The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.
Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.
Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.
Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.
There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.
Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.
But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.
For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.
I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.
In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.
For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.
So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.
It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.
100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.
And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.
> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.
Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right?
It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…
I haven't used office.com but it does seem to have links to the four main webapps (did there used to be more?). They're the second row of big boxes titled "Word with Copilot", etc. Admittedly with very confusing names.
I noticed this and I wad enraged but it. The URL to the old page is way less easy to remember and I had to add it to my bookmarks. I'm still peeved about it.
I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.
I see Microsoft throwing spaghetti at the wall just in time as “AI” functionality hits government and educational procurement procedures.
The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.
My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).
They did the same thing with Azure right? I remember articles about Microsoft stock that would mention that Azure subscription numbers included Office 365. But the thing is, their weird game of inflating numbers worked. There wasn’t really any negative consequence of doing that. So why wouldn’t they do it again? It’s yet another unfortunate example of dishonesty being rewarded these days.
This is the bad side of things like OKRs. They push you away from user satisfaction since that harder to measure, coupled with go consequences for missing them. People just force adoption without taking the product signals that come from users rejecting your changes.
> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."
That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:
The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.
KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!
The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.
I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling.
Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account.
If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.
Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.
We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.
A whole new toolbar appeared in Outlook on my work computer with nothing but a single button to open a copilot chat window. I tried asking it a few simple questions and it completely failed at all of them. Copilot didn't even know if I was using the web or desktop version of the very app it was embedded in!
Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.
Yeah did they test any of this? Did they run a pilot and ask 1000 users did you use it? Did you like it? Is it better with this than without it?
It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.
Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?
The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?
But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.
That only good if you're doing measurably more with the time you save. I feel like I'm significantly faster in parts of my job using Copilot, but when I try to get data on what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before I had it I don't come up with anything. I know I'm working faster, but the time seems to have just gone.
Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.
Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.
They should be trying to convince people it is something they want rather than forcing it on people. Alas that would mean making a product people want and Im not sure they are there.
It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.
It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.
...
On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
Sounds almost like every manager just covers their ass by formally doing what is expected core top-down idea is "AI is a future, thus make it everywhere".
Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.
I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product.
Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.
I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.
That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.
That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.
Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.
My experience of Google+ was that it didn't suck, it just didn't offer much Facebook didn't already offer. So why would anyone use it. And then they started automated posting on Google+ for when you did something like comment on youtube, it would make a post on G+ which pissed people off.
Edge /is/ a chromium based browser, it makes sense people wouldn't feel the need to download Chrome unless they want to use their google account to sync devices.
Agree. I gave it a shot recently after being a hater of MS browsers since the 90's and am actually very happy with it. I love the Workspaces and syncing features. Arc had something similar, but Arc started to stall out remain frustratingly buggy. Edge is now my go-to...
Have you forgotten about Edge 1 that was the evolution of IE’s Trident rendering engine? It failed that’s why they then started with the rebranded Chromium Edge 2.
It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?
Frankly it's how they insist themselves onto their potential users. When I toyed around with Edge a year or two ago, just to get the t-shirt, it was impossible to set a custom home page for first-open instead of MSN crap. New tabs could be customized, but not the initial page. Apparently they fixed it since, but I still don't see Edge as a serious browser, just another rent seeking marketing tool.
If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.
CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.
I actually think Google+ was a good idea and it's a shame google now has a dozen different products with completely different social identities. Facebook does this right, you have one profile.
Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".
Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.
What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.
And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?
I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time.
They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have carved out some of this search space with web-search being native to the tools now.
But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.
Google search is extremely vulnerable to SEO scams. It's very common to see advertised/high ranked scams with similar domain names (e.g bankname.com vs bankname.co). I switched to Kagi mainly for this reason.
The fact that Google grabbed a monopoly and now is making bank does not mean the product is good.
It was amazing.
Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.
But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.
And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.
Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.
Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.
They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.
Then prove it? There have been actual studies that confirm this fact. You could also use the fact that google search has been losing market share steadily since 2023 and since search was supported on things like chatGPT as evidence it has been in decline. But, as I have in the past also said, I refuse to argue about this with google employees/devotees because there seems to be a fair amount of delusion involved.
For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse.
the 'new' ai mode routinely creates these silly categories that are not what i was looking for and my screen is filled with repetitive ai summaries of articles. it will ingest a source as fact, and then use that fact to create confirmation bias across other articles. it will even use words like "confirm" when it finds a source saying something, even if the source is junk or seo spam. it becomes somewhat impossible to escape the assumptions the model has made, and i have to resort to traditional web search to get diversity in my results.
and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.
I don't use it often, but at least now I can get an answer. I swear in early 2023 I would just get completely irrelevant, borderline spammy results to the point I gave up and felt helpless because there was no real alternative at that time for how I used google. It felt like the internet broke for a window of time and Bing (very briefly) brought me out of that hell. To this day I still can't believe they didnt capitalize on it.
