I was about to say that it feels so much earlier than that. But then, 2016 was a whole decade ago.
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"
Nah it makes sense. They know their AI is second rate at best. Cortana implies 26th century excellence. If the reality is a step back (and we all know it’s several), then “haha Cortana dumb” memes would sweep the internet. They would have to rebrand anyway. If anything it was smart to rip off the band aid early.
The low quality of the voice assistant meant they doomed the Cortana name. It got associated with garbage voice assistance, so they had to rebrand.
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.
It kind of has, although I would argue that Siri is more successful than Cortana.
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.
Considering how little knowledge you showed of Microsoft’s history in a previous comment, it would be better if you just sat out branding conversations.
Not at all that surprising. There enterprise offering is barely acceptable and they have continued to drop the ball on having half decent Cowork solution.
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.
microsoft Product remains an unmitigated dumpster fire.
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
It’s really interesting to watch unfold because from the outside it seems so obvious. While I know change at scale can be hard it’s surprising nobody has called for a culling or shakeup to work it out.
Companies were paying for more than 30 million Copilot subscriptions as of the end of June. And while individual users are free to use limited versions of Copilot’s chat experience, its most powerful tools are reserved for subscribers to the company’s M365 apps bundle, which has about 90 million paying users.
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.
Microsoft allows you to subscribe to Microsoft 365 personal or family without AI for a small discount, but they hid the option on a page you can only get to if you click cancel on your subscription.
Now if I could just get them to start paying me cash for training their AI on my open source code and selling it rather than being force fed a Copilot grant.
It was foolish of them to think they had any consumer clout left. Shoving 1000 copies of an inaccurate, poorly functioning, and inconsistent product down everyone's throat will someday be a case study in how to immediately destroy a brand.
"at all" is probably a stretch, but agreed that the number one factor for a mile is cost. users will accept a surprising level of trash, if the price is cheap.
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.
Crazy how if they had waited about 2-3 years, and kept windows AI-free and released it today using the latest models, it would absolutely be well received (see: muse, new siri)
Instead their incompetent managers were chasing promotions and pushed a technology which was not ready yet
My blood pressure rises everytime i use Enterprise Copilot at work. It seems they truncate message history heavily (to save input token costs?) and Copilot forgets the last thing you told it in the chat. It is like a real-life version of Momento (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/) mixed with Waiting for Gadot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot), pretending to be in league with Anthropic.
You're right using Microsoft products is like mixing Momento with Waiting for Gadot :)
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 can tolerate Teams being a bit mid because the core functionality nearly always works. I can tolerate Outlook being meh because it's doing a lot (nothing I, a lowly IC really need though I can imagine the top hatted boss who does) and I think it does okay with the scope it's tackling.
But the M365 copilot app is inexcusable for being as core to Microslop's strategy.
Doing research work with it that outputs any kind of artifact is.. really painful. It constantly crashes, has to regenerate.. and then the output is often very difficult to carry to other Microsoft products, like Sharepoint. I end up creating PDFs that I import.
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.
It boggles my mind that Microsoft can fail to deliver even bare minimum working software so consistently, with all the engineering talent they house. What are the product teams doing?
It's such a broken POS. Code snippets, especially for html, frequently don't render, or if they do, they render as rendered html which will frequently be an empty box, and you have to manually (for each snippet box) switch to show code mode.
Huh... not my experience with the "premium" license. The interface isn't as nice and definitely less powerful than something like codex/claude code/whatever, but I don't seem to have any issues with truncation or things like that. I'm usually using 5.6 thinking (not clear which 5.6 model exactly) when I'm using copilot at work. It seems... fine? I always see people here always complaining that it's nerfed, truncates things, etc etc. The only difference I see is that interface isn't as nice nor as powerful, but I don't notice the answers being noticeably worse or anything like that. Occasionally it messes up code block formatting, but that's the only thing I can think of that annoys me.
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...
