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I think the difference with Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, and where it's being pushed. Because Copilot is bundled with software people need, it's going to get a lot more scrutiny compared to AI products that aren't built into the OS/built into Office, etc. In a way, being an "agentic OS" isn't that different from say Moltbot (conceptually), but one of those ideas seems to have gotten quite a bit of excitement, and the other a lot of anger, because Moltbot isn't being forced on you.
The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.
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.
I expect this is the crux of the problem.
There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.
Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.
But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.
I started working in 1997. Cisco was one of our big customers so I knew a lot of engineers there. Cisco stock hid $80 in 2000. In 2002 it was at $10.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/
I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.
I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.
What do you mean exactly by "diversify"? Money/investment-wise?
Sell the risky stock that has inflated in value from hype cycle exuberance and re-invest proceeds into lower risk asset classes not driven by said exuberance. "Taking money off the table." An example would be taking ISO or RSU proceeds and reinvesting in VT (Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF) or other diversified index funds.
Taking money off the table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763769 - October 2025 (108 comments)
(not investing advice)
What tomuchtodo said. When I left Sun in 1995 I had 8,000 shares, which in 1998 would have paid off my house, and when I sold them when Oracle bought Sun after a reverse 3:1 split, the total would not even buy a new car. Can be a painful lesson, certainly it leaves an impression.
I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.
The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.
And this is the broken mindset tanking multiple large companies' products and services (Google, Apple, MS, etc). Focus on the stock. The product and our users are an afterthought.
Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.
0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/
> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.
Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.
Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026
This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...
> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.
> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology
> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked
> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died
("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
It's happened before.
Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.
Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.
Doesn't matter what the leaders think if the users hate it and call it slop
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...
They boosted copilot numbers by renaming office to copilot. No I'm not joking.
Musk could learn from this to boost his FSD subscription numbers for his bonus payouts.
I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling.
Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.
MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…
I noticed this and I wad enraged but it. The URL to the old page is way less easy to remember and I had to add it to my bookmarks. I'm still peeved about it.
The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?
But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill manageable.
Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.
The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted.
Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
> Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.
...
On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...
It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by selling at all costs, despite the products edges.
Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.
> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."
That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:
The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.
KPI infection. You see projects whose goal is, say "repos with A I code review turned on" vs "Code review suggestions that were accepted". And then if you do get adoption (like, say, a Claude Code trial), then VPs balk about price. If it's actually expensive now it's because they are actually using it all the time!
The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.
Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole:
> “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.
I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product.
Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.
I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.
That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.
Incentives almost always drive the outcome.
It's almost as if that's what incentives are for. Whether the outcome is the intended one is of course another question entirely.
That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.
You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there
Yeah - Google really tried to get people to use Google+ but it always sucked.
YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.
> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.
I'm still super mad at Google+ because it was clearly the cause for Google Reader been killed.
That's when I started losing trust in Google as a company.
It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?
I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.
Comment was deleted :(
> Why can't it just be called "internet"?
Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.
That was the only time when YouTube actually had a proper comment system and you would actually get notified when someone replied to you consistently.
I wish they'd've kept the parts people used the most.
Frankly it's how they insist themselves onto their potential users. When I toyed around with Edge a year or two ago, just to get the t-shirt, it was impossible to set a custom home page for first-open instead of MSN crap. New tabs could be customized, but not the initial page. Apparently they fixed it since, but I still don't see Edge as a serious browser, just another rent seeking marketing tool.
>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers.
I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go
Edge /is/ a chromium based browser, it makes sense people wouldn't feel the need to download Chrome unless they want to use their google account to sync devices.
Agree. I gave it a shot recently after being a hater of MS browsers since the 90's and am actually very happy with it. I love the Workspaces and syncing features. Arc had something similar, but Arc started to stall out remain frustratingly buggy. Edge is now my go-to...
Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?
I really enjoyed Edge after it launched, but when they stuffed in all of the shopping plugins and integrations I bailed on it.
Also Teams and OneNote.
If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.
CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.
> Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.
MSFT not being good at naming things is not new.
I actually think Google+ was a good idea and it's a shame google now has a dozen different products with completely different social identities. Facebook does this right, you have one profile.
Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".
Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.
What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.
And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?
I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
Comments in Facebook may not be perfect, but they are vastly better than youtube comments. This is a false equivalence.
Our experiences differ in that regard. And no it isn't a false equivalence since Facebook's "use your real ID" commenting system is directly comparable to any proposed system to mandate use of someone's ID to post on other platforms.
> I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.
The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.
