Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.
There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.
There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.
There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.
There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?
Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.
It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.
It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.
And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?
> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.
They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active".
To further your argument, look at the XBOX. It is impossible to tell which is the latest model by name alone. Where the playstation is simple, the latest is the 5, the previous was the 4, and the one before that was the 3.
It's over 19 years old, but this video is a brutal but hilarious commentary on Microsoft's inherent dysfunction when it comes to product naming and packaging. Still on point decades later.
Nintendo's strategy isn't the absolute worst. They mostly just give new names to new console designs, with modifiers to specify next-gen-without-major-changes. So the SNES was a next-gen NES, the N64 was its own thing, the GameCube was its own thing, the Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advanced were iterations on the same thing, DS, DSi, 3DS were all generation steps. WiiU was a next-gen Wii, Switch 2 is a next-gen Switch.
They probably should have called the WiiU the Super Wii or Wii 2 or something, but on the whole they've got a mostly coherent naming convention.
As a regular human who plays games and doesn't know about chip architectures, one woud probably lump the wii and the switch closer together than the game cube based on the modes in which one can interact with the systems.
Wii is a game cube with a funny controller. Or, wii is a tv-only olde switch.
I appreciate that it has its own name due to being a transitional experience.
I don’t think Nintendo’s scheme was ever that great as it blurred the difference between variant form factors (Game Boy Pocket vs Game Boy, Game Boy Micro/SP vs Game Boy Advance, DS Lite, 2/3DS XL, Wii Mini), pro models with limited exclusives (Game Boy Color, DSi, New 2/3DS), and full on new generations (Game Boy Advance, 3DS, Wii U).
That is exactly what IBM thought too when they allowed Bill Gates to license the new OS they were supposed to be making for IBM. They had no competition, who are these kids going to sell their OS to?
Some musings from someone who has not worked in microsoft but has in big tech.
This often happens because the people inside are incentivized to build their own empire.
If someone comes and wants to get promoted/become an exec, there's a ceiling if they work under the an existing umberlla + dealing the politics of introducing a feature which requires dealing with an existing org.
So they build something new.
And the next person does the same.
And so you have 365, One, Live, .Net, etc
Google Plus was the same. Lots of unrelated google products were temporarily branded as part of google plus for some reason, including your google account and google hangouts (meet).
That was a very intentional strategy. In hindsight, not a good one, of course, but Plus and its integration across the whole company was blessed by Page and Brin, who were quietly panicking that Facebook could eat Google's lunch by becoming the "start page of the Internet" the moment they integrated search. Which they never did and never appear to have wanted.
The Dev Tools division had Quick- prefix for some tools before settling on Visual- once VB took off.
Then there's DirectX and its subs - though Direct3D had more room for expanded feature set compared to DXSound or DXInput so now they're up to D3D v12.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." -Steve Jobs
There’s got to be solid reasons why they do this and have done so for so damn long. At the very least institutional reasons. At best, actual research that suggests they make more money this way. But as a consumer, I hate it.
Marketing has too much power. They get some hairbrained scheme to goose the numbers and just slam a mandate all the way down the org.
Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion.
>> Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion.
So Microsoft isn't bringing copilot to all these applications? It's just bringing a copilot label to them? So glad I don't use this garbage at home.
This is actually one of their smart decisions. "Copilot" is currently going through the corporate regulators, who know nothing about technology, but I can't buy it until they say everything is Legal.
So once we have signoff then my counterpart in Sharepoint/M365 land gets his "Copilot" for Office, while my reporting and analytics group gets "Copilot" for Power BI, while my coding team gets "Copilot" for llm assisted development in GitHub.
In the meantime everybody just plugs everything into ChatGPT and everybody pretends it isn't happening. It's not unlawful if they lawyers can't see it!
It's because Microsoft isn't a software company. They're a marketing company that happens to make software and a few other bits.
We're now on the back end of that, where Microsoft must again make products with independent substance, but are instead drowning in their own infrastructural muck.
>Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions
Microsoft cannot and will not ever get better at naming things. It is said the universe will split open and and eldritch beast will consume the stars the day Microsoft stops using inconsistent and overlapping names for different and conflicting products.
Nadella has the golden ship taking on water right now. He has entirely botched AI top to bottom. He has screwed that up to such a degree that it would be difficult to overstate. If he doesn't correct these mistakes extremely soon, he'll unravel much of the progress he made for Microsoft and they'll miss this generation of advancement (which will be the end of their $3 trillion market cap - as the market has recently perked up to).
There is no tech giant that is more vulnerable than Microsoft is at this moment.
Most document originations will begin out of or adjacent to of LLM sessions in the near future, as everything will blur in terms of collaborating with AI agents. Microsoft has no footing (or worse, their position is terrible courtesy of copilot) and is vulnerable to death by inflection point. Windows 11 is garbage and Google + Linux may finally be coming for their desktop (no different than what AMD has managed in unwinding the former Intel monopoly in PCs).
Someone should be charging at them with a new take on Office, right now. This is where you slice them in half. Take down Office and take down Windows. They're so stupid at present that they've opened the gates to Office being destroyed, which has been their moat for 30 years.
I am no big fan of MS, and especially not a fan of W11, but you're operating under the false assumption that their users are still their most important customers.
MS's bottom line doesn't depend on how happy users are with W11, especially not power users like ourselves. W11 is just a means of selling subscriptions (office, ai, etc). The question isn't 'are users happy' it's 'will OEMs and business continue to push it?'. The answer to that is almost certainly yes. OEMs aren't going to be selling most pcs with ubuntu included any time soon. Businesses are not going to support libreoffice when MS office is the established standard.
Maybe apple could make inroads here, but they don't seem willing to give up their profit margins on overpriced hardware, and I don't think I've ever seen them release anything 'office' related that was anywhere near feature parity with MSO, and especially not cross platform.
If their whole business is based around being an established standard and making users happy is not a relevant goal, then why do anything at all? They already are an established standard, so why would they bother taking any further actions whatsoever, making any changes or rolling out any new products? Clearly they are trying to achieve something, right? So what is it?
It is about making specific high value users happy. If the rest of us are unhappy - we don't matter. They know for most people ubuntu or whatever isn't a realistic option and so they can take whatever money they can get from those people. Sure a few people like me will run *BSD or linux, but we are a footnote not worth their time.
The only danger is every once in a while one of those little footnotes becomes large enough to be a problem and you lose the market of those who do matter as well. While there are many obvious examples of where that happened, there are also a lot of cases where it didn't.
Agree that someone should double down on competing with Office, but that alone won’t take them down. MS has spent decades listening to what SMB to large companies need, and has layers of absolute domination to bolster their lead. As an example, they have a stranglehold on catering to the Governance, Risk, and Compliance market. The most die-hard Linux folks I know turn to AD the minute they need to manage users and devices at scale. Need visibility into what is happening both remotely and locally, across your enterprise? MS has the typing and a smart sales deck that explains how you really just need another comparatively small investment to make your board sleep better at night. And that’s not even going into the license shenanigans they play to make Azure competitive against other clouds, for hosting MS-owned tools like Windows and SQL Server.
About a year ago I had to buy a new Xbox. It took me time to figure out what model I had and what the new models are. It’s the least intuitive marketing on the market.
Not that I disagree, but this is nothing compared to the ".NET" craze in the early 2000s. Everything had to have ".NET" in its name even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual .NET technology.
There was also "Active" before that, but .NET was next level crazy...
>>Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information. It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.
Everyone I know who use AI day-to-day is just using Copilot to mostly do things like add a transition animation to a Powerpoint slide or format a word document to look nice. The only problem these LLM products seem to solve is giving normal people a easy way to interact with terrible software processes and GUIs. And better solution to that problem would be for developers to actually observe how the average use interacts with both a computer and their program in particular.
The craziest thing was how Microsoft took the super established brand from decades, and renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365.
I'm not sure if it's named Microsoft 365 Copilot nowadays, or if that's an optional AI addon? I thought it was renamed once more, but they themselves claim simply "Microsoft 365" (in a few various tiers) sans-Copilot. https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-micr...
> No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.
When it came out, Github Copilot was an autocomplete tool. That's it. That may be what the OP was originally using. That's what I used... 2 years ago. That they change the capabilities but don't change the name, yet change names on services that don't change capabilities further illustrates the OP's point, I would say.
To be fair, Github Copilot (itself a horrible name) has followed the same arc as Cursor, from AI-enhanced editor with smart autocomplete, to more of an IDE that now supports agentic "vibe coding" and "vibe editing" as well.
I do agree that conceptually there is a big difference between an editor, even with smart autocomplete, and an agentic coding tool, as typified by Claude Code and other CLI tools, where there is not necessarily any editor involved at all.
Thanks... 2 years felt a bit too recent. I think I was trialing copilot in late 2022, and then got turned on to ... codeium/windsurf in late 2023. The years are merging together now. :/
That's silly. Gmail is a wildly different product than it was when it launched, but I guess it doesn't count since the name is the same?
Microsoft may or may not have a "problem" with naming, but if you're going to criticize a product, it's always a good starting place to know what you're criticizing.
The confusion is when I say “I have a terrible time using Copilot, I don’t recommend using it” and someone chimes in with how great their experience with Github Copilot is, a completely different product and how I must be “holding it wrong” when that is not the same Copilot. That Microsoft has like 5 different products all using Copilot in the name, even people in this very comment section are only saying “Copilot” so it is hard to know what product they are talking about!
I mean, sure. But aside from the fact that everything in AI gets reduced to a single word ("Gemini", "ChatGPT", "Claude") [1], it's clearly not an excuse for misrepresenting the functionality of the product when you're writing a post broadly claiming that their AI products don't work.
Github Copilot is actually a pretty good tool.
[1] Not just AI. This is true for any major software product line, and why subordinate branding exists.
I specifically mention that my experience is with the Office 365 Copilot and how terrible that is and in online discussions I mention this and then people jump out of the woodwork to talk about how great Github Copilot is so thank you for demonstrating that exact experience I have every time I mention Copilot :)
GitHub Copilot is available from website https://github.com/copilot together with services like Spark (not available from other places), Spaces, Agents etc.
This absolutely sucks, especially since tool calling uses tokens really really fast sometimes. Feels like a not-so-gentle nudge to using their 'official' tooling (read: vscode); even though there was a recent announcement about how GHCP works with opencode: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
No mention of it being severely gimped by the context limit in that press release, of course (tbf, why would they lol).
However, if you go back to aider, 128K tokens is a lot, same with web chat... not a total killer, but I wouldn't spend my money on that particular service with there being better options!
I mean, it's definitely not perfect, but consider that Claude is a 200k window (unless you're a beta user with access to more), and it's not the tragedy that you're making it out to be.
My experience is that the models all lose focus long before they fill their context window, so I'm not crying over the lower limit.
That was back when they were going wild naming everything "Active". Active Desktop made sense, Active Directory? What made that "Active". ActiveMovie? It's just a video playing framework... ActiveX?? X?? ActiveSync, I don't want my sync to be active. ActiveStore was apparently a thing?
My colleague works in a functional role for a medium sized SaaS company(1000-5000 employees), working with banks, family offices, hedge funds. They use teams and copilot, they all hate it.
One thing that I don't know about is if they have an AI product that can work on combining unstructured and databases to give better insights on any new conversation? e.g. like say the LLM knows how to convert user queries to the domain model of tables and extract information? What companies are doing such things?
This would be something that can be deployed on-prem/ their own private cloud that is controlled by the company, because the data is quite sensitive.
> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.
AI really should be a freaking feature, not the identity of their products. What MS is doing now is like renaming Photoshop to Photoshop Neural Filter.
That's a great analogy, but could be taken one step further. Because Adobe would also have to rename the rest of their products to come close to what MS is doing.
By the way, why is app lowercase in "the Microsoft 365 Copilot app"? Is it not part of the trademark but even they couldn't deal with how confusing that was?
'app' isnt part of that trademark, but on other products (Windows App) it is.
Searching the store or a company portal for one of these rebraned apps returns dozens of hits because 'windows', 'copilot', '365' and 'app' are all common words in most application descriptions.
People already do pay for it: office 365. It’s just like getting cloud storage with the subscription. OneDrive has been one of the better cloud storage options for consumers.
Also, a great use is Microsoft Forms I was surprised with the AI features. At first I just used it to get some qualitative feedback but ended up using copilot to enter questions Claude helped me create and it converted them into the appropriate forms for my surveys!
Objectives -> Claude -> Surveys (markdown) -> Copilot -> MS Forms -> Emailed.
Insights and analysis can use copilot too.
Main thing to remember is the models behind the scenes will change and evolve, Copilot is the branding. In fact, we can expect most companies will use multiple AI solutions/pipelines moving forward.
I asked it to create a slide deck for me, within Slides, based on a block of notes I wrote. It wouldn't do it. The chat assistant at gemini.google.com wouldn't do it either. They told me how to do it step by step though...which I knew how to do already. Useless.
I also tried the `AI()` Sheets function to fill a range in based on some other data in the sheet. It doesn't accept other ranges, even if you use the &CELL_REF& notation.
For being supposedly the same models with how close MS and OpenAI supposedly are, it's bizarrely bad.
I was trying to just get an Excel function dialed in with some IFs and formatting weirdness. The licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot built into Excel tried several times and failed miserably. One screenshot to ChatGPT (5.1?) and it was one-shot.
I'm not even sure it's the same models any more. It feels years behind. Maybe they limit it or cripple it somehow.
>There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.
There is also Github Copilot, the subscription, that lets you use Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models.
This isn't a Microsoft thing, it's a big dumb corporation thing. Most big corporations are run by dumb executives who are 100% out of touch with the customer (though even if they were in touch, they wouldn't care). Their only consideration is the stock price. If adding new names to things, chanting the magic spell "AI" over and over, and claiming the new name will make them more money can cause the stock price to increase, that's what they'll do. (Making customers happy doesn't make the stock price rise; if it did, we'd all be a lot less depressed and a lot richer)
Like Microsoft Defender, which is now Defender Antivirus, or Defender for Endpoint if you have a real license. You will also get Defender for Identity, and maybe Defender for Office 365, which is probably not ASR. And Defender for Cloud, not to be confused with Defender for Cloud Apps.
Can somebody give me a TLDR on what the "copilot button" does? I've never had one of those laptops and have never understood that. Does it just start the AI front-end? Does it power up the NPU?
It is just a button. Default it starts the Copilot app which is really the Office app that already existed but now with the copilot tab preselected. Also that Copilot runs in the cloud and doesn't use your NPU.
The only thing until now I've found using the NPU are the built in blur, auto frame and eye focus modes for the webcam.
I got one of those Asus ROG laptops that bragged about having an NPU and I kept trying to figure out how to access it until I realized they just meant the integrated Ryzen GPU (which is also responsible for getting anything rendered by the discrete Nvidia GPU to the actual display). Also its alleged 16G of video memory included a mapped 8G of system RAM. I miss when vendors at least pretended to be honest.
There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.
There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.
There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.
There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?
Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.
It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.
It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.
And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?