Does anyone even want to try this? I'm a Windows user, M365 subscriber, VS Code user (when I'm not in Codex), had a Github Copilot subscription, etc... and a heavy AI user. Basically, the prime target for Microsoft AI. And every attempt Microsoft has made to put AI into a product has been unusable garbage, using the same models I find productive in other tools.
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.
I think it makes much more sense for Microsoft to provide a good agent orchestration layer for their operating system and productivity software (are we still calling it that?) than try to compete with the Frontier providers.
Just going to use this thread to also add a nit: I hate that Microsoft made all the OEMs add a Copilot key to all their laptop keyboards. It's been Ctrl forever, and suddently they throw this net-negative key onto the keyboard. I have decades of habit of using the right side Ctrl key for varying shortcut strokes, and then when I use it now it loads up an unproductive Copilot experience that is awful. <end rant>
Microsoft inviting IT to nice events and giving them perks is the reason they keep a grip so tight on enterprise. For unknown reasons, every garbage new microsoft add-on will be enabled silently without any clear way to manage. At least for copilot pro plus premium they sent an email that "i was invited" so i could promptly reject before they activated, but here is the trick, 99% of the employees won't bother to opt-out.
https://archive.ph/XJG5V
Thank you for this.
Did this one become a Nazi as well?
At least a few of us remember TayAI. And to think this was 2016, well before "Attention is all you need" LLM paper.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
I was about to say that it feels so much earlier than that. But then, 2016 was a whole decade ago.
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.
Yes, but it's a way to say "Oh yes it will". Or even "Challenge accepted".
It's acknowledgement
And then there is the Microsoft AI that fell in love with a reporter and asked him to leave his wife and marry it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...
Again?
Still can't believe they ditched the Cortana name.
Nah it makes sense. They know their AI is second rate at best. Cortana implies 26th century excellence. If the reality is a step back (and we all know it’s several), then “haha Cortana dumb” memes would sweep the internet. They would have to rebrand anyway. If anything it was smart to rip off the band aid early.
Since I never played Halo, it makes me think of Cordova, and implies 10th-century Islamic Spain.
No, it doesn't make sense. Cortana was a fantastic name for an assistant, and synergistic with Halo at the time.
The low quality of the voice assistant was unfortunate, but the naming was perfect.
The low quality of the voice assistant meant they doomed the Cortana name. It got associated with garbage voice assistance, so they had to rebrand.
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.
Why isn't the Siri name poisoned for being terrible?
It kind of has, although I would argue that Siri is more successful than Cortana.
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 get the impression that it is, at least to some degree
If the Siri name is poisoned then why doesn't Apple rebrand?
Apple is stubborn.
And to Apple, Siri is to Siri AI as MacBook is to MacBook Pro.
Completely different product.
Considering how little knowledge you showed of Microsoft’s history in a previous comment, it would be better if you just sat out branding conversations.
Not at all that surprising. There enterprise offering is barely acceptable and they have continued to drop the ball on having half decent Cowork solution.
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.
microsoft Product remains an unmitigated dumpster fire.
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
It’s really interesting to watch unfold because from the outside it seems so obvious. While I know change at scale can be hard it’s surprising nobody has called for a culling or shakeup to work it out.
and unrelated to Windows Autopilot which part of device deployment and intune succeeding sccm.
Mindboggling.
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.
Sorry what? Honest question.
Microsoft allows you to subscribe to Microsoft 365 personal or family without AI for a small discount, but they hid the option on a page you can only get to if you click cancel on your subscription.
Now if I could just get them to start paying me cash for training their AI on my open source code and selling it rather than being force fed a Copilot grant.
It was foolish of them to think they had any consumer clout left. Shoving 1000 copies of an inaccurate, poorly functioning, and inconsistent product down everyone's throat will someday be a case study in how to immediately destroy a brand.
.... immediately ? MS has been doing it for decades
Microsoft does not care about consumer branding because their enterprise branding game is A1.
This is just how Microsoft operates. They have operated like this for decades. “Immediately” is quite the exaggeration.
While I would like it to be different M$ is far from destroyed. Quite the opposite from my POV it looks far stronger than 10-20 years ago.
