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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There <i>aren't</i> any "AI" products that have enough value.<p>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.<p>But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a <i>feature</i> 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 <i>harms</i> business with its hallucinations.<p>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, <i>and</i> its development, <i>and</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>My guess is every team's metric is probably reduced to tokens consumed through the products owned.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.
I have zero doubt that AI will eventually make many people lots of money. Just about every company on earth is collecting TBs of data on everyone and they know they're sure they can use that information against us somehow, but they can't possibly read and search through it all on their own.<p>I have quite a few doubts that it'll be a net positive for society though. The internet (for all of its flaws) is still a good thing generally for the public. Users didn't have to be convinced of that, they just needed to be shown what was possible. Nobody had to shove internet access into everything against customer's wishes. "AI" on the other hand isn't something most users want. Users are constantly complaining about it being pushed on them and it's already forced MS to scale back the AI in windows 11.
The comparison to the dotcom bubble isn't without merit. As a technology in terms of its applications though I think the best one to compare the LLM with is the mouse. It was absolutely a revolution in terms of how we interact with computers. You could do many tasks much faster with a GUI. Nearly all software was redesigned around it. The story around a "conversational interface" enabled by an LLM is similar. You can literally see the agent go off and run 10 grep commands or whatever in seconds, that you would have had to look up.<p>The mouse didn't become some huge profit center and the economy didn't realign around mouse manufacturers. People sure made a lot of money off it indirectly though. The profits accrued from sales of software that supported it well and delivered productivity improvements. Some of the companies who wrote that software also manufactured mice, some didn't.<p>I think it'll be the same now. It's far from clear that developing and hosting LLMs will be a great business. They'll transform computing anyway. The actual profits will accrue to whoever delivers software which integrates them in a way that delivers more productivity. On some level I feel like it's already happening, Gemini's well integrated into Google Drive, changes how I use it, and saves me time. ChatGPT is just a thing off on the side that I chat randomly with about my hangover. Github Copilot claims it's going to deliver productivity and sometimes kinda does but man it often sucks. Easy to infer from this info who my money will end up going to in the long run.<p>On diversification, I think anyone who's not a professional investor should steer away from picking individual stocks and already be diversified... I wouldn't advise anyone to get out of the market or to try and time the market. But a correction will come eventually and being invested in very broad index funds smooths out these bumps. To those of us who invest in the whole market, it's notable that a few big AI/tech companies have become a far larger share of the indices than they used to be, and a fairly sure bet that one day, they won't be anymore.
I started working in 1997. Cisco was one of our big customers so I knew a lot of engineers there. Cisco stock hid $80 in 2000. In 2002 it was at $10.<p><a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/</a><p>I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.<p>I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.
What do you mean exactly by "diversify"? Money/investment-wise?
> at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do<p>The revolution already happened. I can't imagine life without AI today. Not just for coding (which I actually lament) but just in general day to day use. Sure it's not perfect but I think it's quite difficult to ignore how the world changed in just 3-4 years.
That's just so strange to me. In my experience, it hallucinates and makes things up often, and when it's accurate, the results are so generic and surface level.
I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.
This industry has seen several bubbles in its existence. Many previously top companies didn't even survive them.
The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.
And this is the broken mindset tanking multiple large companies' products and services (Google, Apple, MS, etc). Focus on the stock. The product and our users are an afterthought.<p>Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.<p>0. The Fallen Apple - <a href="https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/" rel="nofollow">https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/</a>
The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.<p>Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.
In particular it's the short term stock price. They'll happily grift their way to overinflated stock prices today even though at some point their incestuous money shuffle game will end and the stocks will crash and a bunch of people who aren't insider trading are going to be left with massive losses.
every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.
> 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.<p>Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.<p>Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.<p><i>Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172</a> - February 2026<p>This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/eli5_what_was_the_dot_com_bubble/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...</a><p>> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.<p>> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology<p>> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked<p>> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died<p>("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
<i>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.</i><p>It's happened before.<p>Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.<p>Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.
