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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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> “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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

Text-only, no Javascript:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf...

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.

Similarly Copilot is everywhere, but why I would want it there or use it there is unknown.

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

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.

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.

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   (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 "<p>.\*</p>"|tr -d '\134'; } > 1.htm

   firefox ./1.htm