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Amazing! I keep banging on about how Microsoft is building the business lock-in of the next decade, and this is a sign of it. Put down your snubs about Clippy a

Amazing! I keep banging on about how Microsoft is building the business lock-in of the next decade, and this is a sign of it. Put down your snubs about Clippy and frothing about "EEE" and look at that announcement: > "Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads." > "It creates a new knowledge model for every organization — harnessing the massive reservoir of data and insights that lies largely inaccessible and untapped today. Business Chat works across all your business data and apps" > "Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data." That's amazing, natural search, summary over all your company SharePoint and emails and Teams chats. You aren't going to commercially compete with this with an IRC server, IMAP and a copy of LibreOffice. Something DropBox could have been doing with their massive trove of business documents? Something Slack could have been doing with their massive haul of chat history?

itsdrewmiller 4y ago
Curious how well this works if Teams has a short window for chat retention - if it still has learned from them and keeps the information but puts it out of reach of discovery that would be kind of amazing.
411111111111111 4y ago
I dont remember a single time when people supposedly said that EEE wasn't still being done. There are just countless examples of people misattributing everything to be EEE. Vscode is another recent example of Microsoft still doing EEE by first creating the editor, destroying a lot of the IDE/editor ecosystem, just to eventually remove the important bits into non-free plugins, making the free version of codium basically pointless. But that doesn't make M$ buying GitHub into EEE for example.
- whoisthemachine 4y ago
  It actually kind of directly links to Microsoft's strategy, because Atom was the original Electron editor, and Atom was created by GitHub, who was purchased by Microsoft, after which Atom was ~extinguised~ deprecated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    > "after which Atom was ~extinguised~ deprecated." That isn't what 'extinguished' meant! It was supposed to be that you and Oracle exchanged email by open SMTP, Microsoft wedged some new features into Exchange SMTP which then enough Microsoft customers relied on that Oracle rolled over to MS-SMTP, and then you practically couldn't use plain standard SMTP because everyone you wanted to email was using proprietary Microsoft SMTP. To trivialise that by turning it into "Microsoft stopped developing a thing and I can't be bothered to fork it and develop it myself" is, well, to turn a potentially real issue (from twenty five years ago, which never happened) into empty whining.
    - whoisthemachine 4y ago
      I guess as an end-user, I fail to see the difference. And it wasn't like Microsoft started developing Atom and then stopped it, they bought the company that started developing it, and shut it down in favor of their own product. And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best.
      - jodrellblank 4y ago
        One difference is that you can continue using your old Atom install, and if it had been "extinguished", you couldn't[1]. The other difference is that EEE was largely about interoperable protocols, not what one person could do with one program - it was about TCP/IP and SMTP and HTML and trying to take those over to Microsoft's benefit[2]. > "And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best. Yes, welcome to the elephant in the room of Open Source, 'many eyes makes bugs shallow', and the other pretenses we don't question. But at least the principle stands - you can still get the Atom source code[3] and pay someone as a contractor to change it for you, employ some people to work on it, start up a foundation, beg someone. Compared to a closed source program built on patented algorithms when the company shuts down and nobody can practically or legally improve it, or compared to a multiplayer game with online servers which the company shuts down and you can't use the game ever again, it is different. [1] If you think it's impossible for Microsoft to reach into your Linux machine and take your Atom editor away, you'll see why EEE is a moral-panic rather than a real thing which could ever happen. [2] you know, like Google actually does with HTML/Chrome strong-arming through Google-custom extensions, AMP pages, and the like. You'll see that this still hasn't resulted in other people being unable to make browsers or webservers or web-like protocols (Gemini). [3] https://github.com/atom/atom https://github.com/atom/atom
ChikkaChiChi 4y ago
> Something DropBox could have been doing with their massive trove of business documents? Something Slack could have been doing with their massive haul of chat history? Absolute truth. Discoverability in modern apps is a sad joke at the expense of the users. I guess "search that actually works" isn't enough of a value prop to actually get dev time.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Correct, there was a company called use.fyi (by the founder of KissMetrics) that did only search and they eventually pivoted to data security after one of their users used their tool to figure out which employee was accessing what data and manually blocked one employee after the employee had left the company but somehow still had accidental access to files.
LightBug1 4y ago
Clippy just got hench.
JonChesterfield 4y ago
> Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads." This sounds to me like a significant competitive disadvantage. I'm torn between joy that this makes it easier for small companies to compete by doing novel things like, uh, talking to each other and horror that my own employer might embrace this with enthusiasm. It's an interesting thought that usually IP-paranoid companies might cheerfully stream absolutely all their internal documentation to Microsoft in order to leverage this synergy. I think I'll buy some M$ stock.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Many of those IP-Paranoid companies are already using Sharepoint and Office 365 (or Google Docs) to store all that documentation.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Because the convenience of SharePoint and O365 is a huge productivity boost compared to having everything self hosted on-prem. Or better yet, the other way around, having everything on-prem, outside the cloud, kneecaps your productivity. Case in point, I currently work in a relatively niche cybersecurity company, so naturally, most customer stuff is done and stored on-prem for security reasons since we handle a lot of customer sensitive data and storing it in anyone's cloud is a big no-go for any customer. By far the biggest issues are managing the on-prem environment and moving the data back and fourth between the O365 environment and the on-prem environment, as the O365 environment is actively used by the customers, C-suite, business, sales and upper management, while the on-prem environment is used by the engineers, lower and middle managers, which is the biggest PITA that I have ever dealt with. Nextcloud, Thunderbird, Libre Office, Element chat etc. are great but what Microsoft offers with the O365/sharepoint ecosystem is something else and copilot will move the goalposts even further. Also, I'm not aware of Microsoft having had any data leaks or breaches, so maybe they have gained enough trust in the corporate space that makes companies at ease storing all their stuff in Microsoft's cloud for the sake of convenience.
  - JonChesterfield 4y ago

itsdrewmiller 4y ago

Curious how well this works if Teams has a short window for chat retention - if it still has learned from them and keeps the information but puts it out of reach of discovery that would be kind of amazing.

