[HN Gopher] The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
___________________________________________________________________
The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
Author : belter
Score : 246 points
Date : 2025-01-26 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| phren0logy wrote:
| Given how hard Microsoft is leaning into AI, and how important
| Office 365 is, the Copilot for 365 is shockingly bad.
| rUsHeYaFuBu wrote:
| I think these things have potential to improve over time.
|
| If nothing else I do like being able to get a relative quick
| explanation for how to change some obscure or minute
| functionality in the Windows OS.
|
| Now, would it be better if the Win OS, by default wasn't
| obnoxiously in the way with the pretense of being "simpler"?
| Yes!
|
| At least there are some truly free OS's out there that keep the
| interface consistent through iterations and generally improve
| overtime.
| phren0logy wrote:
| I'm sure it will improve over time. I'm just surprised it was
| as bad as it was at launch, and has improved minimally.
| hotstickyballs wrote:
| That's because the alternative is worse.
| riskable wrote:
| This change was probably recommended/implemented via AI.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| But what consequences will a really large company face for such a
| prominent disaster? They got what they wanted, which is an excuse
| to force everyone into paying for new AI products through price
| increases forced into enterprise contract renewals. It is the
| same thing that Google just did with Google Workspace or Google
| Apps or whatever their office suite is called now, where everyone
| is forced to pay for their new Gemini AI features even if they
| don't want it.
|
| The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit.
| They are achieving that, so for them this isn't a disaster. They
| are doing that through illegal bundling, and preventing anyone
| else from competing for the same revenue fairly. To me that is
| the real disaster, because it is undermining the startup
| ecosystem.
| sarajevo wrote:
| We did an enterprise license renewal with them last summer.
| They offered and we accepted a purchase of a large block of
| m364 license in exchange for a substantial discount in the
| overall price. Worked for us, worked for them, so no complaints
| there. We are measuring engagement and time-savings per user
| and we are doing pretty good on the engagement side while time
| savings side is barely breaking even (comparing the price of
| the product versus monetary value of the time saved per user on
| a monthly basis).
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Is m364 the same as m365 but without AI? What is the SKU?
| easton wrote:
| As far as I can tell, they didn't do this price increase on
| the business/enterprise SKUs at all. Copilot is still an
| add on for any of the integration with Office.
|
| (Something the UI reminds you of if you're on a business
| plan without it, if you click the button it offers to
| request a license from your admin unless they remembered to
| turn that off.)
| jampekka wrote:
| The startup ecosystem in which the goal is to get bought to be
| killed by the monopolies would help us how anyway?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| My point was that any deserving and more helpful product that
| is not from Microsoft or Google will not see any revenue
| because customers are already being forced to pay for
| Microsoft or Google's AI products.
| dartharva wrote:
| > The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and
| profit.
|
| Unfortunately, it's much worse - logically, such stunts are
| detrimental to revenue in the long term if they lead to loss of
| customer confidence. But they don't care about that, they are
| doing this to hype up and remove legitimate skepticism for "AI"
| products among the investor class and solidify the bubble.
|
| _AI is the next big thing suckers, look how all of our
| customers are using it. WDYM we "forced" it on them, just shut
| up and buy MSFT_
| logicchains wrote:
| Microsoft can't even make Teams pleasant and bugfree to use; it's
| unreasonable to expect them to make a compelling AI product.
| dijit wrote:
| But people (who have never used any non-microsoft communication
| software) are always telling me that Teams isn't so bad.
|
| Never underestimate the docile nature of a captive audience.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| One of the problems I see with the 365 suite, is that most users'
| ratio of consume:produce is pretty high. IOW, they use it to view
| the content authored on it. They might author the occasional
| document, but they'll view +10x that many. This makes a one size
| fits all pricing difficult.
| munchler wrote:
| My problem with this isn't the price increase. It's the blurring
| of what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products
| (e.g. Office) and services (e.g. OneDrive) into a soup of weird
| AI and cloud stuff that all goes under a single unhelpful name
| (Copilot). My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is
| broken in this new paradigm.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| It was all part of Microsoft 365 already; Copilot just adds the
| AI slop.
| munchler wrote:
| Yes, and I was already struggling to understand what
| Microsoft 365 actually meant. Adding AI and renaming it all
| to Copilot is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
| Archit3ch wrote:
| Copilot is a button. ;)
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Clearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams
| about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out
| if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel
| "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most
| confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...
| bornfreddy wrote:
| You aren't wrong - however GP didn't use the terms "Teams"
| and "SharePoint". Those terms should never be used next to
| "understandable" unless properly negated or followed by "/s".
| duxup wrote:
| Every task I do in teams feels compromised as far as UX goes.
|
| I loathe using that app.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Teams is the most loathsome piece of collaboration software I
| have ever used. When it comes to finding basic things, the UX
| is so far from intuitive that it makes you wonder if they're
| just trolling us with these awful designs. I remember being
| excited about a Slack competitor when it first came out, but
| the same issues it had back then still exist to this day. I
| wish they would just pull the plug on that piece of crap.
| mcny wrote:
| I still don't understand why Ctrl plus shift plus C starts
| a call on teams when V pastes text unformatted and it is
| right next to it. At least let me reassign this shortcut...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's not a Slack competitor if it comes free with your
| current Microsoft licence. It's just a takeover. If it were
| any good it would've steamrollered Slack, not competed with
| it.
| xyst wrote:
| This reminds me of a very old e-mail from bill gates to his
| direct reports about the poor usability of windows (xp?)
| sunaookami wrote:
| This one? https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-
| install-mov...
| rawgabbit wrote:
| But with Copilot you can now ask it to find the file for you.
| Isn't AI amazing?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Im still trying to figure out if Loop is part of normal Office
| or what. Its a better OneNote since they seeminly dont update
| OneNote at all.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| It's funny seeing the Stockholm syndrome in action (or plain
| old forgetting) with OneDrive being touted as being part of the
| products, whereas it was the beginning of the mess that is now
| Office.
| xyst wrote:
| > My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in
| this new paradigm.
|
| It's been broken for some time, mate. The era of subscription
| based models blurred it long ago.
| mihaaly wrote:
| > what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products
| (e.g. Office)
|
| I only assume you refer to the pre 2000 state of Office.
| Confusion started way befor AI.
|
| And to me the OneDrive - was forced on my in the job - was
| never a properly usable product, allowing others think
| differently, but to me, its weird ways and failures (i.e.
| renaming files) are jus barriers to efficiency.
| munchler wrote:
| The move to a subscription model is where I started to lose
| the thread, and it's gotten worse from there.
|
| I understand OneDrive as Microsoft's version of Dropbox, but
| the more it's integrated into Windows/Office, the more
| confusion it causes me.
| maximilianthe1 wrote:
| I was confused to discover (while deleting OneDrive), that
| it had changed my Desktop folder from User/Desktop to
| User/OneDrive/Desktop.
| dartharva wrote:
| Please, never in its history has anything from Microsoft been
| "clearly understandable".
| evanelias wrote:
| > that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot)
|
| This isn't even a new dumb move for Microsoft. In the early
| 2000s, they applied the .NET brand to lots of random things
| that were completely unrelated to the runtime/framework:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| They are doing the same thing to Xbox right now. Really
| working hard to kill the brand.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to
| your cursor with no way of turning it off.
|
| I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better
| than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave
| me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-
| out mechanism.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Just let me write and leave me alone.
|
| Yeah, we have networked supercomputers in every pocket and on
| every desk. And word processors and spreadsheets have been
| around for decades---that use case is a solved problem.
|
| I suppose we can be charitable to Microsoft and say they're
| trying to innovate, but these AI features lack a clear
| practical need that they're meeting. It feels more like Big
| Tech flopping around trying to make the next big thing happen,
| rather than actually going out into the real world and solving
| problems actual humans have.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Microsoft is trying to stay relevant and have an answer to
| Wall St analysis asking them questions about their AI
| strategy. They will delete AI tools and helpers as soon as
| the industry goes after another "big idea".
| Yeul wrote:
| I guess making billions of profit isn't enough you need to
| do something with AI.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Also, they can now proudly proclaim they have 100M+
| subscribers to their AI stuff so it's a huge success :P
|
| I'm glad my web-only 365 (business basic without teams,
| can't use the family plan because I need a personal domain)
| just renewed for a year so they can't mess with mine.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| This. It is backwards attempt to become "The AI" company.