"2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. [...]
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”."
Customers are not buying the spectacle and investors are wondering why there is no substance.
Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.
One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.
Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.
I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.
PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.
There certainly other examples that I failed to address.
This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive
It has more to do with Microsoft's size and long history. If you are big and have been doing the same thing for many years, naturally you'll want to expand, some of which do succeed.
Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.
Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone.
I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.
Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to?
What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system?
It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of users that will continue to find ways to use their computer the way they want to.
This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough. MS should be happy to retain any end user they can at this point and not continue to piss of some nerds that still use your operating system under the one condition that they get to do so the way they see fit.
How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
There was a conspiracy theory in my company that M$ had plants in my company to turn everything into M$. "If it doesnt have the word M$ in it, we aren't using it."
I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.
From the article, "its productivity software is used by hundreds of millions of corporate users, a captive audience to whom it can easily promote new AI products."
Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.
weirdly enough, we asked microsoft to help us build these reports and give us insights into these numbers. The ones in our country were utterly incapable and just send screenshots of powerbi reports from the US team.
So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane
Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions.
Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.
Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole:
> “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote.
This is true in almost every large organization, and will affect every enterprise AI product out there. There was a relevant subthread just a couple of days ago recounting this exact, same dynamic: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir
It gets even worse if you consider this data is going to be extremely messy, with multiple bespoke, partially-duplicate / overlapping, potentially conflicting versions of the data with varying levels of out-of-datedness, scattered across these silos. (I would know, in a past life, I worked on a months-long project called, self-explanatorily enough, "Stale Docs".)
Yeah, untangling these bureaucratic webs and data horrors is not a quarter-long or year-long project, so investors are gonna be waiting a long time for the impact of AI to be visible. On the bright side, as TFA also hints at, AI providers themselves have been severely capacity-constrained. So hopefully by the time these issues get sorted out enough new capacity would be coming online to actually serve that traffic.
In the meantime, I expect a prolonged period of AI companies feverishly splurging on AI CapEx spend even as Wall Street punishes them repeatedly for the lack of impact of AI being reflected anywhere.
It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop.
It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and this also surprised me, more than one billion devices run on Win11. That's also strange - AI is not a big reason for most of these folks then, right? Probably neither positive or negative (or they may not even know about it).
It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get what you get, even if it sucks.
Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.
Don't worry, after a decade or two of having Windows reinstall and re-enable it every couple weeks against their users' wishes I'm sure they'll get the market penetration they're looking for...
This is repeated endlessly by non-Windows fans I assume, because I disabled AI and other annoyances in Windows long ago and they haven't come back. I even used to worry about updating Windows because I saw this warning so many times, but then I did and it just never came to pass.
Microsoft has a long and well documented history of resetting user preferences.
Multiple times I've disabled the cortana taskbar search widget, only to have a windows update turn it back on and proudly gives me a popup telling me they noticed it was disabled and turned it back on for me.
Microsoft will forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.
I think the difference with Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, and where it's being pushed. Because Copilot is bundled with software people need, it's going to get a lot more scrutiny compared to AI products that aren't built into the OS/built into Office, etc. In a way, being an "agentic OS" isn't that different from say Moltbot (conceptually), but one of those ideas seems to have gotten quite a bit of excitement, and the other a lot of anger, because Moltbot isn't being forced on you.
> Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us,
AI demand goes though. AI investments numbers good. Numbers up. Not because people choose, because corporations are fomo-ing it and we don't have a choise.
I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept asking me for the spreadsheet like it's open in a browser window.
I always find myself recalibrating if copilot understands what I am doing. I get mixed results. cannot seem to come up with a consistent rule of thumb.
I wanted to do something complex in google sheets. We had just gotten Gemini in gsheet. I assumed they'd have used some fancy mcp and enabled us to do a lot of things but all gemini in gsheet could do was summarize
It sounds like that's still a step up from Copilot.
I know Gemini has more advanced features in Docs and they rolled something out for Sheets. I would bet GWorkspace keeps gaining ground on the functionality battle.
AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.
People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)
I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.
It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.
I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.
When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.
For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.
I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.
People who paid are leaving.
That's a churn problem.
The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and Gemini at higher rates.
Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but won't share the numbers.
That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.
This is the Ballmer story all over again.
- Massive distribution advantage
- Captive enterprise base
Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use.
Windows Phone had carrier deals too.
The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight.
This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:
> "About a year ago, Nadella sent a frustrated email to Rajesh Jha,
> executive vice president of experiences and devices, detailing an incident in which
> Nadella had asked the enterprise version of Copilot on the Edge browser
> to help with a public webpage he was on,
> but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"
Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.
Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.
github copilot?
bing copilot?
office365 copilot?
office365 copilot chat?
windows copilot?
or one of those clippy like copilots in dev environments that can't do anything but point you to the wrong documentation?
