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.
Yeah the difference with Microsoft though is they actually hold the enterprise data and have been entrusted with doing so. So if Microsoft’s AI bypasses the governance guards a company puts in place on data that lives in O365, they are liable. With Cowork and OpenAI the liability is on the employee who is misusing the data because the company did not go into any governance agreement with Anthropic or OpenAI.
Eh I guess? I just said they have all rights to win because of existing agreements. Most enterprises have already banned OpenAI/Anthropic from their networks unless an agreement was put into place. So yes they have all rights to win this but their product is so bad that there is a healthy oppportunity that does not happen.
Are you using Copilot as a daily driver? Because all people I talk to that use it as a daily driver in enterprise have only said it keeps getting better and better.
Microsoft took a safer approach to copilot rollout because of enterprise data protection, OpenAI/Anthropic rolled out their best to get people hooked and elected to figure out the data protection later.
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.
Microsoft will forever be in my personal dumpsterfire. Absolute trash. How the fuck they can allow admins to disable copy and expect anyone to get anything done. I work in healthcare I’m expected to understand what is confidential and what is not as part of my job. 99% of my email has nothing confidential in it but yet I cannot copy an email address or drag a block of text anywhere. It is so infuriating…. That guess what…. Everyone sends their emails to their personal address. Good work…. I realise this is the sysadmins washing their hands of accountability. But Microsoft should allow copying an email address from their own profile pages. I do other admin that requires lists of people emails and I have to resort to all sorts of crap to get their email address out of Microsoft. It’s a joke. They can burn in hell.
> 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.
Some of us have internalized it! It's like walking around in the twilight zone or the bodysnatchers movie sometimes. In a dream society we could agree on some values and argue about how to direct our shared efforts. In this one we can't agree on values or even facts. It's equal parts maddening and terrifying.
We need help in avoiding the worst futures that could come from this.
Iirc Microsoft increased the pricing on existing subscriptions on next renewal citing AI as the reason for the increase, they then added a no AI version at the original price, effectively opting all users into the 'upgrade' rather than requiring them to explicitly upgrade their licence.
It’s a documented fact that a lot of subscription services will offer you a discount if you ask to cancel. This has been a thing in the US with cable tv for about a decade, as far as I’m aware. I think some cell providers might do the same. Not everything, but some.
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.
Like copyright on training input? Fair use has done a lot heavier of a lift on that than it would every have to do on opensource, license prohibiting it or not.
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.
I guess most users of Microsoft products are not the buyers of said products.
When these tools are getting forced upon you in the workplace, there's often not so much you can do. I can raise the quality issues in the 1-to-1 with my manager, but it won't have any effect.
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
These kinds of features absolutely come from the top. VP level, at the very least, if that's what you mean by incompetent managers. The middle managers are just trying to do their jobs and figure out how to get it done. If they say no, they're just going to lose their job faster than they'd lose it to AI.
No, the very top. Nadella has been driving this directly, he was going to get there first, shock & awe, etc. Maybe this would have worked if Microsoft cared about customer experience as much as it cares about customer lock-in.
>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)
But that would make John Shareholder sad! He wants it done now, this quarter!
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?
I feel it is even worse than bare minimum -- it is so bad it infuriates the user. It is hard to get away from that reaction when one uses better alternatives in their personal life.
If you prompted an AI to return answers "as though you habitually ate soap and crayons while mouth breathing" you'd still get a better response than copilot
That used to be the case, but the current Enterprise version, with the poorly-named "GPT 5.6 think deeper" option, is very decent indeed. Can't tell if it's Sol, Terra or a mixture of the two, but it's certainly not Luna.
(Stick with the default "Auto" and you probably get Phi-4 -- it's lobotomised AF.)
I use Copilot a lot now. Unlimited, free, high-quality, enterprise-protected inference is not to be sniffed at. It also writes some of the nicest code I've ever seen from an LLM, that's almost entirely free of comments.
Are you referring to GitHub Copilot? I believe this thread is referring to Windows Copilot, such as the AI feature embedded into every Office progam, which is not the same experience.
Try sending this prompt to "GPT 5.6 Think Deeper" in the interface:
Provide me with optimised python code to perform a prime number search. Test the code and report on performance. Benchmark different search solutions. Provide the code in a downloadable zip archive.
A silly toy example, but it should help give a hint of what's possible.
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...
Given you're comparing to codex/claude code you probably arent talking about MS Copilot (e.g. the thing inside MS Teams but also available standalone as MS Copilot 365). Try it out and be convinced :-)
I think I am! I use it in the browser instead of teams/the desktop app, but my understanding is that it should be the same thing. I do know most people don’t get the premium license with it at my company, not 100% sure what difference that makes.
But yeah, comparing to codex/claude code was a bit silly since those can do way more. It’s closer to the chatGPT. I’m pretty sure 5.6 Luna or something, not sure exactly since it doesn’t specify Luna/Terra/Sol
One difference is that the premium copilot has access to company files and those on your onedrive, whereas the non premium version requires you to upload files.
I don't think there is a misunderstanding. I don't recall ever having an issue with it either. Now I don't do anything extreme with it. Just questions, suggestions, or some basic task which are either Microsoft or basic business activity related. I haven't tried anything like coding, deep analysis, or anything complicated. It feels like it is for business tasks so I haven't really tried to push it to do anything outside of that.
When people ask me why I don't have any Windows machine at home, I say "for health reasons". It really raises my blood pressure and at some point I realised it's not worth it risking my health over it. You could use the same to get away from Copilot.
I only have one Windows install left and I only have it to (1) play some games with Windows-only anti-cheat and (2) play my flight simulator, where the hardware is finnicky to get working on Linux. And honestly, (2) seems to be becoming less of a hassle every month, especially now you can throw agents at the driver issues.
i feel like i have to shower after using windows. a decade ago when i left the only OS id ever known and grew up on behind, i was scared my computing experience would pale in comparison. boy was i wrong, windows just kind of ... sucks.
once i finally outgrew the tribalism that came with having used windows for the first couple decades of my life, i feel like i just have little to no reverence for that OS anymore that is made by a company that has been downright hostile to computing in general.
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 believe it’s checkbox-filling in the acquisition process for enterprise contracts, like a lot of other half-baked capabilities in their flagship products.
It doesn’t matter how they work, it matters you can tell leadership “yes, they have that too” to maintain existing contracts and vendor relationships.
You’re precisely right. In corporate purchases many times it’s not the best product that is bought but instead the one that can answer yes to the most questions.
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 for you account without any clear way to reject. At least for copilot pro plus premium they sent a email that "i was invited" so i could promptly reject before they activated.
This has happened to me, but only a couple of times. I think it’s an issue with the UI, not with the actual LLM output, and a reload of the page fixes it.
I think it’s related to how they display the LLM output, through some obfuscation layer in the HTML presented to the browser. I tried to save a thread as pdf once and that got me nowhere because of this.
Yes, it's an absolutely terrible UI, probably the worst ever coupled to an LLM. I have no idea why those *'s pepper the code blocks (but it's not coming from the model: reload, and you'll generally see the codeblock render correctly). The interface is bloated, slow, fugly and massively over-engineered. That's the price of entry.
But you don't need to get code from the chat window -- that's so 2024. There is an entire agentic coding remote sandbox built into the Enterprise M365 version. It's not talked about, or advertised, but it's there. Just ask for your code changes back in a zip.
It turns out almost anything is possible with Copilot, if you spend a bit of time thinking it through and exploring its capabilities. It is a surprisingly powerful platform.
I agree, “Think Deeper” seems good for chatbot-style use. However, “Quick Response” is awful, even for simple, one-step queries and very often makes things up or contradicts its earlier replies.
This is crazy to me. I work in local government and for a state in Australia and most LG orgs are battling with the confusing of the current Enterprise Copilot conveluted-ness. This is just another change to deal with. What happens with Agents, Studio, Cowork and Scout? Is this a rebrand again of those?
This is how it looks to me now: we have "The New Copilot”, which is Home, Code and Autopilot. Meanwhile an organisation is already trying to explain usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot in Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook etc, Copilot Studio, Agents, Agent Builder, Researcher / Analyst and other agents, Cowork, Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Actions, Workflows and connectors.
I know frontier AI labs change a lot, but this just seems like throwing a new mask on the product to cover the mess underneath.
You forgot GitHub Copilot which most of us refer to as VS Code Copilot.
(point-of-clarity: I am referring to Copilot within VS Code IDE not Copilot manifestations within the GitHub website UX, which I think is also called GitHub Copilot)
> Jacob Andreou, who leads product development of the unified Copilot app, told the audience of corporate customers on Wednesday. Importing some user experience features from the consumer app “made Copilot so much better in just the last few months,” he said.