It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.
I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.
Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.
Youtube comments have been nice and constructive for a few years now
Maybe this is just me only subscribing to channels where people behave in the comments and the channel owner actually does some moderation, but I actually kind of agree.
Sure, you find disagreements and arguments, but you don't get the 'ur mum gae', the reductio ad Hitlerum, the dongers, and the outright insane takes and paragraphs of all caps that I would expect from Youtube comments. Meanwhile, every time I open Facebook because of some event I need to press 'going' on, I get a glimpse of some inane take or someone writing in all caps because reasons.
There have been a few waves of comment spam, but maybe Youtube actually managed to curb that now? Only took them two or so years.
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It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop.
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).
It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get what you get, even if it sucks.
Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.
It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.
> It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI.
Yeah. Right now the <title> of office.com is:
> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI
Microsoft 365 Copilot... what a product name.
Putting "AI integrations" on Windows 11 is like layering surstromming on a turd.
innovators dilemma.
they see that the future is AI, but AI doesnt need Microsoft.
Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular.
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.
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.
> most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity.
The iPhone is a much stronger contender for that title. It has probably surpassed $1 Trillion in profit for Apple since 2007.
Google search is extremely vulnerable to SEO scams. It's very common to see advertised/high ranked scams with similar domain names (e.g bankname.com vs bankname.co). I switched to Kagi mainly for this reason.
Then prove it? There have been actual studies that confirm this fact. You could also use the fact that google search has been losing market share steadily since 2023 and since search was supported on things like chatGPT as evidence it has been in decline. But, as I have in the past also said, I refuse to argue about this with google employees/devotees because there seems to be a fair amount of delusion involved.
For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)
>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion
if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse.
the 'new' ai mode routinely creates these silly categories that are not what i was looking for and my screen is filled with repetitive ai summaries of articles. it will ingest a source as fact, and then use that fact to create confirmation bias across other articles. it will even use words like "confirm" when it finds a source saying something, even if the source is junk or seo spam. it becomes somewhat impossible to escape the assumptions the model has made, and i have to resort to traditional web search to get diversity in my results.
and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.
I don't use it often, but at least now I can get an answer. I swear in early 2023 I would just get completely irrelevant, borderline spammy results to the point I gave up and felt helpless because there was no real alternative at that time for how I used google. It felt like the internet broke for a window of time and Bing (very briefly) brought me out of that hell. To this day I still can't believe they didnt capitalize on it.
It cost them (as a guess) -1T of market cap..
In other words they still got rewarded by the market despite all the missteps. I don’t agree with this reality but here we are.
Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.
One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.
Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.
I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company
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.
Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.
Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft.
But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
You mean Munich, and Microsoft bribed them millions of dollars and a HQ relocation to put Microsoft Office back.
Most people are just highly resistant to change, even change for the better.
Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.
The unironic use of "off brand office suite" here is hysterically tragic.
Also, the productivity suite formerly known as Office is these days called "365 Copilot".
Which one did they switch to?
Here's a case of a recent one which is early in the cycle
https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft...
LibreOffice isn't bad at all.
LibreOffice is catastrophically bad. It is slow, buggy, and everything it does is either pointlessly emulating a bad product, or pointlessly going against expectations.
It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.
I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.
I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.
In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.
I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.
Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.
What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.
But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.
So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.
I'm with wolvoleo. I'm forced to use MS Office at work but install only LO on my personal machines. It may lack features or pizzazz but as a reliable, unfussy authoring tool, it serves my needs very well.
> pointlessly going against expectations
If you're referring to the ribbon, I'm not sold on its superiority. The vast majority of other software still uses the familiar menu structure, which is what LO uses too.
Granted, well meaning educational programs expose students to MS Office and its paradigm, from an early age. For their sake, I eagerly await a coding assistant AI powerful enough to reskin LibreOffice to look just MS Office, ribbon and all.
I started my wife on LibreOffice, putting it on her Mac when her 365 subscription lapsed. She loves it. Her needs aren't fancy, though, and she can create her own or open others' documents and spreadsheets just fine.
I recently began using markdown readers/writers like Typora and they’ve blown me away— what LibreOffice Writer could have been. Competing directly with MS Word was a trap.
How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
There was a conspiracy theory in my company that M$ had plants in my company to turn everything into M$. "If it doesnt have the word M$ in it, we aren't using it."
I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.
As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.
From the article, "its productivity software is used by hundreds of millions of corporate users, a captive audience to whom it can easily promote new AI products."
Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.
If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.
I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.