Does anyone know why microsoft thought it would be a good idea to alter the right-click menu in a folder to hide all the important choices behind a second, "Show more options" click? Just making the user click once more where previously they didnt have to?
I use StartAllBack to replace the Start menu with more or less the Windows 7 one, and it also has features to restore file explorer to the more sensible Windows 7/8 versions.
God, it's so dumb. And these 2 menues have 2 different looks, because I guess for Windows 11 they reimplemented it in whatever fancy fucking UI framework they decided to make, but they didn't complete the implementation so they still had to offer the "legacy" version of the menu.
For a long while "Settings" had 2 interfaces, 1 that looks like it's from the iPhone, and the other which is from "Control Panel"...
I forgot that there are three different, separate, different-looking settings menus for the mouse, which show three layers of legacy OS implementation.
Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.
Microsoft's focus was making it so that AI could allow unskilled workers to replace skilled workers. The hope was that everyone but sales/management could be offshored to SEA/India/etc and AI would somehow make up for the skill differential.
The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.
Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost anyone can do the following trick successfully:
step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
step 2. download iso
step 3. flash iso on medium
step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.
> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race. But data shows that it is losing ground with users.
This explains perfectly the annoying behavior when you search for ChatGPT using Edge. The top thing that appear to you is, well, Copilot and not ChatGPT! Tagged as "Promoted by Microsoft" and labeled as "Your Copilot is here", is clearly a weak move from MS to push Copilot as possible as it can despite its limitations in what it can do compared to its competitors.
At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.
What I find deeply troubling is that, from people I know, Microsoft is making it harder to use any other AI tool in the enterprise. Copilot operates like a computer virus where you can only use it for AI or you will be fired. It's really frustrating to hear about people I know when they can't do basic things with AI and their organizational policy changes it day-by-day in order to get the numbers up for Copilot. Their basic workflows involving PyTorch or Sklearn are being kneecapped and it's getting worse. Microsoft is becoming a huge liability for AI professionals that I know of.
I am building Agents for a long while now. The problem with Copilot is that it gets in the way too many times without being useful.
Examples:
When I open an email with 3 short lines of text, why do I need a "summary by copilot" button?
When I open a meeting invote from someone else the first 1/3rd of the screen is occupied with "Prepare for your meeting" nonsense. The "insights" button just provides general knowledge akin to "read the documentation".
You know things are running bad when they've lost even the likes of WSJ. And yet Satya and his ilk (across the LLM space) keep pushing it. It does not matter that this technologically on its own can never reach what they kept promising. Is the pride and ego of a couple of CEOs so important that we'll all just watch them bringing the whole market down ?
The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.
These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.
It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.
Yup, I asked it how long an azure subscription had existed and it could not even tell me that. Literally now() minus the object’s creation date and it had no idea what to do.
Agree. In general, the whole Microsoft "Admin" panel is utter garbage. Messy, slow, with ten different interfaces. Finding something without Googling it first is impossible.
They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year.
When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash.
I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.
It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the company to open source, naturally not without their own intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer branding, anything related to Windows.
Just because Satya is bald and Indian, doesn't make him Gandhi. Ballmer was Bill's bulldog, but he couldn't direct the company's strategy nearly as effectively as his predecessor; Nadella is craftier. Microsoft has been Microsofting harder than ever lately, and their open source strategy is very subtly embrace-extend-extinguish. I honestly think that by 2030 they will have begun executing a plan to disallow Linux (or any other OS) from running on new PCs without a Windows hypervisor underneath it.
Given how unstable stock prices typically are over the short term, and given that we're currently something like thirty-five days into the year, I don't consider that fact to mean much.
Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.
I mean, Apple is at ATH from basically waiting out and picking the winner from its throne. Everyone clowned them, but it also made them not waste money until things are a bit more clear.
The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.
Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.
However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.
Copilot should not have been released.
A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.
For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.
People hate it, and for hood reason.
It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.
Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams
I think it comes down to..not every product in the world is improved by AI. but shareholders believe they all should be. So its crammed into all of them, instead of the few that would really benefit.
The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.
MS Copilot for Android has some annoying UI bugs which they seemingly refuse to fix. The biggest is that the chat area sometimes gets randomly resized so that you can hardly read anything. There is also no way to search past chats. For all the billions they are spending on AI, their chat interface seems inexplicably half-assed.
In some ways this reminds me of the .NET marketing debacle Microsoft pulled where every product suddenly was ".NET" and nobody could explain what that meant or what it did that was helpful.
Similarly Copilot is everywhere, but why I would want it there or use it there is unknown.
Nadella is in the position he's is, clearly, and I'm just a nobody. The guy must be onto something, and I'm just a delusional internet commentator.
However.
No-one I know, literally not a single soul, is delighted by using any of the copilot-branded tools. What's more, almost everyone seems to resent these tools due to their hamfisted design, poor performance and seedy marketing.
