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The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
- phren0logy 2y agoGiven how hard Microsoft is leaning into AI, and how important Office 365 is, the Copilot for 365 is shockingly bad.
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y agoI think these things have potential to improve over time. If nothing else I do like being able to get a relative quick explanation for how to change some obscure or minute functionality in the Windows OS. Now, would it be better if the Win OS, by default wasn't obnoxiously in the way with the pretense of being "simpler"? Yes! At least there are some truly free OS's out there that keep the interface consistent through iterations and generally improve overtime.
- phren0logy 2y agoI'm sure it will improve over time. I'm just surprised it was as bad as it was at launch, and has improved minimally.
- rsynnott 2y agoSo release them when they work, if ever. Do not release a broken thing and then go “you must use this, in case it is one day non-shit”.
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y agoMaybe they want to collect data on people using copilot in order to train copilot to be better?
- johnnyanmac 2y agoYes, we called those alphas and betas back in the day. But I suppose we've been shipping betas as a full release in software for quite a while now. Maybe even soke alphas.
- esafak 2y agoI see you are not familiar with Microsoft.
- rsynnott 2y agoGranted, they're no strangers to pushing unwanted nonsense on people (remember the ribbon?) but even by their standards this does seem unusually extreme.
- hotstickyballs 2y agoThat’s because the alternative is worse.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoWhat's the alternative?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- riskable 2y agoThis change was probably recommended/implemented via AI.
- cbozeman 2y agoIt's shockingly bad because of how they want it to behave. They don't want it to bullshit, they don't want it to say rowdy things, and they want it stay "on brand". Well too bad. These things are all modeled after human beings... they're literally called large language models. Human beings bullshit, they say rowdy things, and they don't always stay on brand. The only way to have an exceptional AI is you actually "raise" (train) it like you would a normal human being. That's being learned with the quality of Deepseek's models, although I think they're lying through their teeth about how much it cost to train it. It's in China's interest to bullshit on that metric, so they're bullshitting.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoEvery single thing in which M$ has market capture is shockingly bad. Windows, Office, Azure.
- gaoshan 2y agoSimple as this statement is it is also underrated. When you seriously consider their various products and properties it truly is a shocker at how consistently awful they all are.
- einsteinx2 2y agoThe fact that they have such consistently terrible products, but yet still have over $3T market cap and are one of the 3 most valuable companies in the world is extremely frustrating and disappointing.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoBut what consequences will a really large company face for such a prominent disaster? They got what they wanted, which is an excuse to force everyone into paying for new AI products through price increases forced into enterprise contract renewals. It is the same thing that Google just did with Google Workspace or Google Apps or whatever their office suite is called now, where everyone is forced to pay for their new Gemini AI features even if they don’t want it. The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit. They are achieving that, so for them this isn’t a disaster. They are doing that through illegal bundling, and preventing anyone else from competing for the same revenue fairly. To me that is the real disaster, because it is undermining the startup ecosystem.
- sarajevo 2y agoWe did an enterprise license renewal with them last summer. They offered and we accepted a purchase of a large block of m364 license in exchange for a substantial discount in the overall price. Worked for us, worked for them, so no complaints there. We are measuring engagement and time-savings per user and we are doing pretty good on the engagement side while time savings side is barely breaking even (comparing the price of the product versus monetary value of the time saved per user on a monthly basis).
- rad_gruchalski 2y agoIs m364 the same as m365 but without AI? What is the SKU?
- easton 2y agoAs far as I can tell, they didn’t do this price increase on the business/enterprise SKUs at all. Copilot is still an add on for any of the integration with Office. (Something the UI reminds you of if you’re on a business plan without it, if you click the button it offers to request a license from your admin unless they remembered to turn that off.)
- badmeme93 2y ago
- logicchains 2y agoMicrosoft can't even make Teams pleasant and bugfree to use; it's unreasonable to expect them to make a compelling AI product.
- dijit 2y agoBut people (who have never used any non-microsoft communication software) are always telling me that Teams isn’t so bad. Never underestimate the docile nature of a captive audience.
- travisgriggs 2y agoOne of the problems I see with the 365 suite, is that most users’ ratio of consume:produce is pretty high. IOW, they use it to view the content authored on it. They might author the occasional document, but they’ll view +10x that many. This makes a one size fits all pricing difficult.
- munchler 2y agoMy problem with this isn't the price increase. It's the blurring of what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office) and services (e.g. OneDrive) into a soup of weird AI and cloud stuff that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot). My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in this new paradigm.
- jeremyjh 2y agoIt was all part of Microsoft 365 already; Copilot just adds the AI slop.