Doesn't matter what the leaders think if the users hate it and call it slop<p><a href="https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya-nadella-ai-slop" rel="nofollow">https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...</a>
Were you around in 2008?
The mistake is simple. It is like the difference between giving you many tools to use vs making you the tool.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this:
<a href="https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html" rel="nofollow">https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html</a>
I'm baffled by this as well, Microsoft seems to have lost the plot almost completely.
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.
Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.
That only good if you're doing <i>measurably</i> 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 <i>gone</i>.
Working faster, but at what?<p>LLM workflow:<p>Describing to Claude that I need an edit made in the second paragraph of the third section feels easy, comfortable, and straightforward. I’m using my speech centers, speech to text, and then I wait for a generation during which I hit my phone or Reddit. Poof, the text flies out like magic, taking 20+ seconds, then I re-re-re-read it to make sure the edit was good and nothing was lost in that edit. Oops, the edit inverted the logic of the paragraph, lemme repeat the above… and again… time flies! 2 hours gone in a flash.<p>Old and boring workflow:<p>I gruellingly move my mouse to open a file, then take a coffee break. I come back and left-click into the sentence that sucks. I hit Reddit to deal with the anxiety… I think, boo, and then type out the edit I needed. It’s bad, I fix. Coffee break. Squiggly red line from a misspelling? I fix. I google and find a better turn of phrase, copy and paste it in manually with a little edit. Ugh. This sucks. I suck, work sucks. Time sucks. 35 entire minutes of my life has been wasted… time to get another coffee and check Reddit.<p>———<p>Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis. The moment to moment feelings are deceptive and we humans are unreliable recorders of time-usage. Particularly when engaged in unwanted effort.<p>Google has had all this tech for a minute. Their restrained application and lack of 10x-vibe-chad talk make me think their output measurements are aligned with my measurements.<p>1 rabbit hole hallucination wrong-turn can eat up a lot, lot, lot of magic one-shotting.
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?<p>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
Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.<p>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.
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.
The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted.<p>Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. <a href="https://designer.microsoft.com/" rel="nofollow">https://designer.microsoft.com/</a><p>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. <a href="https://designer.microsoft.com/" rel="nofollow">https://designer.microsoft.com/</a><p>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.<p>...<p>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!<p>[0]: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigenerated_page_summaries/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...</a>
I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.
> "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."<p>That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:<p>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!<p>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.
My phone, laptop, TV, fridge, etc., all demonstrably worse than they were 5 years ago.
Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is complete slop. Claude Code is better with PPT.
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.
Google is certainly looking better than stack overflow.
My take away from mobile first G was “sites need to be fast right guys for mobile?” ->
amp -> actually let’s hostile take over the web, oh actually well rework chrome auto sign in, oh actually … just a long string of user hostility
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.<p>Incentives almost always drive the outcome.
You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there
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.
I'm still super mad at Google+ because it was clearly the cause for Google Reader been killed.<p>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.<p>Make a Disqus-like comment section that shows the comments in RSS articles from Reader.<p>Also Reddit, by empowering the GReader Groups capabilities.<p>But no, let's copy Facebook and force everybody on it. And kill Google Talk while at it.<p>I'll never forgive Google for that.
>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.<p>False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers.<p>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.
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.
Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?
Yes, also it's not even encrypted. It's the worst case of all major browsers.<p>Firefox & Safari: E2E encrypted, you hold keys, not possible for Mozilla/Apple to access it.<p>Chrome: Encrypted, Google holds keys meaning it is useless, they can read and give away the data. One can enable sync passphrase which would enable E2E however.<p>Edge: Nothing is encrypted and no way to change this.
Yeah - Google really tried to get people to use Google+ but it always sucked.<p>YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.<p>> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.<p><a href="https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/</a><p>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.
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.
That seems far too clear, I'd bet more on "Copilot Online".
I'm holding out for Copilot 365 Explorer Enterprise Edition.
