9 ms·
Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions. There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-
by kemotep 8mo ago
Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.
There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.
There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.
There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.
There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?
Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.
It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.
It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.
And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?
- pixl97 8mo ago>Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions Microsoft cannot and will not ever get better at naming things. It is said the universe will split open and and eldritch beast will consume the stars the day Microsoft stops using inconsistent and overlapping names for different and conflicting products. Isn't that right .Net/dotnet
- i80and 8mo agoI remember when everything was "Sign in with .NET Passport" as a yoot and just being like "what the hell are you talking about"
- twisteriffic 8mo agoCries in dapper dapr
- anal_reactor 8mo agoI'm "I don't know what Xbox is" years old.
- neogodless 8mo agoIt's a music app. I thought that much was obvious.
- Tempest1981 8mo agoCan I pair it with my Zune?
- throw20251220 8mo agoyes, directly through the Windows Phone using a Silverlight 1.0-enabled appliance
- akiselev 8mo agoI think it’s an Adobe Flex app now.
- estimator7292 8mo agoSeeing the name Silverlight in the wild did untold psychic damage. Excuse me while I crumble to dust.
- neogodless 8mo agoPretty sure you can just ask Cortana to pair Xbox Music with your Zune.
- anonymars 8mo agoDo you mean Xbox One? Or Xbox One X? Or Xbox Series X? Or maybe Xbox Series S? Seriously, how?
- lazzurs 8mo ago
- Paradigma11 8mo agoMy peak experience so far was trying to search if there was an extension of dotnet interactive for visual studio or only for visual studio code.
- simplyinfinity 8mo agothe interactive console is built into Visual Studio, no extension needed
- Paradigma11 8mo agohttps://github.com/dotnet/interactive https://github.com/dotnet/interactive
- ksec 8mo agoExactly. In the 50 years history of Microsoft, Office ( Year ) was perhaps the best they did. Nadella might have fixed a few things, but Microsoft still have massive room for improvement in many areas.
- adventured 8mo agoNadella has the golden ship taking on water right now. He has entirely botched AI top to bottom. He has screwed that up to such a degree that it would be difficult to overstate. If he doesn't correct these mistakes extremely soon, he'll unravel much of the progress he made for Microsoft and they'll miss this generation of advancement (which will be the end of their $3 trillion market cap - as the market has recently perked up to). There is no tech giant that is more vulnerable than Microsoft is at this moment. Most document originations will begin out of or adjacent to of LLM sessions in the near future, as everything will blur in terms of collaborating with AI agents. Microsoft has no footing (or worse, their position is terrible courtesy of copilot) and is vulnerable to death by inflection point. Windows 11 is garbage and Google + Linux may finally be coming for their desktop (no different than what AMD has managed in unwinding the former Intel monopoly in PCs). Someone should be charging at them with a new take on Office, right now. This is where you slice them in half. Take down Office and take down Windows. They're so stupid at present that they've opened the gates to Office being destroyed, which has been their moat for 30 years.
- rayiner 8mo agoDid they put the Teams people in charge of AI?
- wing-_-nuts 8mo agoI am no big fan of MS, and especially not a fan of W11, but you're operating under the false assumption that their users are still their most important customers. MS's bottom line doesn't depend on how happy users are with W11, especially not power users like ourselves. W11 is just a means of selling subscriptions (office, ai, etc). The question isn't 'are users happy' it's 'will OEMs and business continue to push it?'. The answer to that is almost certainly yes. OEMs aren't going to be selling most pcs with ubuntu included any time soon. Businesses are not going to support libreoffice when MS office is the established standard. Maybe apple could make inroads here, but they don't seem willing to give up their profit margins on overpriced hardware, and I don't think I've ever seen them release anything 'office' related that was anywhere near feature parity with MSO, and especially not cross platform.
- DrTung 8mo agoI've heard the next version will be called "Visual Active NET Copilot".
- HPsquared 8mo ago"Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging" (2006) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
- imglorp 8mo agoNineteen years ago. Nothing has changed.
- christophilus 8mo agoI’d forgotten all about this gem. I think it was made by some Microsoft employees, too, which makes it even funnier to me.