- munchler 2y agoYes, and I was already struggling to understand what Microsoft 365 actually meant. Adding AI and renaming it all to Copilot is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
- throwup238 2y agoMicrosoft 365 = Word documents without absolute positioning. I tried it once to make a lost cat poster and ended up just using Krita.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Archit3ch 2y agoCopilot is a button. ;)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y agoClearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...
- for_i_in_range 2y agoHate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off. I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
- Angostura 2y agodelighted that Office 2019 still seems to work OK
- the_snooze 2y ago>Just let me write and leave me alone. Yeah, we have networked supercomputers in every pocket and on every desk. And word processors and spreadsheets have been around for decades---that use case is a solved problem. I suppose we can be charitable to Microsoft and say they're trying to innovate, but these AI features lack a clear practical need that they're meeting. It feels more like Big Tech flopping around trying to make the next big thing happen, rather than actually going out into the real world and solving problems actual humans have.
- surfingdino 2y agoMicrosoft is trying to stay relevant and have an answer to Wall St analysis asking them questions about their AI strategy. They will delete AI tools and helpers as soon as the industry goes after another "big idea".
- Yeul 2y agoI guess making billions of profit isn't enough you need to do something with AI.
- wkat4242 2y agoAlso, they can now proudly proclaim they have 100M+ subscribers to their AI stuff so it's a huge success :P I'm glad my web-only 365 (business basic without teams, can't use the family plan because I need a personal domain) just renewed for a year so they can't mess with mine.
- tapoxi 2y agoIs this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.
- fullshark 2y agoWe will solve the cheating problem with more AI, all essays will need to be written in 3 hour time windows in web portals with key-logging + copilot off and children on webcam the entire time. An AI will assess all the data and tell you if the child cheated or not. Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in the future, and having that skill just means you're working a low paying training data creation job, but we will carry on pretending otherwise for a few years.
- graypegg 2y agoThat sounds dystopian… Essay writing is not a task intended to make you specifically better at writing more essays. It’s supposed to train your ability to explain your point of view clearly and with sound reasoning.
- dimator 2y agoNo one has ever cared of you're good at writing essays in the future, that was true 50 years ago. The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source material (book, novel, historical event, political concept, whatever). I'm
- whalesalad 2y agoI don't think Microsoft has created a single novel or useful thing in the last 30 years, with the exception of vscode.
- grepfru_it 2y agoWindows 2000 was pretty revolutionary
- narrator 2y agoAs an oldtimer, when Redhat 9 came out at the same time as Windows 2000, Windows 2000 was ridiculously far ahead. Many engineers switched back to Linux from Windows for a while.
- whalesalad 2y ago25 years*
- rzzzt 2y agoNT4 then?
- bluedino 2y agoIt was a security nightmare, but it was so close to what we're still using today it's not even funny.
- grepfru_it 2y agoI was around for the development, launch, and replacement of windows 2000. It was absolutely not a security nightmare when it came out and completely revolutionized desktop security (though not enough and was further enhanced through today)
- mananaysiempre 2y agoCompared to 9x? Sure, but it’s not like it was born in a vacuum. Compared to NT 4? Not really, I think. There were significant new things (MMC, Windows Installer, a first-party USB stack). I think there was a grand total of one headline new feature for developers (COM+, a continuation of MTS, a non-partition-tolerant distributed transactions thing). It’s not nothing, surely, but I don’t really see anything that deserves being called “revolutionary”.
- lewisjoe 2y agoMicrosoft really has to pull itself together in terms of product branding. Microsoft 365 itself was a terrible name for an office suite, but adding a "copilot" at the end is hitting too low a bar. Not sure how it even got an approval in the first place.
- mrweasel 2y agoMy guess is that the plan will be Office -> Office 365 -> Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot -> Microsoft Copilot.
- pylua 2y agoWhy was it Microsoft 365 in the first place? Does it not work on leap days ?
- mrweasel 2y agoGood question, 360 would have been better, full circle coverage of all your (office) productivity needs.
- jay_kyburz 2y agoThen the next version would have been Microsoft One.
- oneplane 2y agoIt's even dumber than it seems at first glance; what people do has changed to the degree where besides a niche market segment of users with deep product knowledge and usage, most activities and work happens in much simpler shapes than a productivity suite is a good fit for. It's primarily tasks using surface level functionality. This essentially (along with subscriptions and bundling) makes the fit just worse, which in turn makes the value proposition even worse. The global idea of having something that does what a publisher's desk needs but "on the computer" became irrelevant over 10 years ago, and at the same time, the work that remained moved to where specialised work has always been: in specialised tools. The space between emulating the physical world and processes that are mostly digital but somehow still have to relate to the physical world is pretty much self-eliminating. I suppose the only thing that remains is a spreadsheet, because it is a tool that has no direct analog. But even there you end up with people using it to manage lists (which you can do with practically anything else) or doing actual spreadsheet work. That split is not really apparent with the other many products in the Copilot suite as the processes it used to be used for are themselves shrinking. For example: we're not writing a larger number of internal memos in Word, we're not creating more brochures in Publisher, and we're not printing letters all day long. Our meetings aren't better because we have outlook, planner, project and onenote. Even if all of those products had 1000 AIs built in, that wouldn't change. Sprinkling AI around to try and manufacture relevant improvements or relevance for the processes that used to be the primary way to spend a working day only hurts the product.