411111111111111 4y ago

I dont remember a single time when people supposedly said that EEE wasn't still being done. There are just countless examples of people misattributing everything to be EEE. Vscode is another recent example of Microsoft still doing EEE by first creating the editor, destroying a lot of the IDE/editor ecosystem, just to eventually remove the important bits into non-free plugins, making the free version of codium basically pointless. But that doesn't make M$ buying GitHub into EEE for example.

whoisthemachine 4y ago
It actually kind of directly links to Microsoft's strategy, because Atom was the original Electron editor, and Atom was created by GitHub, who was purchased by Microsoft, after which Atom was ~extinguised~ deprecated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  > "after which Atom was ~extinguised~ deprecated." That isn't what 'extinguished' meant! It was supposed to be that you and Oracle exchanged email by open SMTP, Microsoft wedged some new features into Exchange SMTP which then enough Microsoft customers relied on that Oracle rolled over to MS-SMTP, and then you practically couldn't use plain standard SMTP because everyone you wanted to email was using proprietary Microsoft SMTP. To trivialise that by turning it into "Microsoft stopped developing a thing and I can't be bothered to fork it and develop it myself" is, well, to turn a potentially real issue (from twenty five years ago, which never happened) into empty whining.
  - whoisthemachine 4y ago
    I guess as an end-user, I fail to see the difference. And it wasn't like Microsoft started developing Atom and then stopped it, they bought the company that started developing it, and shut it down in favor of their own product. And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best.
    - jodrellblank 4y ago
      One difference is that you can continue using your old Atom install, and if it had been "extinguished", you couldn't[1]. The other difference is that EEE was largely about interoperable protocols, not what one person could do with one program - it was about TCP/IP and SMTP and HTML and trying to take those over to Microsoft's benefit[2]. > "And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best. Yes, welcome to the elephant in the room of Open Source, 'many eyes makes bugs shallow', and the other pretenses we don't question. But at least the principle stands - you can still get the Atom source code[3] and pay someone as a contractor to change it for you, employ some people to work on it, start up a foundation, beg someone. Compared to a closed source program built on patented algorithms when the company shuts down and nobody can practically or legally improve it, or compared to a multiplayer game with online servers which the company shuts down and you can't use the game ever again, it is different. [1] If you think it's impossible for Microsoft to reach into your Linux machine and take your Atom editor away, you'll see why EEE is a moral-panic rather than a real thing which could ever happen. [2] you know, like Google actually does with HTML/Chrome strong-arming through Google-custom extensions, AMP pages, and the like. You'll see that this still hasn't resulted in other people being unable to make browsers or webservers or web-like protocols (Gemini). [3] https://github.com/atom/atom https://github.com/atom/atom

ChikkaChiChi 4y ago

> Something DropBox could have been doing with their massive trove of business documents? Something Slack could have been doing with their massive haul of chat history? Absolute truth. Discoverability in modern apps is a sad joke at the expense of the users. I guess "search that actually works" isn't enough of a value prop to actually get dev time.

satvikpendem 4y ago
Correct, there was a company called use.fyi (by the founder of KissMetrics) that did only search and they eventually pivoted to data security after one of their users used their tool to figure out which employee was accessing what data and manually blocked one employee after the employee had left the company but somehow still had accidental access to files.

LightBug1 4y ago

Clippy just got hench.

JonChesterfield 4y ago

> Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads." This sounds to me like a significant competitive disadvantage. I'm torn between joy that this makes it easier for small companies to compete by doing novel things like, uh, talking to each other and horror that my own employer might embrace this with enthusiasm. It's an interesting thought that usually IP-paranoid companies might cheerfully stream absolutely all their internal documentation to Microsoft in order to leverage this synergy. I think I'll buy some M$ stock.

lazyasciiart 4y ago
Many of those IP-Paranoid companies are already using Sharepoint and Office 365 (or Google Docs) to store all that documentation.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Because the convenience of SharePoint and O365 is a huge productivity boost compared to having everything self hosted on-prem. Or better yet, the other way around, having everything on-prem, outside the cloud, kneecaps your productivity. Case in point, I currently work in a relatively niche cybersecurity company, so naturally, most customer stuff is done and stored on-prem for security reasons since we handle a lot of customer sensitive data and storing it in anyone's cloud is a big no-go for any customer. By far the biggest issues are managing the on-prem environment and moving the data back and fourth between the O365 environment and the on-prem environment, as the O365 environment is actively used by the customers, C-suite, business, sales and upper management, while the on-prem environment is used by the engineers, lower and middle managers, which is the biggest PITA that I have ever dealt with. Nextcloud, Thunderbird, Libre Office, Element chat etc. are great but what Microsoft offers with the O365/sharepoint ecosystem is something else and copilot will move the goalposts even further. Also, I'm not aware of Microsoft having had any data leaks or breaches, so maybe they have gained enough trust in the corporate space that makes companies at ease storing all their stuff in Microsoft's cloud for the sake of convenience.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago