13 ms·

Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

300 points by fortran77 9mo ago

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems-ce235b28?st=V8rLES&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is...

fortran77 9mo ago
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems-ce235b28?st=V8rLES&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is...
Eddy_Viscosity2 9mo ago
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company 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.
- JohnMakin 9mo ago
  If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.
- Etheryte 9mo ago
  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.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft. But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
    - PaulHoule 9mo ago
      It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
      - stock_toaster 9mo ago
        Most people are just highly resistant to change, even change for the better.
        outside1234 9mo ago
        Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.
        olyjohn 9mo ago
        Its really not that bad. I used to use it at work all the time. I did word processing, spreadsheets and presentations all the time with it. Maybe not as powerful as Excel, but I was never really a power user. But then again I never saw any spreadsheets that anybody used that were particularly complex.
        syockit 9mo ago
        We have OnlyOffice as an alternative today. Personally I find the UI quite pleasing. But lately I haven't had any need to use office suite at home so I don't really use it so I have yet to find anything to complain (meanwhile, LibreOffice was horrible, while Office 365 was bearable until you stuff too many things in the equation editor).
        speed_spread 9mo ago
        At this point, LibreOffice is much better than whatever Microsoft now sells as an office suite.
        jamesnorden 9mo ago
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    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 Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
  - PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
    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." 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. As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.
    - Underqualified 9mo ago
      My company recently decided to move away from Power Automate after having trained lots of people on this 'no code' platform and then having to hire expensive consultants to support or flesh out the apps those users had actually written.
  - InterlooperX 9mo ago
    Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone. I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing. 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? 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. 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.
    - lizknope 9mo ago
      MS wants control and they will figure out some way to monetize that control. Whether it is using the data stored in the cloud for AI training or something else. If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.
    - snarfy 9mo ago
      It makes more sense if you replace the person buying with "company" and replace "local user" with "employee".
- hangonhn 9mo ago
  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." 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.
  - dahcryn 9mo ago
    weirdly enough, we asked microsoft to help us build these reports and give us insights into these numbers. The ones in our country were utterly incapable and just send screenshots of powerbi reports from the US team. So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane
- copilot_king 9mo ago
  [dead]
- tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.
  - InfamousRece 9mo ago
    I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is that.
    - bandrami 9mo ago
      No, they were all-in on Blockchain-as-a-service on Azure for a hot minute, and it's still included in their supply chain protection stack (which in fairness is one of the few use cases that makes a lot of sense)
- fsflover 9mo ago
  This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.
- podgorniy 9mo ago
  Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions. Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.
cyrusradfar 9mo ago
The 3.3% paid conversion is not great. 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. People who paid are leaving. That's a churn problem. 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. 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. That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI. This is the Ballmer story all over again. - Massive distribution advantage - Captive enterprise base Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use. Windows Phone had carrier deals too. The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight. This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked: > "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" Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other. Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.
- code_for_monkey 9mo ago
  > Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other. I audibly winced
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    There are in fact almost 30 products with Copilot in the name now. Though they've seem to have cut a few recently like the sales version
- deleted 9mo ago
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- mook 9mo ago
  > unlike anything we've seen before They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…
ryandvm 9mo ago
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...
- add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
  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.
  - estimator7292 9mo ago
    Microsoft has a long and well documented history of resetting user preferences. Multiple 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. Microsoft will forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      Starting when you selected "don't install Windows 10" and it asked you a few times and you kept selecting that and then you woke up one day and your computer was running Windows 10, and blue screened when you logged in
  - hbn 9mo ago
    Microsoft has pinned a Copilot shortcut to my taskbar after an update multiple times. One time they replaced my "show desktop" button in the bottom right with a Copilot button.
    - Zambyte 9mo ago
      That's called malware. Like that's literally malware by any reasonable definition. The fact that it's branded by and distributed by a multi trillion dollar corporation does not make it not malware. Your PC has been compromised, and it would be wise to solve your problem instead of trying to make the best of running malware.
th0ma5 9mo ago
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kotaKat 9mo ago
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off. 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.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  Can't say Win 11 is really that bad. 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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - exceptione 9mo ago
    > which "just doesn't work" Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost anyone can do the following trick successfully: 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. Done.
    - zxcvasd 9mo ago
      >I guess almost anyone can do the following almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course 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? (i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the vast majority of people do not)
Drunkfoowl 9mo ago
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JohnMakin 9mo ago
Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. 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. 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. But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing. 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!" 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 you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable. 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.
  - ifwinterco 9mo ago
    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. I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
- basch 9mo ago
  >it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse. 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. and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.
PaulHoule 9mo ago
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. 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. 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. I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
copilot_king 9mo ago
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zwaps 9mo ago
The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X. Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products. However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail. 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. For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed. People hate it, and for hood reason. It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form. 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 Bah
pjmlp 9mo ago
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. PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI. There certainly other examples that I failed to address. This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
- exceptione 9mo ago
  And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-notch.)
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977 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/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
    - brg 9mo ago
      I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv being the strongest technical organization at MS than its provenance.
      - pjmlp 9mo ago
        Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer experience in Visual Studio. 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. Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality. Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.
_fat_santa 9mo ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
- llama052 9mo ago
  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.
  - mook 9mo ago
    Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.
  - pwarner 9mo ago
    And Teams
- basch 9mo ago
  The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted. Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/ https://designer.microsoft.com/ If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
  - 9mo ago
AJRF 9mo ago
They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year. 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. I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  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.
  - bitwize 9mo ago
    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.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Luckily you can use "Linux" on Google's products, or Amazon for that matter. /s 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.
- simoncion 9mo ago
  > ...they are down ~12% for the year. 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. Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.
mjr00 9mo ago
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. The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
- bagacrap 9mo ago
  Yeah, my experience is currently pointing towards AI replacing the cheap workers instead of the expensive ones.
1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-s-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems/ar-AA1VBKdf/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence... Text-only, no Javascript: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf/ https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf...
dang 9mo ago
Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.
- eddyg 9mo ago
  If you have Apple News, you can open the article in Safari and then "Share" it to the News app.
- hvb2 9mo ago
  This still works for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565
  - dang 9mo ago
    Ok, let's put that in the toptext. Thanks!
- ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
  For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems ...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    Oh, but it does.
1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
. 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 ".\*"|tr -d '\134'; } > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm No Javascript, no CSS, only two HTML tags: and <a> with href attribute; 1.htm can be viewed in _any_ browser, no matter how old or unpopular, firefox is just one example
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
 Correction: Three tags: 1. , 2. <a> with href attribute and 3. <meta> with charset attribute
nitwit005 9mo ago
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. Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  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"?
  - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
    > Why can't it just be called "internet"? Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.
    - Dylan16807 9mo ago
      They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.
      - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
        The Internet Explorer is not for exploring the internet, but the world wide web, so the name never did make sense.
        jamesnorden 9mo ago
        I guess intranets don't exist.
        direwolf20 9mo ago
        Actually, it views HTML. But if you call it Microsoft HTML Viewer and then wonder why nobody clicks on it.........
shevy-java 9mo ago
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. 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).
- Aperocky 9mo ago
  Putting "AI integrations" on Windows 11 is like layering surstromming on a turd.
- askonomm 9mo ago
  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. 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.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Most gamers rather chose PlayStation, Nintendo and XBox instead of Windows PC.
      - 9mo ago
jjcm 9mo ago
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.
iamleppert 9mo ago
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. 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. 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.
- reddalo 9mo ago
  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.
- throwaheyy 9mo ago
  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.
smithkl42 9mo ago
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.
nl 9mo ago
Copilot is such a typical MS product. It checks all the correct checkboxes on a feature list in comparison to the competition but it just sucks to use. It's like Sharepoint - the deathpit of all collaborative software
- ZeroCool2u 9mo ago
  Microsoft Copilot: The Sharepoint of chatbots I can't imagine a description more likely to give corporate workers the ick.
- kittikitti 9mo ago
  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.
golfer 9mo ago
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.
keeda 9mo ago
Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole: > “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote. 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209 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: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir 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".) 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. 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.
verdverm 9mo ago
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.
- bagacrap 9mo ago
  They own a quarter of openai
  - verdverm 9mo ago
    Right, they had to buy it, not build it
    - bagacrap 9mo ago
      Well yes but it's hardly third party any more.
overgard 9mo ago
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 need, 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.
- JBlue42 9mo ago
  True. Let's not forget that they are rebranding Office 364 as Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- podgorniy 9mo ago
  > Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, AI demand goes though. AI investments numbers good. Numbers up. Not because people choose, because corporations are fomo-ing it and we don't have a choise.
kittikitti 9mo ago
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.
neumann 9mo ago
Which copilot? 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?
petersumskas 9mo ago
AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying. People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity) I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting. 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.
- podgorniy 9mo ago
  > I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting. Confusion and fear are much better for stock prices than clarity
- rossdavidh 9mo ago
  If what they are getting is "not much, plus a side order of hallucination", then connecting the dots is exactly what they DON'T want to do.
jsemrau 9mo ago
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? 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".
- uyzstvqs 9mo ago
  Absolutely. And trying to be invasive by adding Copilot buttons everywhere. It's reminiscent of "free toolbar" adware. Solution: Add MCP to MS applications, then isolate Copilot to its own app.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Make MCP as pervasive as OLE Automation once was
christkv 9mo ago
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?
redbell 9mo ago
> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race. But data shows that it is losing ground with users. 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. At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.
Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
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?
- netsharc 9mo ago
  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. 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"...
  - Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
    I forgot that there are three different, separate, different-looking settings menus for the mouse, which show three layers of legacy OS implementation. Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.
    - netsharc 9mo ago
      My work computer's Win 11 install is originally French, I'm using the English UI. Searching for "Display" in the start menu shows me Display-related settings... in English and French. Looking at it closely, the English results point to settings available via the Control Panel, and the French ones point to settings in the "Settings" app. Picking a French result opens the Settings app, in English. But yeah, Microsoft competency means it's also fine to show some search results in the language which isn't the user's preferred UI language.
- hbn 9mo ago
  I use StartAllBack to replace the Start menu with more or less the Windows 7 one, and it also has features to restore file explorer to the more sensible Windows 7/8 versions.
isoprophlex 9mo ago
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. However. 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. The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit. Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base? I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are. The mind truly boggles.
codebolt 9mo ago
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.
- podgorniy 9mo ago
  They seemingly forgot to ask their "almost-agi-future-of-economics-the-best-thing-ever" to fix the UI...
deafpolygon 9mo ago
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.
haritha-j 9mo ago
I think it comes down to..not every product in the world is improved by AI. but shareholders believe they all should be. So its crammed into all of them, instead of the few that would really benefit. The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.
smcleod 9mo ago
Microsoft's everything is running into problems. Seriously though, it always seems like a dumpster fire over there but the last year is next level with all their Windows 11 problems, Windows update problems, Office365 outages, Copilot issues, Azure outages etc... not to mention the features no one seems to want.
- Ylpertnodi 9mo ago
  Several people are not happy about the association with Bill Gates, too.
chakintosh 9mo ago
I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept asking me for the spreadsheet like it's open in a browser window.
- nashashmi 9mo ago
  I always find myself recalibrating if copilot understands what I am doing. I get mixed results. cannot seem to come up with a consistent rule of thumb.
- thewhitetulip 9mo ago
  I wanted to do something complex in google sheets. We had just gotten Gemini in gsheet. I assumed they'd have used some fancy mcp and enabled us to do a lot of things but all gemini in gsheet could do was summarize
  - Andrex 9mo ago
    It sounds like that's still a step up from Copilot. I know Gemini has more advanced features in Docs and they rolled something out for Sheets. I would bet GWorkspace keeps gaining ground on the functionality battle.
    - thewhitetulip 9mo ago
      Well, copilot is less than useless But the thing is, for gemini to be magic, they need api for each operation, they don't have it! So that's why it can only do sum.
- reval 9mo ago
  I got bitten by this confusing UX. The spreadsheet must be in OneDrive for copilot to use it as context. It’s actually quite useful.
ProfessorZoom 9mo ago
Is anyone surprised? Windows can't even open and close file explorer reliably without lagging or refusing to respond. How could they possibly rival these models?
hansmayer 9mo ago
You know things are running bad when they've lost even the likes of WSJ. And yet Satya and his ilk (across the LLM space) keep pushing it. It does not matter that this technologically on its own can never reach what they kept promising. Is the pride and ego of a couple of CEOs so important that we'll all just watch them bringing the whole market down ?
duxup 9mo ago
In some ways this reminds me of the .NET marketing debacle Microsoft pulled where every product suddenly was ".NET" and nobody could explain what that meant or what it did that was helpful. Similarly Copilot is everywhere, but why I would want it there or use it there is unknown.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

300 points by fortran77 9mo ago

fortran77 9mo ago

Eddy_Viscosity2 9mo ago

> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company 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.

JohnMakin 9mo ago
If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.
Etheryte 9mo ago
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.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft. But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
    - stock_toaster 9mo ago
      Most people are just highly resistant to change, even change for the better.
      - outside1234 9mo ago
        Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.
        olyjohn 9mo ago
        Its really not that bad. I used to use it at work all the time. I did word processing, spreadsheets and presentations all the time with it. Maybe not as powerful as Excel, but I was never really a power user. But then again I never saw any spreadsheets that anybody used that were particularly complex.
        syockit 9mo ago
        We have OnlyOffice as an alternative today. Personally I find the UI quite pleasing. But lately I haven't had any need to use office suite at home so I don't really use it so I have yet to find anything to complain (meanwhile, LibreOffice was horrible, while Office 365 was bearable until you stuff too many things in the equation editor).
        speed_spread 9mo ago
        At this point, LibreOffice is much better than whatever Microsoft now sells as an office suite.
        jamesnorden 9mo ago
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  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 Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
- PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
  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." 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. As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.
  - Underqualified 9mo ago
    My company recently decided to move away from Power Automate after having trained lots of people on this 'no code' platform and then having to hire expensive consultants to support or flesh out the apps those users had actually written.
- InterlooperX 9mo ago
  Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone. I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing. 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? 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. 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.
  - lizknope 9mo ago
    MS wants control and they will figure out some way to monetize that control. Whether it is using the data stored in the cloud for AI training or something else. If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.
  - snarfy 9mo ago
    It makes more sense if you replace the person buying with "company" and replace "local user" with "employee".
hangonhn 9mo ago
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." 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.
- dahcryn 9mo ago
  weirdly enough, we asked microsoft to help us build these reports and give us insights into these numbers. The ones in our country were utterly incapable and just send screenshots of powerbi reports from the US team. So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane
copilot_king 9mo ago
[dead]
tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.
- InfamousRece 9mo ago
  I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is that.
  - bandrami 9mo ago
    No, they were all-in on Blockchain-as-a-service on Azure for a hot minute, and it's still included in their supply chain protection stack (which in fairness is one of the few use cases that makes a lot of sense)
fsflover 9mo ago
This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.
podgorniy 9mo ago
Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions. Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.

cyrusradfar 9mo ago

The 3.3% paid conversion is not great. 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. People who paid are leaving. That's a churn problem. 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. 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. That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI. This is the Ballmer story all over again. - Massive distribution advantage - Captive enterprise base Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use. Windows Phone had carrier deals too. The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight. This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked: > "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" Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other. Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.

code_for_monkey 9mo ago
> Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other. I audibly winced
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  There are in fact almost 30 products with Copilot in the name now. Though they've seem to have cut a few recently like the sales version
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
mook 9mo ago
> unlike anything we've seen before They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…

ryandvm 9mo ago

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...

add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
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.
- estimator7292 9mo ago
  Microsoft has a long and well documented history of resetting user preferences. Multiple 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. Microsoft will forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    Starting when you selected "don't install Windows 10" and it asked you a few times and you kept selecting that and then you woke up one day and your computer was running Windows 10, and blue screened when you logged in
- hbn 9mo ago
  Microsoft has pinned a Copilot shortcut to my taskbar after an update multiple times. One time they replaced my "show desktop" button in the bottom right with a Copilot button.
  - Zambyte 9mo ago
    That's called malware. Like that's literally malware by any reasonable definition. The fact that it's branded by and distributed by a multi trillion dollar corporation does not make it not malware. Your PC has been compromised, and it would be wise to solve your problem instead of trying to make the best of running malware.

th0ma5 9mo ago

[dead]

kotaKat 9mo ago

Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off. 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.

PaulHoule 9mo ago
Can't say Win 11 is really that bad. 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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- exceptione 9mo ago
  > which "just doesn't work" Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost anyone can do the following trick successfully: 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. Done.
  - zxcvasd 9mo ago
    >I guess almost anyone can do the following almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course 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? (i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the vast majority of people do not)

Drunkfoowl 9mo ago

[dead]

JohnMakin 9mo ago

Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. 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. 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. But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.

PaulHoule 9mo ago
Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing. 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!" 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 you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable. 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.
- ifwinterco 9mo ago
  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. I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
basch 9mo ago
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse. 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. and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.

PaulHoule 9mo ago

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. 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. 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. I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.

copilot_king 9mo ago

[dead]

zwaps 9mo ago

The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X. Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products. However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail. 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. For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed. People hate it, and for hood reason. It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form. 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 Bah

pjmlp 9mo ago

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. PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI. There certainly other examples that I failed to address. This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.

exceptione 9mo ago
And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-notch.)
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977 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/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
  - brg 9mo ago
    I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv being the strongest technical organization at MS than its provenance.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer experience in Visual Studio. 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. Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality. Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.

_fat_santa 9mo ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

llama052 9mo ago
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.
- mook 9mo ago
  Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.
- pwarner 9mo ago
  And Teams
basch 9mo ago
The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted. Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/ https://designer.microsoft.com/ If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
- 9mo ago

AJRF 9mo ago

They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year. 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. I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.

pjmlp 9mo ago
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.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  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.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Luckily you can use "Linux" on Google's products, or Amazon for that matter. /s 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.
simoncion 9mo ago
> ...they are down ~12% for the year. 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. Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.

mjr00 9mo ago

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. The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.

bagacrap 9mo ago
Yeah, my experience is currently pointing towards AI replacing the cheap workers instead of the expensive ones.

1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-s-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems/ar-AA1VBKdf/ https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence... Text-only, no Javascript: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf/ https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf...

dang 9mo ago

Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.

eddyg 9mo ago
If you have Apple News, you can open the article in Safari and then "Share" it to the News app.
hvb2 9mo ago
This still works for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565
- dang 9mo ago
  Ok, let's put that in the toptext. Thanks!
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems ...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  Oh, but it does.

1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

. 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 ".\*"|tr -d '\134'; } > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm No Javascript, no CSS, only two HTML tags: and <a> with href attribute; 1.htm can be viewed in _any_ browser, no matter how old or unpopular, firefox is just one example

1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
Correction: Three tags: 1. , 2. <a> with href attribute and 3. <meta> with charset attribute

nitwit005 9mo ago

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. Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

direwolf20 9mo ago
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"?
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > Why can't it just be called "internet"? Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.
  - Dylan16807 9mo ago
    They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.
    - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
      The Internet Explorer is not for exploring the internet, but the world wide web, so the name never did make sense.
      - jamesnorden 9mo ago
        I guess intranets don't exist.
      - direwolf20 9mo ago
        Actually, it views HTML. But if you call it Microsoft HTML Viewer and then wonder why nobody clicks on it.........

shevy-java 9mo ago

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. 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).

Aperocky 9mo ago
Putting "AI integrations" on Windows 11 is like layering surstromming on a turd.
askonomm 9mo ago
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. 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.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Most gamers rather chose PlayStation, Nintendo and XBox instead of Windows PC.
    - 9mo ago

jjcm 9mo ago

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.

iamleppert 9mo ago

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. 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. 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.

reddalo 9mo ago
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.
throwaheyy 9mo ago
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.

smithkl42 9mo ago

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.

nl 9mo ago

Copilot is such a typical MS product. It checks all the correct checkboxes on a feature list in comparison to the competition but it just sucks to use. It's like Sharepoint - the deathpit of all collaborative software

ZeroCool2u 9mo ago
Microsoft Copilot: The Sharepoint of chatbots I can't imagine a description more likely to give corporate workers the ick.
kittikitti 9mo ago
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.

golfer 9mo ago

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.

keeda 9mo ago

Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole: > “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote. 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209 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: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir 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".) 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. 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.

verdverm 9mo ago

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.

bagacrap 9mo ago
They own a quarter of openai
- verdverm 9mo ago
  Right, they had to buy it, not build it
  - bagacrap 9mo ago
    Well yes but it's hardly third party any more.

overgard 9mo ago

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 need, 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.