The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit.
Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base?
I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are.
It's a product that gives system administrators a power trip. Imagine you control every capability of an AI and you're not qualified to have engineered it. You would give more access to your favorite departments, projects, and coworkers while keeping the defaults as restrictive as possible. I've seen this happen in real time across many different companies. I've known people who were reported to HR by them for using HuggingFace.
Product leaders should really measure internal usage as a litmus test for whether or not people actually want these things. It's honestly shocking how much MS's brand has diminished in the last few years because of them pushing the copilot brand into everything.
Is anyone surprised? Windows can't even open and close file explorer reliably without lagging or refusing to respond. How could they possibly rival these models?
Microslop can never be a real Ai company if they can't build a frontier model and push the envelope themselves. Today they are completely dependent on 3rd party companies, not a good position to be in.
Microsoft's everything is running into problems. Seriously though, it always seems like a dumpster fire over there but the last year is next level with all their Windows 11 problems, Windows update problems, Office365 outages, Copilot issues, Azure outages etc... not to mention the features no one seems to want.
The problem here is attributing “Copilot” as a simple chat bot. This is one of the features, yes- but it exists to make surveillance en masse easier. When copilot is on every device, OS and application- they can correlate so many bits of information on people.
No Javascript, no CSS, only two HTML tags: <p> and <a> with href attribute; 1.htm can be viewed in _any_ browser, no matter how old or unpopular, firefox is just one example
The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.
Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.
Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.
Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.
I expect this is the crux of the problem.
There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.
Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.
But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.
For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.
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I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.
In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.
For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.
So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.
It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.
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100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.
And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.
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They bet the company on AI. If their AI push fails, everything else does not matter anymore. What you are seeing is desperation and Hail Marys.
My guess is every team's metric is probably reduced to tokens consumed through the products owned.
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> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.
Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.
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To be fair. MS Office product defects should be regarded just as harmful as hallucinations. Try a lookup in excel on fields that might have text.
For coding,ai is amazing and getting better.
Spell checking is also good, grammar better then me lol
And pumping out fake news and propaganda, way worth it when you do it
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
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MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…
For years I've used this as a home page of sorts for Microsoft products. It's very annoying not to be able to use it now.
I haven't used office.com but it does seem to have links to the four main webapps (did there used to be more?). They're the second row of big boxes titled "Word with Copilot", etc. Admittedly with very confusing names.
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Well there is no "Office" anymore, the suite is named "Microsoft 365 Copilot".
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I noticed this and I wad enraged but it. The URL to the old page is way less easy to remember and I had to add it to my bookmarks. I'm still peeved about it.
I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.
I see Microsoft throwing spaghetti at the wall just in time as “AI” functionality hits government and educational procurement procedures.
The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.
My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).
They boosted copilot numbers by renaming office to copilot. No I'm not joking.
Musk could learn from this to boost his FSD subscription numbers for his bonus payouts.
They did the same thing with Azure right? I remember articles about Microsoft stock that would mention that Azure subscription numbers included Office 365. But the thing is, their weird game of inflating numbers worked. There wasn’t really any negative consequence of doing that. So why wouldn’t they do it again? It’s yet another unfortunate example of dishonesty being rewarded these days.
This is the bad side of things like OKRs. They push you away from user satisfaction since that harder to measure, coupled with go consequences for missing them. People just force adoption without taking the product signals that come from users rejecting your changes.
> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."
That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:
The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.
KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!
The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.
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I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling.
Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.
Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.
We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.
I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html
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A whole new toolbar appeared in Outlook on my work computer with nothing but a single button to open a copilot chat window. I tried asking it a few simple questions and it completely failed at all of them. Copilot didn't even know if I was using the web or desktop version of the very app it was embedded in!
Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.
I'm baffled by this as well, Microsoft seems to have lost the plot almost completely.
Yeah did they test any of this? Did they run a pilot and ask 1000 users did you use it? Did you like it? Is it better with this than without it?
It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.
Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?
The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?
But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.
Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.
That only good if you're doing measurably more with the time you save. I feel like I'm significantly faster in parts of my job using Copilot, but when I try to get data on what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before I had it I don't come up with anything. I know I'm working faster, but the time seems to have just gone.
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Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.
Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.
They should be trying to convince people it is something they want rather than forcing it on people. Alas that would mean making a product people want and Im not sure they are there.
It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.
Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.
And Teams
The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted.
Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
> Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.
...
On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...
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I wonder if there is somebody here high up in the MSFT stack who understands the tech/code but also oversees more stuff to be able to opine.
Sounds almost like every manager just covers their ass by formally doing what is expected core top-down idea is "AI is a future, thus make it everywhere".
Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.
Bad leadership, bad management.
So it's FOMO, formalism and conformism.
I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.
It's good for creating meeting notes and action lists in Teams, but that's about it.
MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.