- markdeloura 2y agoWhen CoPilot showed up in my Word, I was writing a pitch doc that asked me to also describe whether I was using GenAI for anything for this pitch. It made me realize I didn’t know whether this doc was getting auto-pushed to CoPilot and would be used for training in some way. Dislike.
- malnourish 2y agofyi, it's "Copilot" Microsoft is evidentially bad at all forms of naming -- I have it on good authority that even (some) of their sales people think so (and will discretely admit to it).
- BobbyTables2 2y agoWorse than CoPilot is the new Notepad. Can close the program without saving the file, open it again and it is still there! WTF?
- morsch 2y agoThe default editor in Ubuntu, presumably just the default gnome text editor, is the same. I struggled to get rid of a scratchpad of notes once. Really weird and unexpected and I'm sure it gets people in trouble occasionally.
- Lev1a 2y agoThat's why my go-to way of closing that editor has become Ctrl+W+Q (add more W if more than one tab is open in the editor).
- optionalsquid 2y agoSublime Text and VS Code both do the same thing. I can imagine that it takes a bit to get used to, assuming that you'd even want to, but I've found it to be very handy: At this point in time 6 unsaved text documents open in Sublime Text, covering a variety of subjects that I haven't quite finished working on, or that I just want to remember for later
- beowulfey 2y agoIMO, that is encouraging a very bad habit.
- optionalsquid 2y agoHow so? None of this would more than mildly inconvenience me if it were lost. Important notes/files are of course saved in appropriate locations, but a lot things aren't that important
- beowulfey 2y ago
- donohoe 2y agoThis is why, short of real financial hardship, I will never work again at a company where I need to rely on Microsoft products. Have to use Windows as an OS? No thanks. Microsoft Teams as core employee platform? Nope. I get it’s not a choice for many.
- mystifyingpoi 2y agoI was pleasantly surprised how well WSL works under Windows 10. Unfortunately, it is also considered a security threat, because corporations don't like users having effective root on their machines.
- dijit 2y agoIf you find a place, hit me up. Very tired of the popular “productivity” suites, I moved my entire company to Googles last year (which was as painful as you can imagine) and now they’re springing Gemini on us, which is less terrible, but we’ll be paying for the pleasure.
- ycgl20020202 2y ago[dead]
- eXpl0it3r 2y agoFor those just skimming the article and who haven't heard, as an existing subscriber to Microsoft 365, you can switch to the Classic variant without AI and without the price increase, by clicking on "Cancel subscription" on your account page and selecting Classic. ...at least for now...
- roskelld 2y agoBased on the fact of them using a dark pattern to hide a subscription tier, and effectively hiding the one that they're claiming to no longer exist hence the price increase would have me cancel out of principle.
- mjburgess 2y agoUpvoted because it's an actually helpful comment -- I've just downgraded mine to classic. I dont need to pay for several AI subscriptions -- they all do the same thing.
- Marsymars 2y agoThis doesn't even work well. It was still listing the old price for my renewal on Feb 1, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't billed more, so I clicked on "Cancel subscription", and didn't see any option for Classic, so I clicked the "I don't want my subscription" button, figuring that the option was behind that... and it cancelled my entire subscription. Resubscribing then only gave me the option to subscribe at the new +30% price rate. Had to spend two hours with MS support to get them to cancel my subscription again and actually get me onto the Classic plan. I lost two weeks of my plan that I'd previously paid for, without recompense, and they warned that the Classic plan was a one-time transition thing, so by that measure I'm also out an entire year of the Classic plan compared to if I'd renewed at the old rate on Feb 1, 2025, and then switched to my year of Classic for my Feb 1, 2026 renewal. Also kicked my entire family of their shared plans so had to re-invite and subscribe them all. I don't even care about the Office apps, all I really care about is OneDrive, but there aren't any great alternatives for that... e.g. Dropbox Family is nearly double the price of 365 Family.
- rsolva 2y agoA lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
- the_snooze 2y ago>A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation. I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.
- teddyh 2y ago> I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. How long ago was this?
- the_snooze 2y agoThis was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago. It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the document.
- blibble 2y ago30 years of their home name Office brand, known by pretty much every person that's ever had a computer let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator the main brand instead certainly a courageous decision
- mrweasel 2y agoThat was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription service. My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't. 30 years of owning the term "Office", having almost every single person who ever touched a computer know that Office is the Microsoft office productivity suite, then deciding that a sort of working, but yet to be 100% defined LLM is more important. The fact that no one stopped this or that shareholders aren't pissed tells you something about how absolutely broken modern computing is.
- xigoi 2y agoWhy would shareholders have a problem with it? People with big money currently value AI bullshit more than recognizable branding.
- mrweasel 2y agoBecause Microsoft just pissed away their biggest brand after Windows and maybe Microsoft. Brand recognition holds value, a lot of value. Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max, arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because pretty much everyone who needs it already have their subscription.
- TheRealSteel 2y agoYep. They obviously learned nothing from killing Xbox overnight. As an IT person I can guarantee this rebranding is going to cause confusion that will waste my time. That being said, Coke killed Coke Zero and seems to be doing okay I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Neywiny 2y agoAn interesting note on the making a PowerPoint out of a folder of pictures. That isn't a task. It's a few non-obvious button clicks but it'll just make each slide a picture. Used to use it for my grandfather's travels. Just in case anyone thought they needed a LAM or whatever for that.
- Toutouxc 2y agoI understand people who love Apple (or the OSS world) unconditionally and I understand people who hate either, but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft. Feels like there isn’t a single product person left in the company, no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 2y agoIt seems like you get a promo for changing names of things. The more convoluted, the higher you get.
- nitwit005 2y agoIt's probably easier to get ahead by saying you launched a "new product", than "Office release 974".
- Sharlin 2y agoI wonder if it's partly about the well-known phenomenon where new product people come in or are promoted and feel they have to assert their dominance by making a change just for the sake of making a change.
- hedora 2y agoIt switched from being a software company to a cloud provider about 10 years ago. Things like Azure, LinkedIn and GitHub are where the focus is, since they have recurring revenue and also help them build their surveillance apparatus. Windows and Office are legacy monopoly products, so all you’re going to see from those divisions are price hikes and more mandatory surveillance. Edit: VS Code is an interesting play. It’s “free” because of the telemetry stream and built-in aggressive bundling of GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, etc.
- Yeul 2y agoWell there is only so much you can do with Word and Outlook. Let's be real the difference between Office 2024 and Office 2019 are largely cosmetic. That stuff stopped being exciting a long time ago.
- infecto 2y agoIt is an interesting data point that two large companies (MSFT and AAPL) have both failed to properly implement AI tooling within their ecosystem. In MSFT case it is such a terrible experience as a end user, especially in MacOS. I don't even think its an issue with the LLM themself or the engineering talent but a complete lack of talent at the product level. I have never used the capabilities they have built (they are bad implementations) and on top of that the UI is so in your face that it is pathetic. In MacOS Outlook they have a quarter inch sized bar in the main UI with just a button to summarize. It is so bad.
- dartharva 2y ago> Microsoft is halfway through its 2026 fiscal year. It's almost like someone was given instructions at the end of the calendar year to bump up that revenue line for the Office Consumer division. It's always this surprisingly mundane decision behind every fuckup. Just pump up numbers this quarter, the evident crash in user confidence and subsequent revenues is the next sucker's problem.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoIs it worse than apple intelligence butchering news summaries though?
- n144q 2y agoIt is. I have colleagues who used Copilot for generating slides in PowerPoint. Copilot created slides that are completely unrelated to the prompt. Apple Intelligence is horrible and hallucinates a ton, but at least it spits out nonsense on the same topic.
- layer8 2y agoIt's a wash.
- Spooky23 2y agoMuch. I love the Apple summaries. Even the wrong ones provide context.
- TheRealSteel 2y agoMessage from Spooky23: says they like eating apples
- Spooky23 2y agoLOL.
- Neil44 2y agoComing next week, another 8 versions of Teams, all called Teams but with subtly different icons and you can only sign into one of them with your license tier
- einpoklum 2y agoThis is an excellent opportunity to tell our friends and family: It's time to consider switching to --==[[ LIBRE OFFICE! ]]==-- because: 1. It's a very good office suite that isn't subject to "fashionable remakes" and other Microsoft shenanigans. 2. over 100 million people use it - mostly on Windows and many on Linux and Mac. 3. No AI! And it certainly doesn't keep track of what you do, and it doesn't call home to tell anyone about you or share a copy of your private documents. 4. No logging into anything or managing licenses. 5. You can download and use it for free: www.libreoffice.org (and it's on Chocolatey and WinGet too I think, if you're in Windows-land) . But of course it helps a lot when people also donate. 7. It has good community support; and there are also options for paid support, training, transition and deployment if you're in a business or organization. 8. There are also written guides in several languages for those who like that format, and there are some video tutorials etc. and finally: 9. It is managed by a democratically-run public foundation with members from across the world. There are no large companies or governments pulling the strings or calling the shots.
- PebblesHD 2y agoIt does suffer slightly from looking like it was developed in the 90s. The UI kit it uses by default looks very out of place on most modern platforms and despite their being other UIs available, most end users will look at the default and choose something else, likely office. They need to invest some time in modernising the human interface parts of the suite.
- einpoklum 2y agoWhich Desktop environment are you looking at? The "UI kit" is different on different platforms (the idea is to use native widgets) If you mean the fact that it's not ribbony, with a lot of unused empty space between widgets and with mobile-phone-like aesthetic - the rejection of that style is intentional. Microsoft went that way, and hurt usability; LibreOffice has not. Although some argue emphatically that it's the way to go in order to attract new users. For those who like a more ribbon'y UI style - it's available as an option. On the menu, choose "View > User Interface..." TBH, that's not fully-developed and I don't like it much. One other aspect of modernization is that there is a dark mode, which has improved a lot over the past couple of years: https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-dark-mode/ https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-dark-mode/ but if you have specific suggestions/rants - UI/UX discussions are always ongoing, albeit slowly given the immense size of the project and the amount of dialogs and UI/UX aspects to be considered and improved. Try the "LibreOffice Design" channel on Telegram for example.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- oezi 2y agoI subscribed for a trial month because I had a lengthy word document which was bilingual in a side by side table. I wanted it to fill maybe 20 trivial items which needed to be put in several obvious places. Oh boy! It couldn't do anything except append to the end of the document. It couldn't create tables! It couldn't search and replace! It couldn't maintain formatting. What a failure!
- timthelion 2y agoThe interesting thing is that they do not own copilot.com
- meetingthrower 2y agoI mean, the ONE thing I want is when I am writing an email to coordinate a meeting and it says "how about tomorrow at 1:00" in the email body, that I can reply with a meeting and the time is set for tomorrow at 1:00 automatically? Surely we can do this MSFT???? The most basic AI help please, thank you.
- safgasCVS 2y agoCancelled immediately after getting the email. I bought a pair of Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for £20 each for myself and my wife within the hour
- alok-g 2y ago>> Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for £20 Is this key authentic? Which reseller is this?
- layer8 2y agoThese are from volume licenses. Not really legal but it mostly works in practice. In some cases the buyer gets unlucky and the volume key gets revoked due to too many activations, but either the seller will give you a replacement key, or it's just another few bucks for a new key.
- albert_e 2y agoWhat is a good way to check to ensure we are not being handed a key that will get revoked Even in our markets, we have office licenses available on Amazon for all prices ...the cheapest ones looking very suspect but not so sure about the ones that cost a decent amount.
- safgasCVS 2y agoWay beyond my skills to say. I just use a reseller who’s been around for years and has decent trust pilot reviews. I wouldn’t use Amazon though!
- safgasCVS 2y agoCJS CD Keys. I used them before years ago for Visio 2019 and windows 10 pro. Both still purring away nicely
- ycgl20020202 2y ago[dead]
- 2y ago
- noAnswer 2y agoTo avoid 365 Copilot you have to downgrade to "Classic": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVPThx7yss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVPThx7yss
- xoxxala 2y agoI currently have a 365 Family plan, but have never used any of the family features. Wanted to downgrade to a 365 Personal Classic plan, but that option is not available. Spent an hour waiting for Microsoft Support to help. Nice gentleman on the other side of the chat window directed me to Business Sales and closed the chat. So I just cancelled outright.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoThanks, just did this. Hecking fraudsters @ M$
- dang 2y agoRecent and related: Microsoft just renamed Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows for everyone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726 - Jan 2025 (47 comments) You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42640180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42640180 - Jan 2025 (250 comments)
- zb3 2y agoThis is fantastic news for LibreOffice ;)
- righthand 2y agoJust make the full move to Linux already. The water’s fine.
- hcurtiss 2y agoThe crazy part to me is that, with a family subscription, the new AI privileges are only available to the primary account holder and not the rest of my family. That’s nuts. > For Microsoft 365 Family subscribers, Copilot will be available to the subscription owner and cannot be shared with others. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/01/16/copilot-is-now-included-in-microsoft-365-personal-and-family/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/01/1...
- Smar 2y agoMaybe they are at least trying to avoid collecting data of underage people...
- cma 2y agoThere's an easier way, don't collect and train on the data for them.
- hcurtiss 2y agoLike my wife in her forties?
- Dalewyn 2y agoFor the downvoters, parent commenter has a valid point because COPPA[1] exists and it applies to online services like Copilot. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
- vel0city 2y agoYeah but then at least allow one to manually enable things later if they so choose, but I guess the cost aspect of the AI goes too close to negative even after the second user.
- arvinsim 2y agoFor some people, having no AI is a feature.
- 2y ago
- liendolucas 2y agoIs there a single big company out there that sanely has not decided to ride this "AI" wave? People being pushed stupid features that no one has ever needed nor asked for? It's Clippy's revenge and you can't get rid of it this time? Microsoft really deserves ton of prizes for ruining so many products.
- riffraff 2y agoamazon? I mean they have some data center stuff, but amazon-the-website does not seem infected with artificial idiocy yet.
- RavlaAlvar 2y agoWhat are you talking about, they added a chat bot on amazon.com
- riffraff 2y agoI believe it must be US-only then, I don't see it in my european amazon.
- ok123456 2y agoAmazon has its own AI, "rufas," plastered on the site.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoAnd for a while it would helpfully generate python code for you!
- TheRealSteel 2y agoProduct pages on Amazon now have AI review summaries. I like it in theory, but the cynical part of me is suspicious they're somehow using it to skew things positive.
- righthand 2y ago
- manosyja 2y agoEverything at home is OSS, I switched to OSS everywhere in 2000. I love reading these news, gives me a chuckle. At work, everything is Microsoft, Copilot 365 and everything. Gives me a headache using it. And a chuckle seeing IT struggle with disgruntled users…
- yoyohello13 2y agoSame! It blows my mind how much our company spends on this shit. And how oblivious our IT department is to anything non-Windows.
- daft_pink 2y agoThey should have made it something we wanted. Crazy thing is a year ago I wanted to pay for it but I had to have a business plan and pay annual instead of monthly. They really missed an opportunity there because I would have paid.
- rationalfaith 2y ago[dead]
- jomoho 2y agoAren't all Microsoft launches disasters?
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y agoAt least the one where they tried to demo some voice recognition and it went pear-shaped, must have been some twenty years ago. PS: 2006 https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/29/1258212/vista-speech-recognition-goes-awry https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/29/1258212/vista-speech-rec...
- 65 2y agoDoes this allow Micro$oft to train their AIs on your word documents?
- grugagag 2y agoAi is new and this justified them to move fast and break things, including user privacy. The amount of money they target to make minus the slap on the wrist will still be a monumental profit. Then they'll try to clean up house and play PR theater.
- concerndc1tizen 2y agoHas anyone considered that Copilot doesn't need to be good, it just needs to justify collecting your data?
- grugagag 2y agoYeah, add some fine print and to hell with the end-users!
- king_magic 2y agono one wants or need copilot.
- nipperkinfeet 2y agoDear Microsoft, if you try to force it on me, I am not going to use it. In fact, I will ignore it altogether. The same goes for any of the features in Windows that are turned on without my permission.
- DavidPiper 2y agoI have not used Office for years, but I still can't imagine using anything else to write a document if I ever need to. Serious question: what is the last version of Office (or Office for Mac) that I can purchase that doesn't include AI features? Are there 202x versions still available that will never be updated with AI features? It might be the last piece of Microsoft software I purchase for a good decade.
- muststopmyths 2y agoMicrosoft still sells boxed versions. Pretty sure those don't have any online connectivity requirements.
- xeonmc 2y agoAs I mentioned in another comment, don't buy, just use Microsoft Activation Script, then you can choose whichever AI-free version you prefer.
- portaouflop 2y agoThe shocking thing about this article is that people still give Microsoft money for software
- ctm92 2y agoMicrosoft making questionable decisions lately, the official RDP client on Mac was renamed to "Windows App" some weeks ago. It's hard to come up with a worse name, Windows App is what I name any software product that runs natively on Windows. RIP all the helpdesk employees who have to explain this to end users
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago> all the helpdesk employees They should just tell people to use Google's Chrome remote desktop.
- mrbungie 2y agoI'm not sure if it has to do with the UI redesign and renaming, but I don't feel the new app is as reliable as before. My RDP connections now fail all the time.
- ctm92 2y agoFor me, the connection always fails the first time and after retrying it works.
- flkiwi 2y agoI just downgraded my O365 subscription to remove Copilot. I went to (web version) my account settings, subscriptions, manage, and canceled my sub, which then gave me the option to select a Classic edition without Outlook. It's the same price, which is hilariously stupid, but maybe the worst part is that it doesn't deactivate Copilot until the next billing cycle. So, whether you can't use Copilot for security and privacy reasons or you recognize that it is one of the most cataclysmic software failures in human history--I'm serious, compared to other "AI" platforms, its utility is nonexistent, and that's without addressing other issues with "AI" as a category--you're stuck with it until the next billing cycle. What an absurd mess.
- lm28469 2y ago> it is one of the most cataclysmic software failures in human history idk ariane 5 crashed because of an int overflow
- flyingzucchini 2y agoCancelled my subscription immediately - went back to my lifetime 2021 edition. Haven’t noticed anything different.
- nunez 2y agoIt's time to reinstall Office 2010, the last known good 64-bit version of Office.
- vel0city 2y agoAnd yet you'll have a ton of people tell you everything since 2007 has just been terrible and completely unusable and unfit for purpose. Others will tell you Office 2003 was massively bloated and used way more RAM than necessary and had way too slow startup times.
- ulfw 2y agoI don't even know what Copilot is anymore. Typical Microsoft bullshit. It started off as an MS copy of ChatGPT which was really good, especially as ChatGPT bans Hong Kong because China boo boo bad and all that dumb shit. But now suddenly it's an AI version of Siri, giving short responses to questions. Why? I stopped bothering with it
- nunez 2y agoGoogle also did something like this to people with Business Standard Workspace licenses (i.e. the ones who signed up for Google for Domains and got bamboozled into an enterprise offering that limited Google functionality quite noticeably...but that's a topic for another post). Two weeks ago, we were notified that our accounts had licenses Gemini for Enterprise enabled by default, at no extra cost. With that change came an absolute walloping of AI nudges in Gmail, Calendar and Drive apps. The only way to turn it off was to contact support so they could enable two hidden checkboxes in the Admin panel that turn off Gemini for good. Note that any users in a Google Workspace tenant can still enable Gemini outside of the org somehow. Upgrading to Enterprise licenses _might_ prevent this "feature." I hate this timeline in tech.
- iamleppert 2y agoI tried using Copilot that is embedded into Azure. It couldn’t tell me the right instructions to complete something trivial like exporting a database. Instead, it sent me to an out of date documentation complete with old screenshots. When I asked for the up to date documentation, it refused. Then I asked “Why are all Microsoft products so crap?” and it told me I had violated the content policy and disappeared. A day later it came back (the chat window embedded into Azure) but now every request generates an error. I ended up using a combination of other AI, Google and blogs to find what I needed. Even with all the power of AI and all the money they’ve spent on it, Microsoft is still a joke. I wish I didn’t have to use it but it’s going to take time to get off Azure.
- ramchip 2y agoHave you tried drinking a verification can?
- nycdatasci 2y agoMicrosoft still hasn’t figured out desktop search. Of course o365 Copilot is a disaster.
- notTooFarGone 2y agoAmen
- rswail 2y agoThere are a bunch of education users that are really pissed off because they don't want kids learning to read and write to be "assisted" by badly implemented AI "features". But there's (AFAIK) no GPO to turn Copilot off in the apps.
- rswail 2y agoI'm in Australia and didn't get the automatic option to "downgrade" to what I already had. I got on the online chat and they were able to do it. Took an hour of them faffing around to get it to happen.
- aragilar 2y agoReport it to the ACCC as well, the more complaints they get the more likely they'll take up the issue.
- rswail 2y agoHow has MS broken any of Australia's competition laws/regulations here? They put up the price on their product and (theoretically) "added value" to justify it. They didn't/don't have to offer "Classic" but they do. They make you jump through hoops to get it. That's not stuff that ACCC will do something about.
- idk1 2y agoFeels like madness to get rid of the Office brand, such a strong name and brand, like Twitter or iPhone. Office must be worth billions in brand recognition. Ingoring everything else, that alone feels like a mistake.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoYou don't need brand recognition when you have market capture. Microsoft can murder a small puppy every time you buy Office and send you a photo, and you will still pay them because what else will you do.
- idk1 2y agoSee how good the brand is, you called it Office :) that doesn't exist any more.
- ribadeo 2y agoHow do they still have money? Their primo offerings can be readily substituted with FOSS since decades, and at this point the libreoffice experience is better.
- einpoklum 2y agoId' say it's a combination of: 1. The effect of being the closest-to-reach solution on MS Windows. 2. Organizational inertia. 3. MS Office' use of OOXML is convoluted and difficult to replicate/reverse engineer, making it difficult to perfectly export to and import from it. 4. Fear, uncertainty and doubt about ditching MS Office. Nobody ever got fired for paying for Microsoft Office. 5. MS marketing
- noufalibrahim 2y agoThe author touched on the multiple accounts problem in the article. I don't use MS products but some of my clients do and when I get an account on their system, it's always been a hassle to set things up. It remembers old accounts which i can't delete, Random error 500s, Teams doesn't work in the browser, and several paper cuts which has made me dread the idea of logging in into any MS account.
- theanonymousone 2y agoOn an alternative opinion maybe, Microsoft seems to have survived so many such "disasters", that one start to question maybe they are not as disastrous as they are portrayed to be?