> Why can't it just be called "internet"?<p>Because the world wide web is just <i>one</i> of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.
They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.
Looks like the context understander has logged on. Welcome!
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.<p>Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.<p>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.<p>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.<p>What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.<p>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.
Comments in Facebook may not be perfect, but they are <i>vastly</i> better than youtube comments. This is a false equivalence.
I've personally seen WAY more abusive and hateful comments on Facebook, from real accounts of real people, with pictures and friends and everything, than I have ever seen on YouTube. This may be very locale dependent, but in my country (Romania, which has a pretty large proportion of people online from very socially conservative backgrounds) you can easily find extremely explicitly misoginistic, racist, homophobic, and just plain hateful comments coming from real FB and Instagram accounts, again, from people using their real names and faces and everything. I've seen far fewer similar comments on YouTube videos, even ones from the same country.
Our experiences differ in that regard. And no it isn't a false equivalence since Facebook's "use your real ID" commenting system is directly comparable to any proposed system to mandate use of someone's ID to post on other platforms.
> 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.<p>This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does <i>not</i> lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.<p>The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.
It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.<p>I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.<p>Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.
Youtube comments have been nice and constructive for a few years now
You're right. Youtube comments are great now. Granted, it means you can't have controversial conversations there, but that's not what they're for.
Maybe this is just me only subscribing to channels where people behave in the comments and the channel owner actually does some moderation, but I actually kind of agree.<p>Sure, you find disagreements and arguments, but you don't get the 'ur mum gae', the reductio ad Hitlerum, the dongers, and the outright insane takes and paragraphs of all caps that I would expect from Youtube comments. Meanwhile, every time I open Facebook because of some event I need to press 'going' on, I get a glimpse of some inane take or someone writing in all caps because reasons.<p>There have been a few waves of comment spam, but maybe Youtube actually managed to curb that now? Only took them two or so years.
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Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But microsoft was <i>way</i> ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
Nadella himself wrote:<p>"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”."<p>Customers are not buying the spectacle and investors are wondering why there is no substance.<p>[1] _ <a href="https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/" rel="nofollow">https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/</a>
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion<p>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.
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.<p>It <i>was</i> amazing.<p>Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.<p>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.<p>And everyone <i>knows</i> Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity.<p>The iPhone is a much stronger contender for that title. It has probably surpassed $1 Trillion in profit for Apple since 2007.
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.<p>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<p>if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse.<p>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.<p>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 <i>an</i> 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.
It cost them (as a guess) -1T of market cap..<p>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.
Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.<p>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!"<p>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 <i>you can't save your work!</i>) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.<p>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.<p>I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole:<p><i>> “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote.</i><p>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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209</a><p>In fact, Palantir's secret sauce may not be their tech, but their "Forward Deployed Engineers" model (i.e. a rebranding of "partner engineers embedded within their customers' organizations"). Because it turns out that's a lot of what they do is navigating these bureaucratic and political hurdles to unlock access to the data: <a href="https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir" rel="nofollow">https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir</a><p>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".)<p>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.<p>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 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.<p>PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.<p>There certainly other examples that I failed to address.<p>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.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...</a>
I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv being the strongest technical organization at MS than its provenance.
I STILL REMEMBER WHEN SOME MARKETING IDIOT DECIDED THAT VISUAL STUDIO NEEDED TO SHOUT AT YOU. IT TOOK THREE MAJOR VERISONS BEFORE VISUAL STUDIO STOPPED LOOKING LIKE THIS COMMENT. OF COURSE THERE WASN'T A SETTING TO MAKE IT NORMAL AGAIN.
Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer experience in Visual Studio.<p>Also VS 2026 was released with a hard milestone, thus while there is a new settings experience, many options show a dialog from VS 2022, because the new UI is still not implemented for the new experience.<p>Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality.<p>Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.
Ah, thanks. That must be the link with Simon Peyton Jones as well. Seems to be another case of a marketing machine running away with foundational research coming from Europe.*<p>* no hard feelings
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
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company<p>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.
Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone.<p>I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft.<p>But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
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 <i>Android</i> 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."<p>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.<p>As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.
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."<p>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.
If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.
I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.
This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.
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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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.
If you want games, you want Windows. Though Valve is finally chipping away at that.<p>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.<p>In so many ways, for so many reasons, people “must” use Windows.
> It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI.<p>Yeah. Right now the <title> of office.com is:<p>> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI<p>Microsoft 365 Copilot... what a product name.
> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI<p>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."
Putting "AI integrations" on Windows 11 is like layering surstromming on a turd.
innovators dilemma.<p>they see that the future is AI, but AI doesnt need Microsoft.
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 <i>need</i>, 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.
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 <i>long</i> and <i>well documented</i> history of resetting user preferences.<p><i>Multiple</i> 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.<p>Microsoft <i>will</i> forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.
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.
> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, <i>Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race</i>. But data shows that it is losing ground with users.<p>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.<p>At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.
Which copilot?<p>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?
AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.<p>People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)<p>I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.<p>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.
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.<p>The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
The 3.3% paid conversion is not great.<p>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.<p>People who paid are leaving.<p>That's a churn problem.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.<p>This is the Ballmer story all over again.<p><pre><code> - Massive distribution advantage
- Captive enterprise base
</code></pre>
Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use.<p>Windows Phone had carrier deals too.<p>The problem is the same: <i>you can't mandate delight</i>.<p>This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:<p><pre><code> > "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"
</code></pre>
Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.<p>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.<p>I audibly winced
> unlike anything we've seen before<p>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"<p>This says nothing about where the growth is going
<a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-s-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems/ar-AA1VBKdf/" rel="nofollow">https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...</a><p>Text-only, no Javascript:<p><a href="https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf/" rel="nofollow">https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf...</a>
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?
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.<p>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.<p>Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
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?<p>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".
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.
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.<p>However.<p>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.<p>The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit.<p>Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base?<p>I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are.<p>The mind truly boggles.
They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year.<p>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.<p>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.
Luckily you can use "Linux" on Google's products, or Amazon for that matter. /s<p>In what concerns EEE in open source, there are plenty of candidates, expecially everyone that has contributed for the detriment of GPL based licenses in favour of business friendly licenses.
> ...they are down ~12% for the year.<p>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.<p>Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.
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.
The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.<p>Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.<p>However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.<p>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.<p>For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.<p>People hate it, and for hood reason.<p>It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.<p>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<p>Bah
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.
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.
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.
Gift link: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems-ce235b28?st=V8rLES&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is...</a>
Copilot is such a typical MS product.<p>It checks all the correct checkboxes on a feature list in comparison to the competition but it just <i>sucks</i> to use.<p>It's like Sharepoint - the deathpit of all collaborative software
Microsoft Copilot: The Sharepoint of chatbots<p>I can't imagine a description more likely to give corporate workers the ick.
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.
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.<p>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.<p>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.<p>and it’s <i>definitely</i> got some bad edges right now.<p>Literally.
<p><pre><code> > which "just doesn't work"
</code></pre>
Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost anyone can do the following trick successfully:<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
Done.
><i>I guess almost anyone can do the following</i><p>almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course<p>theres probably less than 10 people in my entire company that know half of the words you wrote there. whats an "iso"? what is "flashing" the "iso"? how do i "boot medium"? what is "KDE" and why do i want to say yes?<p>(i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the <i>vast</i> majority of people do not)
You are right, I somehow forgot the word "here" after "anyone". I don't expect the average laymen be able to follow these steps, but I have those expectations from the people here.
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..
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.
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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565</a>
If you have Apple News, you can open the article <i>in Safari</i> and then "Share" it to the News app.
For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original<p><i>Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems</i><p>...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems
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.<p><pre><code> x=AA1VBKdf
{ echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x' HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \
|busybox ssl_client assets.msn.com \
|grep -o "<p>.\*</p>"|tr -d '\134'; } > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
</code></pre>
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