- butlike 8mo agoThat was deeply funny. I can almost smell the inside of CompUSA watching that.
- anonymars 8mo agoMany will never know the joy of trying to search for it back in the days when punctuation was ignored (C# says hello too) Related: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-servers-identity-crisis/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-servers-iden...
- estimator7292 8mo agoTry going on LinkedIn and searching for C# and .net jobs. Completely impossible. The search is bad to begin with, but it explicitly ignores anything that isn't a-9.
- anonymars 8mo agoHa, I stand corrected. Maybe Microsoft could reach out to the owners of LinkedIn to convince them to improve it. Oh, wait...
- stackghost 8mo ago>LinkedIn You mean Microsoft Career Copilot 365?
- vlowther 8mo agoMicrosoft Active Career Copilot 365 ONE, thankyouverymuch.
- josephg 8mo agoGrow your .NET-work!
- anonymars 8mo agoShh, they'll hear you!
- semi-extrinsic 8mo agoNo, I think that's Microsoft Viva Career.
- nobodyandproud 8mo agoSomewhere and in some universe there was a Microsoft that did so, wreaking havoc across the multiverse.
- pradeeproark 8mo agoAre we talking about .NET standard?
- jslaby 8mo agoNo, we're talking about copilot core, not copilot framework
- timr 8mo ago> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool. No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI. I understand your point about naming, but it's always helpful to know what the products do.
- jacquesm 8mo agoGPs point is that it is confusing, I guess point well made?
- timr 8mo agoOnly if the naming confusion kept them from actually bothering to understand what the product is?
- jacquesm 8mo agoApparently, so yes.
- kemotep 8mo agoThe confusion is when I say “I have a terrible time using Copilot, I don’t recommend using it” and someone chimes in with how great their experience with Github Copilot is, a completely different product and how I must be “holding it wrong” when that is not the same Copilot. That Microsoft has like 5 different products all using Copilot in the name, even people in this very comment section are only saying “Copilot” so it is hard to know what product they are talking about!
- dec0dedab0de 8mo agoYou are describing everything Microsoft has done since at least the late 90s.
- bluedino 8mo agoThings were named fine back then. Small Business Server, Office, Frontpage, Internet Information Server, Visual Studio...
- rvnx 8mo agoIt's like ChatGPT, that goes with "Sora", instead of "Image Generation", which would have been very clear
- kalleboo 8mo agoThat was back when they were going wild naming everything "Active". Active Desktop made sense, Active Directory? What made that "Active". ActiveMovie? It's just a video playing framework... ActiveX?? X?? ActiveSync, I don't want my sync to be active. ActiveStore was apparently a thing?
- whobre 8mo agoNot that I disagree, but this is nothing compared to the ".NET" craze in the early 2000s. Everything had to have ".NET" in its name even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual .NET technology. There was also "Active" before that, but .NET was next level crazy...
- anonymars 8mo agoI don't know, it seems comparable Office.com is now "Welcome to Microsoft 365 Copilot"
- adamrezich 8mo ago> Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now. Is it the context menu key? Or did they do another Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Win+L thing?
- lionkor 8mo agoOh no it's a new key and it's on your keyboard.
- adamrezich 8mo agoApparently it's Win+Shift+F23.
- 1718627440 8mo agoThe issue is less that it is a new key and more that the menu key is missing instead.
- itissid 8mo agoMy colleague works in a functional role for a medium sized SaaS company(1000-5000 employees), working with banks, family offices, hedge funds. They use teams and copilot, they all hate it. One thing that I don't know about is if they have an AI product that can work on combining unstructured and databases to give better insights on any new conversation? e.g. like say the LLM knows how to convert user queries to the domain model of tables and extract information? What companies are doing such things? This would be something that can be deployed on-prem/ their own private cloud that is controlled by the company, because the data is quite sensitive.
- ajcp 8mo agoDatabricks Genie is excellent from my experience, and provides for all your listed requirements.
- 0xbadcafebee 8mo agoThis isn't a Microsoft thing, it's a big dumb corporation thing. Most big corporations are run by dumb executives who are 100% out of touch with the customer (though even if they were in touch, they wouldn't care). Their only consideration is the stock price. If adding new names to things, chanting the magic spell "AI" over and over, and claiming the new name will make them more money can cause the stock price to increase, that's what they'll do. (Making customers happy doesn't make the stock price rise; if it did, we'd all be a lot less depressed and a lot richer)
- Foobar8568 8mo agoIt reminds me of IBM and Watson, most likely the same brain rot at the top.
- rubslopes 8mo ago> It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. It's unbelievable how bad they failed at this. If you do the same with Claude or ChatGPT via simple web interface, they get miles ahead.
- dobin 8mo agoLike Microsoft Defender, which is now Defender Antivirus, or Defender for Endpoint if you have a real license. You will also get Defender for Identity, and maybe Defender for Office 365, which is probably not ASR. And Defender for Cloud, not to be confused with Defender for Cloud Apps.
- hoppp 8mo agoThey are vibing the naming probably
- mikkupikku 8mo ago> so why should anyone pay for Copilot? The execs buying Microsoft products are presumed to be as clueless as the execs naming Microsoft products.
- boredatoms 8mo agoIts long term microsoft culture to be horrific at external naming
- codethief 8mo agoDon't forget Azure Copilot :)
- marssaxman 8mo ago> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions. They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active".
- moomin 8mo agoThere’s got to be solid reasons why they do this and have done so for so damn long. At the very least institutional reasons. At best, actual research that suggests they make more money this way. But as a consumer, I hate it.
- estimator7292 8mo agoMarketing has too much power. They get some hairbrained scheme to goose the numbers and just slam a mandate all the way down the org. Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion.
- phkahler 8mo ago>> Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion. So Microsoft isn't bringing copilot to all these applications? It's just bringing a copilot label to them? So glad I don't use this garbage at home.
- Sharlin 8mo agoYes and no, because "Copilot" isn't any single thing, but can mean whatever they want it to mean in different contexts.
- fluidcruft 8mo ago
- raincole 8mo ago> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions. AI really should be a freaking feature, not the identity of their products. What MS is doing now is like renaming Photoshop to Photoshop Neural Filter.
- beart 8mo agoThat's a great analogy, but could be taken one step further. Because Adobe would also have to rename the rest of their products to come close to what MS is doing. - Adobe Neural Filter Acrobat - Adobe Neural Filter App (previously photoshop) - Adobe Neural Filter Illustrator - Adobe 720 Neural Filter app - etc. By the way, why is app lowercase in "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app"? Is it not part of the trademark but even they couldn't deal with how confusing that was?
- ikr678 8mo ago'app' isnt part of that trademark, but on other products (Windows App) it is. Searching the store or a company portal for one of these rebraned apps returns dozens of hits because 'windows', 'copilot', '365' and 'app' are all common words in most application descriptions.
- rdsubhas 8mo agoSo I guess the same situation as with Google Gemini.
- major505 8mo agoThis is what happens when you let all decision to the marketing team without any supervision. They became full retarded. Marketing need as much supervision as a toddler in a cristal store.
- Oras 8mo agoYou need to see how many times they changed AI related services in Azure. It’s a shit show.
- GaryBluto 8mo ago>There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool. There is also Github Copilot, the subscription, that lets you use Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models.
- basch 8mo agoThey will never get better until naming things is a C-Suite level respected position. I think I could clean up their existing mess if they want help. Jedd outlines my credentials well here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17522649#17522861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17522649#17522861
- JumpCrisscross 8mo agoI’m not a gamer. But it still strikes me as wild that they let go of the Cortana moniker.
- skfiehcusjcn 8mo agoPeople already do pay for it: office 365. It’s just like getting cloud storage with the subscription. OneDrive has been one of the better cloud storage options for consumers. Also, a great use is Microsoft Forms I was surprised with the AI features. At first I just used it to get some qualitative feedback but ended up using copilot to enter questions Claude helped me create and it converted them into the appropriate forms for my surveys! Objectives -> Claude -> Surveys (markdown) -> Copilot -> MS Forms -> Emailed. Insights and analysis can use copilot too. Main thing to remember is the models behind the scenes will change and evolve, Copilot is the branding. In fact, we can expect most companies will use multiple AI solutions/pipelines moving forward.
