If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
And if I ask them (which I always do) they still have trouble describing the product, because Microsoft give them no help at all. How DO you explain that something was the Copilot thing that's a feature on GitHub.com that shows up in the web interface there, as opposed to whatever the heck other forms of GitHub Copilot.
(Amusingly there are 15 "GitHub Copilot..." products listed on the linked website and I can't tell which if any of those 15 corresponds to the chat UI on the logged in GitHub.com homepage, or that's available in the "Agents" tab in a repository.)
Surely Microsoft feel this pain all the time? Bug reports in "Copilot" must be almost impossible to interpret.
> If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
I think this is basically a rephrasing of the reason for the shared name. This appears to be an attempt at brand unification.
Microsoft wants user's experiences with their products to blend together into an undifferentiated (in more positive terms, "seamless") set of interactions. Not a set of discrete pieces of software, just interacting with Microsoft via Copilot to... ask it to do their work for them, mostly. This is the AI-native future they're building towards. You complain that users can't talk about what tool they're using. Microsoft doesn't want people knowing or caring what tool they're using. Just pay your subscription and have Copilot read and respond to your email for you.
I always think of GitHub Copilot as the product.
I can purchase the Business or Enterprise plan.
That enables features like Reviews, Chat and so on.
IMO this chart (at least for GitHub Copilot) is confusing products, features and licensing.
That's not to say it isn't confusing understanding what features are available when you get a GitHub Copilot license, but calling them all Products feels wrong. I can't purchase GitHub Copilot Reviews separately as far as I'm aware.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Windows, is in fact, NT/SlopPilot+Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Copilot plus Copilot plus Copilot.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)
I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product. I bet Copilot can fix this...
WSL2 deviates from the native concept of what a Windows subsystem is; it is named that way because it is the successor of the original WSL.
If you want a list of actual subsystems Windows recognizes, this should be pretty accurate:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for...
The real reason for calling it a subsystem was almost entirely for familiarity with the previous concept of running Linux programs on Windows, which were based on that subsystem feature (the POSIX subsystem and the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications).
I read through the brand guidelines where I work, and we have a similar stipulation. Maybe there is some law mixed in there, but from a pure branding play, a company will never want to put someone else first.
WSL2 runs real Linux in a virtual machine.
WSL 1.0 was based on Drawbridge research project of library OSes, also used to port SQL Server into Linux.
You can't have ellipsis when the shortened version already has its own meaning.
X for Y when both X and Y are nouns means that X is part of Y, not that Y is part of X.
e.g. "I bought new tyres for my car". The tyres are part of my car. You can't flip it and say "I bought new my car for tyres", it's just not how the word "for" works.
Grammatically it has to be "Linux for Windows subsystem", or "Windows subsystem for running Linux" as you said. The verb is essential for it to parse correctly.
Only in version 2. WSL1 didn't run a Linux kernel, just provided binary compatibility to run Linux userspace programs.
Probably, but I doubt linux wants it either. People might think it's some official linux product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
Like an imperative, because copilot can exist as a verb, I copilot a plane, and Copilot can exist as a software product, and as a helper in a software product that is itself a software product that helps you use the software product it is a helper to
So Copilot copilot! could be an imperative for Copilot to Copilot, and Copilot Copilot could be a description of a software product that helps people use a software product named Copilot, but the second is not really grammatically correct as a sentence, whereas the imperative is.
So in the end I guess you could have a Copilot Copilot..[infinite Copilots]..copilot!
Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots, which other Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots assist, themselves assist Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots.
(Fun fact: If you repeat a word sufficiently, it will lose its meaning..)
I'm sad they replaced it with copilot.
Not to be confused with "Microsoft Copilot .NET". :-)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=.NET&oldid=134276...
They dropped the Core designation because they're still trying to encourage people to migrate so they can take .Net Framework out behind the shed where Silverlight went. v5 was a convenient time to start that whole process of re-integration.
Both Azure and Intelligent Cloud continue to beat expectations in revenue and adoption.
Don't just make stuff up because you don't like the product or company.
This comment really helps me put things in perspective.
I'm guess now that it's Microsoft's way of naming their LLM-powered products/features, the same way "Azure" is basically their codename for "cloud".