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Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is complete slop. Claude Code is better with PPT.
even Gemini is better with powerpoint, and they are the nr 1 competitor
CEO has only delivered failure, and in trying to avoid that, they brought it
I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product.
Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.
I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.
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That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.
Incentives almost always drive the outcome.
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That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.
You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there
I'm still super mad at Google+ because it was clearly the cause for Google Reader been killed.
That's when I started losing trust in Google as a company.
They could have led the way to a social web using Google Reader.
Make a Disqus-like comment section that shows the comments in RSS articles from Reader.
Also Reddit, by empowering the GReader Groups capabilities.
But no, let's copy Facebook and force everybody on it. And kill Google Talk while at it.
I'll never forgive Google for that.
Yeah - Google really tried to get people to use Google+ but it always sucked.
YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.
> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.
My experience of Google+ was that it didn't suck, it just didn't offer much Facebook didn't already offer. So why would anyone use it. And then they started automated posting on Google+ for when you did something like comment on youtube, it would make a post on G+ which pissed people off.
>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers.
I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go
Edge /is/ a chromium based browser, it makes sense people wouldn't feel the need to download Chrome unless they want to use their google account to sync devices.
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Agree. I gave it a shot recently after being a hater of MS browsers since the 90's and am actually very happy with it. I love the Workspaces and syncing features. Arc had something similar, but Arc started to stall out remain frustratingly buggy. Edge is now my go-to...
I really enjoyed Edge after it launched, but when they stuffed in all of the shopping plugins and integrations I bailed on it.
Have you forgotten about Edge 1 that was the evolution of IE’s Trident rendering engine? It failed that’s why they then started with the rebranded Chromium Edge 2.
Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?
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Did you miss the 2019 news that Edge switched to just being another Chromium reskin?
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It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?
I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.
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> Why can't it just be called "internet"?
Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.
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That was the only time when YouTube actually had a proper comment system and you would actually get notified when someone replied to you consistently.
I wish they'd've kept the parts people used the most.
Frankly it's how they insist themselves onto their potential users. When I toyed around with Edge a year or two ago, just to get the t-shirt, it was impossible to set a custom home page for first-open instead of MSN crap. New tabs could be customized, but not the initial page. Apparently they fixed it since, but I still don't see Edge as a serious browser, just another rent seeking marketing tool.
Also Teams and OneNote.
If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.
CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.
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> Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.
MSFT not being good at naming things is not new.
I actually think Google+ was a good idea and it's a shame google now has a dozen different products with completely different social identities. Facebook does this right, you have one profile.
Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".
Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.
What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.
And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?
Youtube comments have been nice and constructive for a few years now
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I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
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Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular.
Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time.
They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have carved out some of this search space with web-search being native to the tools now.
But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.
I don't see how "most successful and profitable product" is supposed to disprove a big drop in quality.
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Google search is extremely vulnerable to SEO scams. It's very common to see advertised/high ranked scams with similar domain names (e.g bankname.com vs bankname.co). I switched to Kagi mainly for this reason.
Your comment makes me wonder how long have you been online? Google was amazing from ~1999 until 2010 and has slowly deteriorated since.
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> most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity.
The iPhone is a much stronger contender for that title. It has probably surpassed $1 Trillion in profit for Apple since 2007.
The fact that Google grabbed a monopoly and now is making bank does not mean the product is good.
It was amazing.
Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.
But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.
And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.
Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.
Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.
They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.
it's not "unfounded", mountains of people have observed it. That's the foundation.
There was a brief time when everyone was trying Bing to see the new copilot feature for themselves.
Then prove it? There have been actual studies that confirm this fact. You could also use the fact that google search has been losing market share steadily since 2023 and since search was supported on things like chatGPT as evidence it has been in decline. But, as I have in the past also said, I refuse to argue about this with google employees/devotees because there seems to be a fair amount of delusion involved.
For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)
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>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse.
the 'new' ai mode routinely creates these silly categories that are not what i was looking for and my screen is filled with repetitive ai summaries of articles. it will ingest a source as fact, and then use that fact to create confirmation bias across other articles. it will even use words like "confirm" when it finds a source saying something, even if the source is junk or seo spam. it becomes somewhat impossible to escape the assumptions the model has made, and i have to resort to traditional web search to get diversity in my results.
and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.
I don't use it often, but at least now I can get an answer. I swear in early 2023 I would just get completely irrelevant, borderline spammy results to the point I gave up and felt helpless because there was no real alternative at that time for how I used google. It felt like the internet broke for a window of time and Bing (very briefly) brought me out of that hell. To this day I still can't believe they didnt capitalize on it.
Nadella himself wrote:
"2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. [...] 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”."
Customers are not buying the spectacle and investors are wondering why there is no substance.
[1] _ https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/
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It cost them (as a guess) -1T of market cap..
In other words they still got rewarded by the market despite all the missteps. I don’t agree with this reality but here we are.