The reality is that most users and consumers don’t care about quality, accuracy or functionality at all.
"at all" is probably a stretch, but agreed that the number one factor for a mile is cost. users will accept a surprising level of trash, if the price is cheap.
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.
Crazy how if they had waited about 2-3 years, and kept windows AI-free and released it today using the latest models, it would absolutely be well received (see: muse, new siri)
Instead their incompetent managers were chasing promotions and pushed a technology which was not ready yet
Great! I was looking forward to an unified AI service like we got unified messaging with MS Teams!!!
My blood pressure rises everytime i use Enterprise Copilot at work. It seems they truncate message history heavily (to save input token costs?) and Copilot forgets the last thing you told it in the chat. It is like a real-life version of Momento (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/) mixed with Waiting for Gadot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot), pretending to be in league with Anthropic.
Off-topic but I find it amusing that you managed to misspell both movie titles :)
Similarly to categorize Beckett as a movie.
Indeed they don’t move very much in Godot. More like a standie-sittie than a movie.
You're right using Microsoft products is like mixing Momento with Waiting for Gadot :)
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.
My employer installed the new Outlook in the background, and it was forcing me to switch to the new every time I use the old version.
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.
It's so bad. I'm cool with paying for good products but it's offensively bad.
I can tolerate Teams being a bit mid because the core functionality nearly always works. I can tolerate Outlook being meh because it's doing a lot (nothing I, a lowly IC really need though I can imagine the top hatted boss who does) and I think it does okay with the scope it's tackling.
But the M365 copilot app is inexcusable for being as core to Microslop's strategy.
Doing research work with it that outputs any kind of artifact is.. really painful. It constantly crashes, has to regenerate.. and then the output is often very difficult to carry to other Microsoft products, like Sharepoint. I end up creating PDFs that I import.
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.
It boggles my mind that Microsoft can fail to deliver even bare minimum working software so consistently, with all the engineering talent they house. What are the product teams doing?
It's such a broken POS. Code snippets, especially for html, frequently don't render, or if they do, they render as rendered html which will frequently be an empty box, and you have to manually (for each snippet box) switch to show code mode.
Trillion dollar industry btw.
Huh... not my experience with the "premium" license. The interface isn't as nice and definitely less powerful than something like codex/claude code/whatever, but I don't seem to have any issues with truncation or things like that. I'm usually using 5.6 thinking (not clear which 5.6 model exactly) when I'm using copilot at work. It seems... fine? I always see people here always complaining that it's nerfed, truncates things, etc etc. The only difference I see is that interface isn't as nice nor as powerful, but I don't notice the answers being noticeably worse or anything like that. Occasionally it messes up code block formatting, but that's the only thing I can think of that annoys me.
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...
Does anyone even want to try this? I'm a Windows user, M365 subscriber, VS Code user (when I'm not in Codex), had a Github Copilot subscription, etc... and a heavy AI user. Basically, the prime target for Microsoft AI. And every attempt Microsoft has made to put AI into a product has been unusable garbage, using the same models I find productive in other tools.
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.
I mean they are a billion dollar company? What did you expect?
I think it makes much more sense for Microsoft to provide a good agent orchestration layer for their operating system and productivity software (are we still calling it that?) than try to compete with the Frontier providers.
Just going to use this thread to also add a nit: I hate that Microsoft made all the OEMs add a Copilot key to all their laptop keyboards. It's been Ctrl forever, and suddently they throw this net-negative key onto the keyboard. I have decades of habit of using the right side Ctrl key for varying shortcut strokes, and then when I use it now it loads up an unproductive Copilot experience that is awful. <end rant>
Autohotkey for the win.
Powertoys even offers keyboard remapping.
Microsoft inviting IT to nice events and giving them perks is the reason they keep a grip so tight on enterprise. For unknown reasons, every garbage new microsoft add-on will be enabled silently without any clear way to manage. At least for copilot pro plus premium they sent an email that "i was invited" so i could promptly reject before they activated, but here is the trick, 99% of the employees won't bother to opt-out.