JBlue42 9mo ago
True. Let's not forget that they are rebranding Office 364 as Microsoft 365 Copilot.
podgorniy 9mo ago
> Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, AI demand goes though. AI investments numbers good. Numbers up. Not because people choose, because corporations are fomo-ing it and we don't have a choise.

kittikitti 9mo ago

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.

neumann 9mo ago

Which copilot? 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?

petersumskas 9mo ago

AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying. People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity) I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting. 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.

podgorniy 9mo ago
> I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting. Confusion and fear are much better for stock prices than clarity
rossdavidh 9mo ago
If what they are getting is "not much, plus a side order of hallucination", then connecting the dots is exactly what they DON'T want to do.

jsemrau 9mo ago

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? 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".

uyzstvqs 9mo ago
Absolutely. And trying to be invasive by adding Copilot buttons everywhere. It's reminiscent of "free toolbar" adware. Solution: Add MCP to MS applications, then isolate Copilot to its own app.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  Make MCP as pervasive as OLE Automation once was

christkv 9mo ago

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?

redbell 9mo ago

> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race. But data shows that it is losing ground with users. 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. At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.

Schlagbohrer 9mo ago

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?

netsharc 9mo ago
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. 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"...
- Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
  I forgot that there are three different, separate, different-looking settings menus for the mouse, which show three layers of legacy OS implementation. Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.
  - netsharc 9mo ago
    My work computer's Win 11 install is originally French, I'm using the English UI. Searching for "Display" in the start menu shows me Display-related settings... in English and French. Looking at it closely, the English results point to settings available via the Control Panel, and the French ones point to settings in the "Settings" app. Picking a French result opens the Settings app, in English. But yeah, Microsoft competency means it's also fine to show some search results in the language which isn't the user's preferred UI language.
hbn 9mo ago
I use StartAllBack to replace the Start menu with more or less the Windows 7 one, and it also has features to restore file explorer to the more sensible Windows 7/8 versions.

isoprophlex 9mo ago

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. However. 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. The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit. Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base? I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are. The mind truly boggles.

codebolt 9mo ago

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.

podgorniy 9mo ago
They seemingly forgot to ask their "almost-agi-future-of-economics-the-best-thing-ever" to fix the UI...

deafpolygon 9mo ago

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.

haritha-j 9mo ago

I think it comes down to..not every product in the world is improved by AI. but shareholders believe they all should be. So its crammed into all of them, instead of the few that would really benefit. The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.

smcleod 9mo ago

Microsoft's everything is running into problems. Seriously though, it always seems like a dumpster fire over there but the last year is next level with all their Windows 11 problems, Windows update problems, Office365 outages, Copilot issues, Azure outages etc... not to mention the features no one seems to want.

Ylpertnodi 9mo ago
Several people are not happy about the association with Bill Gates, too.

chakintosh 9mo ago

I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept asking me for the spreadsheet like it's open in a browser window.

nashashmi 9mo ago
I always find myself recalibrating if copilot understands what I am doing. I get mixed results. cannot seem to come up with a consistent rule of thumb.
thewhitetulip 9mo ago
I wanted to do something complex in google sheets. We had just gotten Gemini in gsheet. I assumed they'd have used some fancy mcp and enabled us to do a lot of things but all gemini in gsheet could do was summarize
- Andrex 9mo ago
  It sounds like that's still a step up from Copilot. I know Gemini has more advanced features in Docs and they rolled something out for Sheets. I would bet GWorkspace keeps gaining ground on the functionality battle.
  - thewhitetulip 9mo ago
    Well, copilot is less than useless But the thing is, for gemini to be magic, they need api for each operation, they don't have it! So that's why it can only do sum.
reval 9mo ago
I got bitten by this confusing UX. The spreadsheet must be in OneDrive for copilot to use it as context. It’s actually quite useful.

ProfessorZoom 9mo ago

Is anyone surprised? Windows can't even open and close file explorer reliably without lagging or refusing to respond. How could they possibly rival these models?

hansmayer 9mo ago

You know things are running bad when they've lost even the likes of WSJ. And yet Satya and his ilk (across the LLM space) keep pushing it. It does not matter that this technologically on its own can never reach what they kept promising. Is the pride and ego of a couple of CEOs so important that we'll all just watch them bringing the whole market down ?

duxup 9mo ago

In some ways this reminds me of the .NET marketing debacle Microsoft pulled where every product suddenly was ".NET" and nobody could explain what that meant or what it did that was helpful. Similarly Copilot is everywhere, but why I would want it there or use it there is unknown.

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