I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is that.
This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.
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Microslop can never be a real Ai company if they can't build a frontier model and push the envelope themselves. Today they are completely dependent on 3rd party companies, not a good position to be in.
It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.
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.
And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-notch.)
Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
Ah, thanks. That must be the link with Simon Peyton Jones as well. Seems to be another case of a marketing machine running away with foundational research coming from Europe.*
* no hard feelings
I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv being the strongest technical organization at MS than its provenance.
I STILL REMEMBER WHEN SOME MARKETING IDIOT DECIDED THAT VISUAL STUDIO NEEDED TO SHOUT AT YOU. IT TOOK THREE MAJOR VERISONS BEFORE VISUAL STUDIO STOPPED LOOKING LIKE THIS COMMENT. OF COURSE THERE WASN'T A SETTING TO MAKE IT NORMAL AGAIN.
Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer experience in Visual Studio.
Also VS 2026 was released with a hard milestone, thus while there is a new settings experience, many options show a dialog from VS 2022, because the new UI is still not implemented for the new experience.
Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality.
Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.
I think after the failure of Metro, I think Microsoft gave up on native apps entirely and now the story is web or Electron.
It appears the problem is more deep than that.
From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.
Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place.
I might be wrong, this is more my perception than anything else.
I would say the web took over as the primary application platform and Unix-likes provided convenient low cost license-free foundations to build them on.
> nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.
So, in other words, the kids grow up learning and using Linux, right?
Developers, at least. And Macs.
But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive
Don't worry, after a decade or two of having Windows reinstall and re-enable it every couple weeks against their users' wishes I'm sure they'll get the market penetration they're looking for...
This is repeated endlessly by non-Windows fans I assume, because I disabled AI and other annoyances in Windows long ago and they haven't come back. I even used to worry about updating Windows because I saw this warning so many times, but then I did and it just never came to pass.
Microsoft has a long and well documented history of resetting user preferences.
Multiple times I've disabled the cortana taskbar search widget, only to have a windows update turn it back on and proudly gives me a popup telling me they noticed it was disabled and turned it back on for me.
Microsoft will forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.
Starting when you selected "don't install Windows 10" and it asked you a few times and you kept selecting that and then you woke up one day and your computer was running Windows 10, and blue screened when you logged in
Copilot is basically ChatGPT after Microsoft hit it on the head with a pipe hard enough and long enough to drop it about 20 IQ points.
The 3.3% paid conversion is not great.
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.
> Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.
I audibly winced
There are in fact almost 30 products with Copilot in the name now. Though they've seem to have cut a few recently like the sales version
> unlike anything we've seen before
They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…
Comment was deleted :(
> growth is "unlike anything we've seen before"
This says nothing about where the growth is going
Microsoft's focus was making it so that AI could allow unskilled workers to replace skilled workers. The hope was that everyone but sales/management could be offshored to SEA/India/etc and AI would somehow make up for the skill differential.
The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.
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.
Microsoft has access to all the OpenAI/ChatGPT tech. How is their chatbot so awful? Seems like they are trying their hardest to screw this up.
Product leaders should really measure internal usage as a litmus test for whether or not people actually want these things. It's honestly shocking how much MS's brand has diminished in the last few years because of them pushing the copilot brand into everything.
They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year.
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.
It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the company to open source, naturally not without their own intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer branding, anything related to Windows.
> ...they are down ~12% for the year.
Given how unstable stock prices typically are over the short term, and given that we're currently something like thirty-five days into the year, I don't consider that fact to mean much.
Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.
Copilot is such a typical MS product.
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
Microsoft Copilot: The Sharepoint of chatbots
I can't imagine a description more likely to give corporate workers the ick.
Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.
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.
Can't say Win 11 is really that bad.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
Comment was deleted :(
> which "just doesn't work"
step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
step 2. download iso
step 3. flash iso on medium
step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.
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According to the CEO peddling AI, software engineers are about to be replaced by AI, how come AI hasn't fixed all of their atrocious software hmmm..
The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.
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
The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.
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.
Agree. In general, the whole Microsoft "Admin" panel is utter garbage. Messy, slow, with ten different interfaces. Finding something without Googling it first is impossible.
Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.
This still works for me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565
Ok, let's put that in the toptext. Thanks!
If you have Apple News, you can open the article in Safari and then "Share" it to the News app.
For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original
Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems
...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems
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.
x=AA1VBKdf
{ echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(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
Correction: Three tags: 1. <p>, 2. <a> with href attribute and 3. <meta> with charset attribute
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code