There were six versions of Windows Mobile before the iPhone hit and they still couldn't do anything.
Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.
One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.
Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.
I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.
PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.
There certainly other examples that I failed to address.
This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-notch.)
Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
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But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive
It has more to do with Microsoft's size and long history. If you are big and have been doing the same thing for many years, naturally you'll want to expand, some of which do succeed.
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Only because they have enough money in the bank.
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Thrive, or just muddle through?
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company
Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.
Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft.
But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
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Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone.
I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.
Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to? What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system?
It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of users that will continue to find ways to use their computer the way they want to.
This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough. MS should be happy to retain any end user they can at this point and not continue to piss of some nerds that still use your operating system under the one condition that they get to do so the way they see fit.
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How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
There was a conspiracy theory in my company that M$ had plants in my company to turn everything into M$. "If it doesnt have the word M$ in it, we aren't using it."
I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.
As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.
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From the article, "its productivity software is used by hundreds of millions of corporate users, a captive audience to whom it can easily promote new AI products."
Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.
weirdly enough, we asked microsoft to help us build these reports and give us insights into these numbers. The ones in our country were utterly incapable and just send screenshots of powerbi reports from the US team.
So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane
Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions.
Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.
If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.
This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.
I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.
I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is that.
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Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole:
> “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote.
This is true in almost every large organization, and will affect every enterprise AI product out there. There was a relevant subthread just a couple of days ago recounting this exact, same dynamic: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir
It gets even worse if you consider this data is going to be extremely messy, with multiple bespoke, partially-duplicate / overlapping, potentially conflicting versions of the data with varying levels of out-of-datedness, scattered across these silos. (I would know, in a past life, I worked on a months-long project called, self-explanatorily enough, "Stale Docs".)
Yeah, untangling these bureaucratic webs and data horrors is not a quarter-long or year-long project, so investors are gonna be waiting a long time for the impact of AI to be visible. On the bright side, as TFA also hints at, AI providers themselves have been severely capacity-constrained. So hopefully by the time these issues get sorted out enough new capacity would be coming online to actually serve that traffic.
In the meantime, I expect a prolonged period of AI companies feverishly splurging on AI CapEx spend even as Wall Street punishes them repeatedly for the lack of impact of AI being reflected anywhere.
It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop.
It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and this also surprised me, more than one billion devices run on Win11. That's also strange - AI is not a big reason for most of these folks then, right? Probably neither positive or negative (or they may not even know about it).
It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get what you get, even if it sucks.
Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.
It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.
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If I didn't need to use Power BI or connect to various data sources in Excel I would have requested a MacBook at work years ago.
If you want games, you want Windows. Though Valve is finally chipping away at that.
But mostly it’s cost. It’s simply far cheaper to buy a Windows computer than a Mac if you just want a computer. There are no sub-$300 Macs brand new.
In so many ways, for so many reasons, people “must” use Windows.
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> It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI.
Yeah. Right now the <title> of office.com is:
> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI
Microsoft 365 Copilot... what a product name.
> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI
That's some insight into Microsoft's brain rot, isn't it? "Imagine spending every day for the next year dealing with robot office software."
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Putting "AI integrations" on Windows 11 is like layering surstromming on a turd.
innovators dilemma.
they see that the future is AI, but AI doesnt need Microsoft.
But also while the future may be AI (this is debateable), I live and work in the present.
Don't worry, after a decade or two of having Windows reinstall and re-enable it every couple weeks against their users' wishes I'm sure they'll get the market penetration they're looking for...
This is repeated endlessly by non-Windows fans I assume, because I disabled AI and other annoyances in Windows long ago and they haven't come back. I even used to worry about updating Windows because I saw this warning so many times, but then I did and it just never came to pass.
Microsoft has a long and well documented history of resetting user preferences.
Multiple times I've disabled the cortana taskbar search widget, only to have a windows update turn it back on and proudly gives me a popup telling me they noticed it was disabled and turned it back on for me.
Microsoft will forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.
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Microsoft has pinned a Copilot shortcut to my taskbar after an update multiple times.
One time they replaced my "show desktop" button in the bottom right with a Copilot button.
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Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is...
I think the difference with Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, and where it's being pushed. Because Copilot is bundled with software people need, it's going to get a lot more scrutiny compared to AI products that aren't built into the OS/built into Office, etc. In a way, being an "agentic OS" isn't that different from say Moltbot (conceptually), but one of those ideas seems to have gotten quite a bit of excitement, and the other a lot of anger, because Moltbot isn't being forced on you.
True. Let's not forget that they are rebranding Office 364 as Microsoft 365 Copilot.
> Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us,
AI demand goes though. AI investments numbers good. Numbers up. Not because people choose, because corporations are fomo-ing it and we don't have a choise.
I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept asking me for the spreadsheet like it's open in a browser window.
