It needs to be more widely known that if you cancel a (home) 365 subscription, you'll be offered a cheaper version without AI integration.
I'll go ahead and burn working hours on it because I'm getting paid, and people like the things I create.. but it's a very crippled and painful version of what you get with the frontier products and most OSS options.
I recently switched to New Outlook and it's full of weird subtle bugs. It takes them years to fix things and make them barely useable. Given their track record I'm not optimistic for Copilot given both the vision and the execution are questionable at best.
I had to edit Windows Registry to avoid getting prompted every time I open old outlook. I didn’t like the looks or the bugs in the new version.
Trillion dollar industry btw.
But the M365 copilot app is inexcusable for being as core to Microslop's strategy.
Now, the "copilots" integrated in certain Microsoft products can be really horrible. I assume those are some sort of custom models that are not very capable, most of them I consider effectively worthless. But the web chat interface where I can pick chatGPT 5.6 seems fine...
So many AI doubters I know hate using AI tools because their employer only gives them the Microsoft offerings. Which is a totally understandable reaction to those tools.
Instead their incompetent managers were chasing promotions and pushed a technology which was not ready yet
The reality is that most users and consumers don’t care about quality, accuracy or functionality at all.
engineers tend to think as engineers do, solving all problems with features, quality improvements, etc. but those all drive costs up, and don't always provide the return we think they will.
They have all rights to win with their existing enterprise agreement but wow it’s amazing to see how bad their product cadence and decision making is. All they needed to do was copy Claude Cowork like OpenAI did.
The low quality of the voice assistant was unfortunate, but the naming was perfect.
If there had been consumer good will for voice assistant performance before poisoning the name, it might have survived... but when you first product in that realm is garbage and it lingers for a long time, you're dooming the name.
Also, synergy with Halo is meaningless to Microsoft. Most folks do not care or even know about Halo.
If I recall correctly, the thing that made Cortana particularly frustrating and worthless is that it did all searches using Bing, and opened any websites using Edge, regardless of your default settings. You got forced to use all the Microsoft version of every tool, even if you didn't want to.
I don't know anybody who uses Siri for more than just setting an occasional timer or something. Usually it's a nuisance when she is accidentally activated and takes over the interface.
And to Apple, Siri is to Siri AI as MacBook is to MacBook Pro.
Completely different product.
Asking for Siri is like an automatic reflex to a lot of people. You can’t change that name.
i think github copilot has actually gotten to a pretty good place, and of course the two copilot products will both have features called "autopilot" that do entirely different things
Mindboggling.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...
To think, the main impetus was mostly to see if it could be done. And to show Microsoft why you don't expose things like that to the public. Microsoft said "She'll learn from your conversations" and the internet said "Bet"
...well, it did exactly that, no bet here.
It's acknowledgement