| They have sole rights to use OpenAI's technology and the
| best they can come up with is a price markup to further
| piss off their customers.
| narrator wrote:
| Libreoffice is way better than Pages.
| derefr wrote:
| Maybe in terms of being a word processor (i.e. supporting all
| the layout and editing/proofing features that Word has.)
|
| But if, as the GP says, you want a program to "just let you
| write" (with some "writing-phase" accoutrements like change-
| tracking, word count, a dynamic Table of Contents, and so
| forth) -- and you want a pleasant experience _while_ writing,
| that takes advantage of the acceleration of native OS UI
| elements to keep that writing as smooth and jank-free as
| possible... then I'd assume Pages would be the clear winner,
| no?
|
| (That, or just TextEdit. Though I'm not sure if TextEdit is
| optimized for novel-length texts the way word processors
| would tend to be.)
| righthand wrote:
| You can just write with LibreOffice. Your example of
| special acceleration for Apple made software is unfounded.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I happily used LibreOffice for years, and got a small
| businesses off Word in favor of it (well, OOo at the
| time). I'm a fan.
|
| But Pages is much more ergonomic, lightweight, and native
| on a Mac. There's not a likely scenario where I'd use
| LibreOffice over Pages.
| dijit wrote:
| The issue with nearly all of these software suites is
| compatibility.
|
| It is ironic, that libreoffice solves this _the best_ ,
| by being truly cross platform and not requiring special
| software to be purchased on the receiving end: yet it is
| the momentum of _Microsoft Word_ that would instead
| hamper adoption of other word processors.
|
| I am thinking about this, because the reason I would
| choose _not_ to use Pages, is so that I can share my
| documents to other companies or even people in my company
| who may not have a Mac.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's an excellent reason, to be sure. But here we're
| talking about an app to "just write", like opening a file
| and start pounding out an article or something. For
| someone who wants to do that, on a Mac, and who wants
| basic formatting and word-processory WYSIWYG-edness, I'd
| recommend Pages.
| righthand wrote:
| For someone who wants that I'd recommend LibreOffice as
| it does all of that as well.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Just not as natively, quickly, or ergonomically.
| righthand wrote:
| No idea how that's true, there is nothing Pages does
| differently when it comes to opening a file and "just
| writing" that LibreOffice doesn't do. If you honestly get
| hung up that LibreOffice doesn't look like it was
| developed by Apple within the last 5 years then you are
| always being disingenuous when comparing the software in
| the first place.
| dijit wrote:
| This uh... "discussion".. would make an excellent blog
| post, comparing Pages/Word and LibreOffice on a mac,
| based on merits such as:
|
| * Install UX (how difficult, what pop-ups).
|
| * First time user experience.
|
| * Launch speed.
|
| * Consistency with OS (such as using native file dialogs,
| hotkeys).
|
| * Export Options (perhaps compatibility too).
|
| * Spellchecker (especially if the OS is configured in
| another language than US english and the processor can
| detect it).
|
| * Input latency.
|
| I wonder if there would be more, though of this list I
| think LibreOffice would do very fairly compared to
| Pages.app and MS Word for Mac.
| philistine wrote:
| Well LibreOffice has at its core the ability to deliver
| me a text editor that starts in 25 seconds versus the 5
| of Pages. I'll stick to the one that saves me time every
| time I open it.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| You can turn it off. Go to preferences -> Copilot and uncheck
| the Enable Copilot checkbox.
| richm44 wrote:
| As the article explains, that's not been implemented on Mac
| yet.
| tethys wrote:
| That's not correct and also not what the article says. They
| are only talking about Excel and PowerPoint.
|
| "We're working on adding the Enable Copilot checkbox to
| Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint on Windows devices and to
| Excel and PowerPoint on Mac devices."
|
| I am using Word on my Mac (version 16.93) and do have a
| checkbox that disables Copilot.
| richm44 wrote:
| Odd - I also have 16.93 on Mac and I don't get the
| checkbox (unless I just can't find it I guess).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If you throw word behind a firewall with something like little
| snitch, does copilot disappear? There is probably zero reason
| word, excel, or powerpoint should need to connect to the
| internet.
| maximilianthe1 wrote:
| Excel has a sometimes useful feature of gripping data from
| tables from url.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| > Just let me write
|
| TextEdit all the way.