- psychoslave 2y agoPutting Microsoft completely apart, what make you think that there is strong correlation between survival span and the amount of disaster that some human organization can engender?
- fx1994 2y agoNo one asked for AI integration anywhere. But still we are fed with that shit.
- faragon 2y agoThe AI assistant for Office 365 is confusing, e.g., the "light bulb" feature in meetings/calendars adds random OneDrive references. This can be dangerous, as it might be mistaken for attached documents, leading to misunderstandings between the people in the meeting. Such features should be OFF by default and enabled selectively, allowing users granular control over their impact.
- gloosx 2y agoDay 1357 watching Microsoft not give a fuck about their customers, thankfully I was not brainwashed into being their product from the childhood.
- roboyoshi 2y agoSo you are using Google or what? I feel like in Enterprise Environments you don't have much choice between bad and worse.
- gloosx 2y agoI can't really fully understand what "Microsoft 365" stands for. Microsoft years in day? Microsoft all year? hard to understand. Sounds like some kind of new super-term for their Office products. In that case, LibreOffice works absolutely fine inside my company. Element works alright for secure e2ee messaging. For storage and document collaboration we are using a self-hosted Nextcloud cluster. All of these solutions are free and have no upfront fee, but they have some maintenance costs of course, yet I think they are magnitudes lower that M$ could scam us for. The AI tooling you can definitely integrate in the workflow yourself if you need them (we don't). As non-us company inside security field, we have little trust towards microsoft to store the sensitive data on their cloud services, and generally the amount of measures taken against corporate espionage is higher – communications are taken through verified and trusted e2ee mediums, and it's common to host enterprise infrastructure on-premises – it's totally realistic to have your company data and communications never leave your virtual private network, and it's a good practice to do so in my opinion.
- parkersweb 2y ago… except that Google took this as permission to make their previously optional AI bolt-on mandatory and hiked the price for every user in exactly the same way. Complaining to their support was an utterly miserable fruitless exercise that has me wondering what alternatives there are to this madness for SMEs…
- RegW 2y agoCurrently next to the send button in one of my Teams chats are the suggested responses: "I look forward to it", "Haha, no problem" and "Haha, I know". I assume some sort of AI is involved, but I not sure who would ever want to say such things, and my great fear is that one day my motor skills will let me down and I click one of these inane buttons. I've sent the suggestion (many times) that they put in an option to let me turn this off, but they obviously haven't got around to this one yet. So I don't think that we can expect the opt-out options suggested by the article any time soon.
- saratogacx 2y agoIf you're talking about the mobile app I turned those off as soon as they showed up in the settings (click on your profile picture) under [messaging -> show predictions].
- RegW 2y agoAh! There is a deity. Mobile app? You must be joking - work occupies too much time as it is! But yes, you are correct it is now there under Setting -> General -> Suggested replies -> Off.
- csomar 2y agoWhat really cracked me is this: https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/d54d9bed01a08fc8e71b25e7f084b77265160db5/2025/01/24/5e5f13a6-ef9c-43da-963f-e68ca09c9af0/microsoft-copilot-dows-math.jpg?auto=webp&width=1280 https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/d54d9bed01a08fc8e71b25e7f... The AI asking what you are going to do with that extra revenue xD
- nashashmi 2y agoGood point: I still cannot use CoPilot. I frequently try to figure out if MS365 Business accounts in the US have copilot yet. I used it for my family account and dont see any availability to use Copilot in that software either. So far this launch has not worked out right.
- nottorp 2y agoMeanwhile, I got a spam popup about Gemini when logging into a google workspace. I found the button to activate it in the workspace chat and it told me "Gemini in chat is not available". Deployment looks as great as Microsoft's so far?
- Thorrez 2y ago>Microsoft is halfway through its 2026 fiscal year. It's almost like someone was given instructions at the end of the calendar year to bump up that revenue line for the Office Consumer division. 2026?
- jetrink 2y agoWhen Microsoft decided to advance straight to Windows 10 from 8, it also necessitated skipping the 2015 fiscal year. They have been stuck a year in the future ever since.
- Suppafly 2y agoPushing undesirable features and products on users like that always ends badly. Pushing AI onto users that use those products for legally protected data is a supremely bad idea. I'll be surprised if they don't get sued.
- mrandish 2y agoOnce again, a huge tech company trying to make its users want a feature they don't need because management decided it's the buzzword 'strategic priority' they need to sell.
- grazing_fields 2y agoClippy's reincarnation seems a bit... extreme.
- michaelcampbell 2y agoThis feels to me like what's happening in the movie (and video games) industries; the producers/makers of the thing are making things that THEY want, not what the customers want to buy.