I always find myself recalibrating if copilot understands what I am doing. I get mixed results. cannot seem to come up with a consistent rule of thumb.
I wanted to do something complex in google sheets. We had just gotten Gemini in gsheet. I assumed they'd have used some fancy mcp and enabled us to do a lot of things but all gemini in gsheet could do was summarize
It sounds like that's still a step up from Copilot.
I know Gemini has more advanced features in Docs and they rolled something out for Sheets. I would bet GWorkspace keeps gaining ground on the functionality battle.
AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.
People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)
I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.
It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.
> I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.
Confusion and fear are much better for stock prices than clarity
If what they are getting is "not much, plus a side order of hallucination", then connecting the dots is exactly what they DON'T want to do.
I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.
When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.
For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.
I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
The 3.3% paid conversion is not great.
Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.
People who paid are leaving.
That's a churn problem.
The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and Gemini at higher rates.
Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but won't share the numbers.
That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.
This is the Ballmer story all over again.
Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use.
Windows Phone had carrier deals too.
The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight.
This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:
Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.
Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.
> Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.
I audibly winced
There are in fact almost 30 products with Copilot in the name now. Though they've seem to have cut a few recently like the sales version
> unlike anything we've seen before
They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…
> growth is "unlike anything we've seen before"
This says nothing about where the growth is going
Not surprised. Copilot censors queries to the point that it is often useless.
Another reason to use ChatGPT.
Which copilot?
github copilot? bing copilot? office365 copilot? office365 copilot chat? windows copilot? or one of those clippy like copilots in dev environments that can't do anything but point you to the wrong documentation?
Does anyone know why microsoft thought it would be a good idea to alter the right-click menu in a folder to hide all the important choices behind a second, "Show more options" click? Just making the user click once more where previously they didnt have to?
I use StartAllBack to replace the Start menu with more or less the Windows 7 one, and it also has features to restore file explorer to the more sensible Windows 7/8 versions.
God, it's so dumb. And these 2 menues have 2 different looks, because I guess for Windows 11 they reimplemented it in whatever fancy fucking UI framework they decided to make, but they didn't complete the implementation so they still had to offer the "legacy" version of the menu.
For a long while "Settings" had 2 interfaces, 1 that looks like it's from the iPhone, and the other which is from "Control Panel"...
I forgot that there are three different, separate, different-looking settings menus for the mouse, which show three layers of legacy OS implementation.
Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.
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Microsoft's focus was making it so that AI could allow unskilled workers to replace skilled workers. The hope was that everyone but sales/management could be offshored to SEA/India/etc and AI would somehow make up for the skill differential.
The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
Yeah, my experience is currently pointing towards AI replacing the cheap workers instead of the expensive ones.
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.
Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
Can't say Win 11 is really that bad.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
The reason is they’re gearing up to push the AR/VR-first UI/UX.
and it’s definitely got some bad edges right now.
Literally.
Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost anyone can do the following trick successfully:
Done.
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According to the CEO peddling AI, software engineers are about to be replaced by AI, how come AI hasn't fixed all of their atrocious software hmmm..
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...
Text-only, no Javascript:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf...
> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race. But data shows that it is losing ground with users.
This explains perfectly the annoying behavior when you search for ChatGPT using Edge. The top thing that appear to you is, well, Copilot and not ChatGPT! Tagged as "Promoted by Microsoft" and labeled as "Your Copilot is here", is clearly a weak move from MS to push Copilot as possible as it can despite its limitations in what it can do compared to its competitors.
At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.
What I find deeply troubling is that, from people I know, Microsoft is making it harder to use any other AI tool in the enterprise. Copilot operates like a computer virus where you can only use it for AI or you will be fired. It's really frustrating to hear about people I know when they can't do basic things with AI and their organizational policy changes it day-by-day in order to get the numbers up for Copilot. Their basic workflows involving PyTorch or Sklearn are being kneecapped and it's getting worse. Microsoft is becoming a huge liability for AI professionals that I know of.
I am building Agents for a long while now. The problem with Copilot is that it gets in the way too many times without being useful. Examples: When I open an email with 3 short lines of text, why do I need a "summary by copilot" button?
When I open a meeting invote from someone else the first 1/3rd of the screen is occupied with "Prepare for your meeting" nonsense. The "insights" button just provides general knowledge akin to "read the documentation".
Absolutely. And trying to be invasive by adding Copilot buttons everywhere. It's reminiscent of "free toolbar" adware.
Solution: Add MCP to MS applications, then isolate Copilot to its own app.
Make MCP as pervasive as OLE Automation once was
You know things are running bad when they've lost even the likes of WSJ. And yet Satya and his ilk (across the LLM space) keep pushing it. It does not matter that this technologically on its own can never reach what they kept promising. Is the pride and ego of a couple of CEOs so important that we'll all just watch them bringing the whole market down ?
The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.
These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.
It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.