IMHO this is the primary reason that Copilot as a brand has been polluted to the point of "meaningless." Today, a year later, there are probably 60 different permutations.
Microsoft missed making CoPilot actually useful and getting it to a state people wpuld want to use it as an assistant. Huge missed opportunity just like the mobile OS.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 95.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...
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 took a safer approach to copilot rollout because of enterprise data protection, OpenAI/Anthropic rolled out their best to get people hooked and elected to figure out the data protection later.
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.
What fresh hell is that?
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.
It’s really surprising to me that after the US public hasn’t internalized how corrupt the country has become. It’s all coming from the top
We need help in avoiding the worst futures that could come from this.
The reality is that most users and consumers don’t care about quality, accuracy or functionality at all.
When these tools are getting forced upon you in the workplace, there's often not so much you can do. I can raise the quality issues in the 1-to-1 with my manager, but it won't have any effect.
Instead their incompetent managers were chasing promotions and pushed a technology which was not ready yet
But that would make John Shareholder sad! He wants it done now, this quarter!
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.
But the M365 copilot app is inexcusable for being as core to Microslop's strategy.
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.
If you prompted an AI to return answers "as though you habitually ate soap and crayons while mouth breathing" you'd still get a better response than copilot
(Stick with the default "Auto" and you probably get Phi-4 -- it's lobotomised AF.)
I use Copilot a lot now. Unlimited, free, high-quality, enterprise-protected inference is not to be sniffed at. It also writes some of the nicest code I've ever seen from an LLM, that's almost entirely free of comments.
My experience was great because I had premium license and only used thinking models
Most colleagues didn’t have premium and used default/auto model
People stick to their very first bad experience unfortunately
I don't think many people are aware of just how much it can do; it's certainly not advertised, and very likely not intended.
Provide me with optimised python code to perform a prime number search. Test the code and report on performance. Benchmark different search solutions. Provide the code in a downloadable zip archive.
A silly toy example, but it should help give a hint of what's possible.
Trillion dollar industry btw.
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...
But yeah, comparing to codex/claude code was a bit silly since those can do way more. It’s closer to the chatGPT. I’m pretty sure 5.6 Luna or something, not sure exactly since it doesn’t specify Luna/Terra/Sol
once i finally outgrew the tribalism that came with having used windows for the first couple decades of my life, i feel like i just have little to no reverence for that OS anymore that is made by a company that has been downright hostile to computing in general.
The interface is shockingly terrible, but with electron and a few hours with devtools, you can improve on it substantially.
I hope this new release does not change too much.
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.
By the numbers we just call them “most people”… you’re in the minority by quite a growing stretch.
(Not the be confused with the Claude Opus 5. That's a different lord that didn't turn out to be a saviour.)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/18/young-adu...
The numbers and trend lines are clear regardless of your layman relative.
It doesn’t matter how they work, it matters you can tell leadership “yes, they have that too” to maintain existing contracts and vendor relationships.
Powertoys even offers keyboard remapping.
As someone who works with Microsoft intune autopilot regularly... ugh.
Select "GPT 5.6 Think deeper" (ugh, so unrevealing, MS) and you've got free, unlimited Sol or Terra (likely a mix depending on load) on tap.
It writes very nice, clean code with almost no comments.
I use it a lot.
I think it’s related to how they display the LLM output, through some obfuscation layer in the HTML presented to the browser. I tried to save a thread as pdf once and that got me nowhere because of this.
But you don't need to get code from the chat window -- that's so 2024. There is an entire agentic coding remote sandbox built into the Enterprise M365 version. It's not talked about, or advertised, but it's there. Just ask for your code changes back in a zip.
It turns out almost anything is possible with Copilot, if you spend a bit of time thinking it through and exploring its capabilities. It is a surprisingly powerful platform.
This is how it looks to me now: we have "The New Copilot”, which is Home, Code and Autopilot. Meanwhile an organisation is already trying to explain usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot in Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook etc, Copilot Studio, Agents, Agent Builder, Researcher / Analyst and other agents, Cowork, Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Actions, Workflows and connectors.
I know frontier AI labs change a lot, but this just seems like throwing a new mask on the product to cover the mess underneath.
(point-of-clarity: I am referring to Copilot within VS Code IDE not Copilot manifestations within the GitHub website UX, which I think is also called GitHub Copilot)
What do you mean by that? In what way?
That's in relation to an estimated 450 million or so M365 subscriptions for businesses.
Not exactly a huge success.
Yeah, it’s shit lol.