Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot

joshstrange

https://archive.ph/XJG5V

bena

Did this one become a Nazi as well?

2OEH8eoCRo0

Still can't believe they ditched the Cortana name.

infecto

Not at all that surprising. There enterprise offering is barely acceptable and they have continued to drop the ball on having half decent Cowork solution. They have all rights to win with their existing enterprise agreement but wow it’s amazing to see how bad their product cadence and decision making is. All they needed to do was copy Claude Cowork like OpenAI did.

oh_no

microsoft Product remains an unmitigated dumpster fire. i think github copilot has actually gotten to a pretty good place, and of course the two copilot products will both have features called "autopilot" that do entirely different things

red_admiral

> Companies were paying for more than 30 million Copilot subscriptions as of the end of June. And while individual users are free to use limited versions of Copilot’s chat experience, its most powerful tools are reserved for subscribers to the company’s M365 apps bundle, which has about 90 million paying users. It needs to be more widely known that if you cancel a (home) 365 subscription, you'll be offered a cheaper version without AI integration.

VCFundedGenYer

It was foolish of them to think they had any consumer clout left. Shoving 1000 copies of an inaccurate, poorly functioning, and inconsistent product down everyone's throat will someday be a case study in how to immediately destroy a brand.

glimshe

Great! I was looking forward to an unified AI service like we got unified messaging with MS Teams!!!

TuringNYC

My blood pressure rises everytime i use Enterprise Copilot at work. It seems they truncate message history heavily (to save input token costs?) and Copilot forgets the last thing you told it in the chat. It is like a real-life version of Momento ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/ ) mixed with Waiting for Gadot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot ), pretending to be in league with Anthropic.

pseudosavant

Does anyone even want to try this? I'm a Windows user, M365 subscriber, VS Code user (when I'm not in Codex), had a Github Copilot subscription, etc... and a heavy AI user. Basically, the prime target for Microsoft AI. And every attempt Microsoft has made to put AI into a product has been unusable garbage, using the same models I find productive in other tools. So many AI doubters I know hate using AI tools because their employer only gives them the Microsoft offerings. Which is a totally understandable reaction to those tools.

TYPE_FASTER

I think it makes much more sense for Microsoft to provide a good agent orchestration layer for their operating system and productivity software (are we still calling it that?) than try to compete with the Frontier providers.

schwarzrules

Just going to use this thread to also add a nit: I hate that Microsoft made all the OEMs add a Copilot key to all their laptop keyboards. It's been Ctrl forever, and suddently they throw this net-negative key onto the keyboard. I have decades of habit of using the right side Ctrl key for varying shortcut strokes, and then when I use it now it loads up an unproductive Copilot experience that is awful. <end rant>

aniceperson

Microsoft inviting IT to nice events and giving them perks is the reason they keep a grip so tight on enterprise. For unknown reasons, every garbage new microsoft add-on will be enabled silently without any clear way to manage. At least for copilot pro plus premium they sent an email that "i was invited" so i could promptly reject before they activated, but here is the trick, 99% of the employees won't bother to opt-out.

technion

Wait, they rebounded scout as autopilot? As someone who works with Microsoft intune autopilot regularly... ugh.

barney54

Does anyone have any good experiences with copilot? I have never heard anyone say anything good about it.

mugenjin23

This is crazy to me. I work in local government and for a state in Australia and most LG orgs are battling with the confusing of the current Enterprise Copilot conveluted-ness. This is just another change to deal with. What happens with Agents, Studio, Cowork and Scout? Is this a rebrand again of those? This is how it looks to me now: we have "The New Copilot”, which is Home, Code and Autopilot. Meanwhile an organisation is already trying to explain usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot in Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook etc, Copilot Studio, Agents, Agent Builder, Researcher / Analyst and other agents, Cowork, Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Actions, Workflows and connectors. I know frontier AI labs change a lot, but this just seems like throwing a new mask on the product to cover the mess underneath.

shostack

These are effectively the next OS. I wonder if Microsoft realizes that and if so what their strategic play is.

steve1977

> Companies were paying for more than 30 million Copilot subscriptions as of the end of June. That's in relation to an estimated 450 million or so M365 subscriptions for businesses. Not exactly a huge success.

wiseowise

> Jacob Andreou, who leads product development of the unified Copilot app, told the audience of corporate customers on Wednesday. Importing some user experience features from the consumer app “made Copilot so much better in just the last few months,” he said. Yeah, it’s shit lol.