Yup, I asked it how long an azure subscription had existed and it could not even tell me that. Literally now() minus the object’s creation date and it had no idea what to do.
Agree. In general, the whole Microsoft "Admin" panel is utter garbage. Messy, slow, with ten different interfaces. Finding something without Googling it first is impossible.
Microsoft has access to all the OpenAI/ChatGPT tech. How is their chatbot so awful? Seems like they are trying their hardest to screw this up.
They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year.
When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash.
I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.
It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the company to open source, naturally not without their own intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer branding, anything related to Windows.
Just because Satya is bald and Indian, doesn't make him Gandhi. Ballmer was Bill's bulldog, but he couldn't direct the company's strategy nearly as effectively as his predecessor; Nadella is craftier. Microsoft has been Microsofting harder than ever lately, and their open source strategy is very subtly embrace-extend-extinguish. I honestly think that by 2030 they will have begun executing a plan to disallow Linux (or any other OS) from running on new PCs without a Windows hypervisor underneath it.
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> ...they are down ~12% for the year.
Given how unstable stock prices typically are over the short term, and given that we're currently something like thirty-five days into the year, I don't consider that fact to mean much.
Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.
I mean, Apple is at ATH from basically waiting out and picking the winner from its throne. Everyone clowned them, but it also made them not waste money until things are a bit more clear.
The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.
Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.
However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.
Copilot should not have been released. A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.
For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.
People hate it, and for hood reason.
It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.
Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams
Bah
I think it comes down to..not every product in the world is improved by AI. but shareholders believe they all should be. So its crammed into all of them, instead of the few that would really benefit.
The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.
MS Copilot for Android has some annoying UI bugs which they seemingly refuse to fix. The biggest is that the chat area sometimes gets randomly resized so that you can hardly read anything. There is also no way to search past chats. For all the billions they are spending on AI, their chat interface seems inexplicably half-assed.
They seemingly forgot to ask their "almost-agi-future-of-economics-the-best-thing-ever" to fix the UI...
In some ways this reminds me of the .NET marketing debacle Microsoft pulled where every product suddenly was ".NET" and nobody could explain what that meant or what it did that was helpful.
Similarly Copilot is everywhere, but why I would want it there or use it there is unknown.
Copilot is basically ChatGPT after Microsoft hit it on the head with a pipe hard enough and long enough to drop it about 20 IQ points.
Nadella is in the position he's is, clearly, and I'm just a nobody. The guy must be onto something, and I'm just a delusional internet commentator.
However.
No-one I know, literally not a single soul, is delighted by using any of the copilot-branded tools. What's more, almost everyone seems to resent these tools due to their hamfisted design, poor performance and seedy marketing.
The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit.
Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base?
I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are.
The mind truly boggles.
Copilot is such a typical MS product.
It checks all the correct checkboxes on a feature list in comparison to the competition but it just sucks to use.
It's like Sharepoint - the deathpit of all collaborative software
It's a product that gives system administrators a power trip. Imagine you control every capability of an AI and you're not qualified to have engineered it. You would give more access to your favorite departments, projects, and coworkers while keeping the defaults as restrictive as possible. I've seen this happen in real time across many different companies. I've known people who were reported to HR by them for using HuggingFace.
Microsoft Copilot: The Sharepoint of chatbots
I can't imagine a description more likely to give corporate workers the ick.
Product leaders should really measure internal usage as a litmus test for whether or not people actually want these things. It's honestly shocking how much MS's brand has diminished in the last few years because of them pushing the copilot brand into everything.
Is anyone surprised? Windows can't even open and close file explorer reliably without lagging or refusing to respond. How could they possibly rival these models?
Microslop can never be a real Ai company if they can't build a frontier model and push the envelope themselves. Today they are completely dependent on 3rd party companies, not a good position to be in.
They own a quarter of openai
Right, they had to buy it, not build it
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The lobotomized version of Open AI models. It feels worse than small local models I run. Does anyone know what size of models they are running?
Microsoft's everything is running into problems. Seriously though, it always seems like a dumpster fire over there but the last year is next level with all their Windows 11 problems, Windows update problems, Office365 outages, Copilot issues, Azure outages etc... not to mention the features no one seems to want.
Several people are not happy about the association with Bill Gates, too.
The problem here is attributing “Copilot” as a simple chat bot. This is one of the features, yes- but it exists to make surveillance en masse easier. When copilot is on every device, OS and application- they can correlate so many bits of information on people.
Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.
This still works for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565
Ok, let's put that in the toptext. Thanks!
If you have Apple News, you can open the article in Safari and then "Share" it to the News app.
For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original
Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems
...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems
Oh, but it does.
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No Javascript, no CSS, only two HTML tags: <p> and <a> with href attribute; 1.htm can be viewed in _any_ browser, no matter how old or unpopular, firefox is just one example
Correction: Three tags: 1. <p>, 2. <a> with href attribute and 3. <meta> with charset attribute