- rustyhancock 8mo agoYes. Similarly I have Gemini through having 2TB space on Google Photos. I have 2TB with OneDrive too via a Family Office account and I've got no good reason to have the large gapps space. A ChatGPT account and pay for two Claude accounts. Netflix, Disney+, Prime. How did this happen to me? Perhaps I should sign up to one of those companies that will help me close accounts I keep seeing advertised on YouTube?
- racl101 8mo agoHave you seen their Xbox line up?
- jug 8mo agoThe craziest thing was how Microsoft took the super established brand from decades, and renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365. I'm not sure if it's named Microsoft 365 Copilot nowadays, or if that's an optional AI addon? I thought it was renamed once more, but they themselves claim simply "Microsoft 365" (in a few various tiers) sans-Copilot. https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products?tab=1&OCID=cmmruikv4ct https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-micr...
- isk517 8mo ago>>Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information. It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output. Everyone I know who use AI day-to-day is just using Copilot to mostly do things like add a transition animation to a Powerpoint slide or format a word document to look nice. The only problem these LLM products seem to solve is giving normal people a easy way to interact with terrible software processes and GUIs. And better solution to that problem would be for developers to actually observe how the average use interacts with both a computer and their program in particular.
- krzyk 8mo ago> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool. It is a coding everything, autocomplete, ask, edit files and an agent (claude code like).
- p0w3n3d 8mo agoSorry for a question out of topic, but is there still an offline office license available? So you buy it and have it locally?
- hbn 8mo ago> There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool. It's also an LLM chat UI, I don't know if it's because of my work but it lets me select models from all of the major players (GPT, Claude, Gemini) https://github.com/copilot https://github.com/copilot
- NuclearPM 8mo agoXbox one series X They sucks at names.
- NuclearPM 8mo agoAnd I can’t edit this mistake…
- bandrami 8mo agoCan somebody give me a TLDR on what the "copilot button" does? I've never had one of those laptops and have never understood that. Does it just start the AI front-end? Does it power up the NPU?
- sebazzz 8mo agoIt is just a button. Default it starts the Copilot app which is really the Office app that already existed but now with the copilot tab preselected. Also that Copilot runs in the cloud and doesn't use your NPU. The only thing until now I've found using the NPU are the built in blur, auto frame and eye focus modes for the webcam.
- bandrami 8mo agoI got one of those Asus ROG laptops that bragged about having an NPU and I kept trying to figure out how to access it until I realized they just meant the integrated Ryzen GPU (which is also responsible for getting anything rendered by the discrete Nvidia GPU to the actual display). Also its alleged 16G of video memory included a mapped 8G of system RAM. I miss when vendors at least pretended to be honest.
- felixg3 8mo agoThere is also Security Copilot, which I accidentally enabled and got a 3000€ invoice by azure. Thanks, M$!
- solumunus 8mo agoClassic Microsoft.
- sandos 8mo agoGithub copilot is not just autocompletion, its a chat/agent thing in VS Code.
- nunez 8mo agoIt's the same with Gemini for Google Workspace. I asked it to create a slide deck for me, within Slides, based on a block of notes I wrote. It wouldn't do it. The chat assistant at gemini.google.com wouldn't do it either. They told me how to do it step by step though...which I knew how to do already. Useless. I also tried the `AI()` Sheets function to fill a range in based on some other data in the sheet. It doesn't accept other ranges, even if you use the &CELL_REF& notation.
- 9x39 8mo agoFor being supposedly the same models with how close MS and OpenAI supposedly are, it's bizarrely bad. I was trying to just get an Excel function dialed in with some IFs and formatting weirdness. The licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot built into Excel tried several times and failed miserably. One screenshot to ChatGPT (5.1?) and it was one-shot. I'm not even sure it's the same models any more. It feels years behind. Maybe they limit it or cripple it somehow.
- dramm 8mo agoIt's the horrible "IBM Watson" marketing of our time, and I expect will do as badly for Microsoft as Watson did for IBM.