How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'? (teybannerman.com)

It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again

Microsoft yearns for the flight simulator.

Its annoying especially since Copilot exists in Visual Studio (Code too I believe) and its not exactly "the same" thing as far as I can tell. I really hate Microsoft's naming conventions. At least call that one Copilot for Devs or something more meaningful.

Isn’t it just their AI llm thing?

> .. the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things. Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’.

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.

Plot twist: he used Copilot to generate the figure.

It reminds me of around 2002 when Microsoft named everything ".net".

For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.

It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.

Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product (2022-2023 code autocomplete) but they completely ensloppified it

Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI. How many products have Copilot? Just about all of them.

Related/same discussion:

What Is Copilot Exactly?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231

Okay. But how many products have Gemini or Claude in the name?

Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).

They should have called it Micro.

No one can ruin microslops branding better than microslop.

Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson

I actually was just thinking about doing something very similar for this but for "agent," specifically in the Microsoft ecosystem. There are a zillion different proper nouns (products, services, frameworks, toolkits and tools, SDKs etc.) containing "agent" now, plus a bunch of other things that are now "agentic".

I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap?

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?

It's just one brand: Copilot

It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.

The only Microsoft products I’ve actively heard people desire within the last 5 years are VSCode and Excel. Microsoft have so severely damaged their brand that they’ve finally shed the image of oddly gray Dell midtowers running XP on Pentium 4.

To be fair, Google does it too. I just had the product I work on renamed to Gemini Enterprise. Sure we use Gemini but it’s confusing because it’s not really an “enterprise” version of Gemini. It’s just a way to name drop what it uses under the hood. This was our third rename in 4 years so probably will change again soon

Microsoft is uniquely unable to name / brand anything sensibly:

"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...