They just like branding their dev tools for whatever they're pushing at the time. In 2002 they named Visual Studio "Visual Studio .NET".
It would have been more confusing to have Visual Studio Team Server and Azure DevOps Services being the same product but hosted differently.
At one point the next version of Windows Server 2003 was going to be Windows .NET Server.
Also Windows CE, Outlook Express, Xbox App, Xbox Game Pass for PC, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, etc.
Only perfect pasta sauces.
Howard R. Moskowitz is an American market researcher and psychophysicist. He is known for the detailed study he made of the types of spaghetti sauce and horizontal segmentation. By providing a large number of options for consumers, Moskowitz pioneered the idea of intermarket variability as applied to the food industry.
I think they were lucky this time that they landed a good name after only a few iterations that has since stuck.
Anyone remember Google Bard or LaMDA?
They could simply have marketing that talked about “<product name>, now with Copilot”. Eventually the marking moves on to the next thing, Microsoft products already became synonymous with Copilot/AI due to the marking and general use, and the names stay clean and consistent over time.
Also, Apple tends to make system services that are implemented once and work across all apps I the OS, like with their writing tools. The app didn’t change, it can just take advantage of a new system level feature… and so can 3rd party apps.
To me, the issue isn't that they've named so many things 'Copilot' but rather that Copilot is in every goddamn product.
Microsoft has been replacing most of their brands by Copilot. There's no searching for it in a product, the product is named "Copilot".
This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea which GitHub MCP server I setup in Claude Code, but the domain has “githubcopilot” in it. Am I burning copilot tokens (or “requests” or whatever is their billing unit) when I use this from Claude?
Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.
A while back, Microsoft bought Github.
"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.
One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.
Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.
"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".
Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.
Yeah github pays Claude but what's the point ?
I am not locked in to Anthropic, either. I can easily switch between GPT and Gemini models based on how I think each would perform in various scenarios. That's a big win. I use a lot of design with Opus, implement with GPT 5.4.
Also, Github Copilot CLI is pretty much at feature parity (for the stuff that matters) with Claude Code. Using both at work and home, I don't think there's much difference in features between the two. Maybe I'm not a super power user, and just a regular dumb user, but GH doesn't seem buggy and everything I think I'd want to do with CC I can do with GH.
Yes, Copilot supports skills. Practically all agents support very similar feature sets or are actively building up parity support if not already there. The only real difference between systems is the prompt and payment method. Copilot even allows you to use Anthropic's own skills repository: https://github.com/anthropics/skills
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/about-age... details the support for skills. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/copilot-c... details the CLI tool in general, which seems more or less on par with Claude Code's.
1. Tooling is changing very fast but people tend to form sticky opinions (reasonably enough - there’s only so much time in the world).
2. It’s just hard to form robust objective opinions - you have to make a real effort to build test cases and evaluation processes and generally the barrier to entry there is pretty high.
So - I agree, calling people uninformed is not a great way to win them over, but maybe that’s the price of living in a world of anecdotes which become fixed in people’s minds.
> "Fix the following compile errors" -> one shot try and stops.
> "Fix the following compile errors. When done, test your work and continue iterating until build passes without error" -> same cost but it gets the job done.
Your question does raise a valid point - Github Copilot's value proposition is fairly limited in my opinion. Not to say worthless but limited and clearly varies depending on how Githubbey your dev workflows are.
Claude's integration looked like trash in comparison.
Why would I lock myself into a single vendor when I can have access to all models.
Also the GitHub subscription is a very good price.
Making it possible to buy something from Anthropic might require tedious paperwork for many of them.
There is no VSCode Copilot. There is Github Copilot integration inside VS Code.
If had first meant a coffee table form factor PC with touch screen and special software, which was able to sense special objects placed on top of it. Then that was renamed to "PixelSense" [1] and "Surface" instead got put on a line of touchscreen tablet form factor PCs launched together with Windows 8. OK, reusing a strong name for a product line expected to sell more, and which still fit the theme made sense.
.. but then the brand was also put on laptops, convertibles, desktop PC and an Android phone ... eh, OK, but at least those also had touch screens.
... but then the brand was also put on generic peripherals: keyboard, mouse, headphones, earbuds, etc. which diluted the brand to mean practically nothing. For example, a search for "surface keyboard", could result in a "type cover" for some kind of tablet PC or a keyboard intended for desktop computers.
Microsoft later did the same with the "Microsoft Sculpt" brand. It was first a compact curved "sculpted" ergonomic keyboard with chiclet keys and an ergonomic mouse that were most often sold as a set. That got quite popular and so the brand achieved recognition. But later, Microsoft decided to reuse that brand for completely generic peripherals with no special ergonomic designs whatsoever.
BTW. Not long after, Microsoft also released products with the similarly ungoogleable names "Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard" and "Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard".
Do you mean blades?
Proof that I'm not hallucinating that name: https://www.windowscentral.com/meet-surface-music-kit-new-bl...
What the hell is Kevin Scott (Microslop's CTO) doing with his time? How can any reasonable leader look at this disaster and go "hmm, yes, this looks like a sane and sustainable setup for future growth"?
Somewhat more niche, I'd also add Access to the list. There is worryingly little development going on these days, but after all these decades there is no other product who came even remotely close to its quality. For quick local RDB stuff and some RAD, nothing is as quick and reliable. I still use it for all of my personal collection tracking, data modeling and prototyping for hobby projects, etc. The speed at which I can set up and adjust is unreal. I appreciate that LibreOffice are giving it a try with Base, but every time I try it, it takes me about 2 minutes until I find a basic, essential feature that's severely broken. (I guess I know which project I should start contributing to if I ever got into the mindset of doing some open-source work.)
Jupyter also has a janky execution model. It doesn’t track dependencies so you have to be very careful in how you separate cells from one another and just running the whole notebook every time seems kind of pointless vs just writing a pure Python script.
But as a professional, it has no further use.
[0]: Please tell me how I add a new paragraph style in Docs?
It would be ironic if there was nothing called "CoPilot" for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Copilot means there’s a button/menu/command in the Microsoft app/site/tool that allows the user to pass whatever text/file/site/context/prompt is on the screen to the Copilot AI backend so it can summarize/transform/expand/explain it, and then have the user wait an inordinate amount of time for a mediocre response.
Which can get even messier in people’s head, since they will usually reference any product they use as to copilote, when they may be talking about different ones sometimes.
For instance, my friends who uses teams or the 365 suit refer to copilot as the integrated AI tool within these softwares. When, as a SWE, where I hear about copilot, it usually refers to the coding assistant/AI code completion/agent tools for me.
There is Siri on iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, Apple TV, and CarPlay and are all different different incarnation of Siri (with different capabilities). Then there is everything else like the Siri Remote, Siri Suggestions (and all their types: Siri apps suggestions, Maps, keyboard, Share Sheet, etc), Siri Shortcuts, and Siri Knowledge (WolframAlpha + Wikipedia + other databases?).
I'm sure 75% of these will be rebranded "Apple Intelligence" by the end of the year...
If they were like MS, they would add Siri into everything and then call it "Siri Cloud", "Siri Messages", etc (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")
Nowadays Apple would brand such features as "Apple Intelligence", but since they already existed long before, they are "Siri".
Though I agree that it's not quite as badly ubiquitous as Copilot.
Siri 365 Communication Suite .NET Enterprise Edition With Copilot
Most Apple customers probably don’t even realize you can still do all the original iTunes stuff in Music (local music and syncing, CD burning, etc) purely due to the horrible branding.
I wonder if MS Copilot meant he made money on that investment?
Pretty sure bollocks was the literal example I read on HN like 10 years ago of what your cool-sounding product name will turn out to mean in Spanish, but I can't remember if the moral of the story was to check every language or to just accept it because it'll happen anyway
Anyway, the various tech podcasts caught on after a few episodes and seem to now pronounce it more foreignly, so it's now more like clod
Cortana was a great brand. Clippy is still on the shelf. Copilot could have been a deep brand if they pulled it from their flight simulators. Instead it rings hollow of any meaning.
Developer tools live in their own space. And I assume most devs don't really care that "Copilot" started to show up everywhere, especially in MS365 products. At least I don't. Conversely, do non-technical people care where the term comes from, and now means "LLM integration" in a bunch of MS products?
I think it's better that Google going through Bard, Gemini, IDX, Firebase Studio, Antigravity, ...
Like, "the copilot in visual studio", "the copilot on github", "the copilot on office" etc.
Copilot does not know either but I'm sure the answer is a much bigger number then anyone would be comfortable with.
It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.
I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.
Larger than the difference between the .Net Framework (that is a framework) and .Net Core (that is a framework)?
The only good "AI" editor that supports Claude Code natively has so far been Zed. It's not PERFECT, but it has been the best experience short of just running Claude Code directly in the CLI.
Haven't tried it yet but the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode also seems to integrate Claude, Gemini and other non-OAI stuff
The Claude Code extension for VSCode from Anthropic will use your Claude subscription. But honestly it’s not very good - I use it but only to “open in terminal” (this adds some small quality of life features like awareness it’s in VSC so it opens files in the editor pane next to it).
"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"
.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)
The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"
Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"
"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"
"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"
"Microsoft FrontPage" / "Site Server" / "Site Server Commerce Edition" / "Office Server" / "SharePoint Portal Server" / "Windows SharePoint Services" / "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Foundation" / "SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Standard" / "SharePoint Enterprise" / "SharePoint Online" / "SharePoint Designer"
"Office Communicator" / "Microsoft Lync" / "Skype for Business" / "Skype" / "Skype for Business Online" / "Skype for Business for Microsoft 365"
Fairly guffaw-inducing branding, to me, was removing the Remote Desktop Client app and introducing something called "Windows App".
The old "System Management Server" became "System Center" and its family of products.
There's the whole accounting software / ERP world, too:
"Great Plains" / "Dynamics GP" / "Navision" / "Dynamics NAV" / "Solomon" / "Dynamics SL" / "Axapta" / "Dynamics AX" / "Dynamics 365" / "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations" / "Dynamics 365 Business Central"
(For most guffaws induced, though, there's the Windows 98-era "Critical Update Notification Tool"[0])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Update...
“Xbox” / “Xbox 360” / “Xbox One” / “Xbox One X” / “Xbox Series S” / “Xbox Series X”
What should we call our third product? -- One. -- Brilliant!
What should we call the fourth product in the series? -- Series. -- Brilliant!
I thought this was the same app/protocol, only more enshittified as time went by.
That being said: I would love someone from Marketing and Branding to explain me this “Copilot everywhere” because it is unintelligible (unless they want to dilute it through over exposure).
To my understanding, Office (or "Microsoft 365") itself becoming "Copilot" was just confused messaging about the "Office Hub" app/shortcut being repurposed.
One should aim for clarity.
FooPilot, Barwonk, etc.. would actually be a vast improvement.
two extremes at play here. A single brand name masquarading as the same product, versus a hundred brand names that don’t tell you a thing about what the product is
Kind of why I’m fond of GCP now. Just name it what it is
It means Microsoft AI.
Hope that helps!
Most of the time, these piggy backers only pull down the value of what they're riding on.
Right, so then it's not a "product", or even a range of "products".
It's a brand name and inherently pointless to map out. It doesn't even have to involve any "AI" to be given the branding. All that matters is it's a thing they have, new or old, that they'd like to push people towards.
Copilot is _amazing_. Everyone is hyping about Claude, but I'm way more productive with the copilot cli. The copilot cloud agent is great, and copilot code review is great (we also tried the new very expensive claude code review - it was slow and expensive).
Forget that it's Microsoft, forget that everything is Copilot and go and give it a shot.
Do you mean Github Copilot? If not, which Copilot are you recommending? Can you give a link to where it can be purchased or trialed?
I'm genuinely interested in trying out whatever you're recommending; but it highlights the problem, that I literally don't know what you're actually referencing.
Due to microsoft’s confusing naming
I don't use LLMs, but a coworker who does said that Copilot was one of the worst of the lot.
What many people who don't use the GitHub Copilot CLI don't seem to be aware of is that it's not limited to GPT models. I mostly use it with Gemini and Opus, for instance.