms for my surveys!

Objectives -> Claude -> Surveys (markdown) -> Copilot -> MS Forms -> Emailed.

Insights and analysis can use copilot too.

Main thing to remember is the models behind the scenes will change and evolve, Copilot is the branding. In fact, we can expect most companies will use multiple AI solutions/pipelines moving forward.

  • rustyhancock  2 days ago

    Yes. Similarly I have Gemini through having 2TB space on Google Photos.

    I have 2TB with OneDrive too via a Family Office account and I've got no good reason to have the large gapps space.

    A ChatGPT account and pay for two Claude accounts.

    Netflix, Disney+, Prime.

    How did this happen to me?

    Perhaps I should sign up to one of those companies that will help me close accounts I keep seeing advertised on YouTube?

GaryBluto  2 days ago

>There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool. There is also Github Copilot, the subscription, that lets you use Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models.

hbn  1 day ago

> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

It's also an LLM chat UI, I don't know if it's because of my work but it lets me select models from all of the major players (GPT, Claude, Gemini)

https://github.com/copilot

sandos  1 day ago

Github copilot is not just autocompletion, its a chat/agent thing in VS Code.

felixg3  1 day ago

There is also Security Copilot, which I accidentally enabled and got a 3000€ invoice by azure. Thanks, M$!

0xbadcafebee  2 days ago

This isn't a Microsoft thing, it's a big dumb corporation thing. Most big corporations are run by dumb executives who are 100% out of touch with the customer (though even if they were in touch, they wouldn't care). Their only consideration is the stock price. If adding new names to things, chanting the magic spell "AI" over and over, and claiming the new name will make them more money can cause the stock price to increase, that's what they'll do. (Making customers happy doesn't make the stock price rise; if it did, we'd all be a lot less depressed and a lot richer)

krzyk  2 days ago

> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

It is a coding everything, autocomplete, ask, edit files and an agent (claude code like).

p0w3n3d  1 day ago

Sorry for a question out of topic, but is there still an offline office license available? So you buy it and have it locally?

bandrami  1 day ago

Can somebody give me a TLDR on what the "copilot button" does? I've never had one of those laptops and have never understood that. Does it just start the AI front-end? Does it power up the NPU?

  • sebazzz  1 day ago

    It is just a button. Default it starts the Copilot app which is really the Office app that already existed but now with the copilot tab preselected. Also that Copilot runs in the cloud and doesn't use your NPU.

    The only thing until now I've found using the NPU are the built in blur, auto frame and eye focus modes for the webcam.

    • bandrami  1 day ago

      I got one of those Asus ROG laptops that bragged about having an NPU and I kept trying to figure out how to access it until I realized they just meant the integrated Ryzen GPU (which is also responsible for getting anything rendered by the discrete Nvidia GPU to the actual display). Also its alleged 16G of video memory included a mapped 8G of system RAM. I miss when vendors at least pretended to be honest.

dobin  2 days ago

Like Microsoft Defender, which is now Defender Antivirus, or Defender for Endpoint if you have a real license. You will also get Defender for Identity, and maybe Defender for Office 365, which is probably not ASR. And Defender for Cloud, not to be confused with Defender for Cloud Apps.

Oras  2 days ago

You need to see how many times they changed AI related services in Azure. It’s a shit show.

major505  2 days ago

This is what happens when you let all decision to the marketing team without any supervision. They became full retarded.

Marketing need as much supervision as a toddler in a cristal store.