|
| I used to edit a market-leading print magazine with TextEdit. I
| don't need layout features, the designers do that in InDesign.
| I don't need a grammar checker or AI because I can write.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| I am old school. I write books and print them out to edit
| with red pen. Need all of Word's print features. Not everyone
| is a "digital writer."
| chasil wrote:
| Allow me to introduce you to WordStar, in the "modern"
| context of Joe's Own Editor.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/sci-fi-writer-releases-free-archive-
| of-l...
|
| https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor
|
| Edit: I once used WordStar 4 with a daisywheel printer.
| drooopy wrote:
| TextEdit is my editor of choice for 90% of all RTF word
| processing that I do, when on a Mac.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Do you have a copyeditor and/or proofreader? I'm a production
| editor. Part of my job is to fix stuff written by people who
| can write.
| jappgar wrote:
| You can still proof it. Op is just saying they don't need
| spellcheck (perhaps because they do have an editor).
| elicksaur wrote:
| Actually the OP specifically said "grammar" checker,
| which since they can write is likely an intentional
| distinction. Alternate phrasings reveal the absurd
| elitism of the statement.
|
| "I don't need a spellchecker because I can spell."
|
| "I don't need a calculator because I can do math."
| elicksaur wrote:
| Your comma after features should be a semicolon, but I'm sure
| you knew that!
| dunham wrote:
| > Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next
| to your cursor with no way of turning it off.
|
| They should put it in the bottom corner, next to an animated
| paperclip instead.
| robotnikman wrote:
| >next to an animated paperclip instead.
|
| Now that would be kinda funny, Clippy powered by modern AI
| utdoctor wrote:
| "It looks like you're trying to build AGI! Need help taking
| over the world responsibly?"
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| "It looks like you think whatever I am doing with all
| this venture capital is AGI! Should I bother to correct
| you?"
| passwordoops wrote:
| I heard a description of Copilot as "What Microsoft thought
| Clippy should be". Thanks, but no thanks.
| NBJack wrote:
| Ah yes, the real paperclip doomsday scenario. As was
| foretold.
| shrikant wrote:
| Well, Copilot is an anagram of "Clip too", which is sort of
| like Clippy 2.0, or Clippy Too. Microsoft's really missing
| a trick here!
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| I wish Microsoft would have the balls to do this. Meme it all
| the way. At least we'd get some good laughs out of it.
| ramoz wrote:
| It's honestly disappointing and somewhat strange that they
| didn't go this route. IP barriers?
| captn3m0 wrote:
| I am still on Office 2021 on my Mac, which was the last "non-
| subscription" offering I could find. No Copilot yet.
| kyleee wrote:
| Office 2007 works great in wine
| mrweasel wrote:
| I haven't attempted to buy it, but there should be a 2024
| version: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
| rkagerer wrote:
| Office 2003 is my preferred pick for productivity, I use it for
| all new documents - and best of all there's no ribbon.
| ozim wrote:
| Why not LibreOffice?
| NexRebular wrote:
| Office v. X on a Powerbook G4 12-inch. Can't get better than
| that...
| infecto wrote:
| The MacOS copilot implementation is horrid. Takes up a
| significant amount of screen space just to offer a summary of
| the email. Cannot turn off. For whatever reason cannot be a
| simple button with pop up on click. It's horrid.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I can't think of an email I have ever received that needed to
| be summarized?
|
| Who is writing these super long emails?
| Keyframe wrote:
| sometimes, super long email threads in corps
| Tostino wrote:
| Could definitely use this with some of the PG mailing
| list threads.
| infecto wrote:
| I could definitely see value in condensing the threads.
| Would be nice to see a single message.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I've written some super long emails; but I also include a
| TL;DR summary at the top when I do. Sometimes, the "how to
| get to the summary from the current, commonly known info"
| (long) part is useful; but not for everyone. And certainly
| not right out of the gate.
|
| That being said, I'd almost never trust an AI to generate
| the summary part.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Have you never seen how AI makes texts super long? That
| needs to be summarized again by the receiver!
|
| Like a reverse compression.
| freehorse wrote:
| > Who is writing these super long emails?
|
| Other LLMs.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Takes up a significant amount of screen space just to
| offer a summary of the email. Cannot turn off. For whatever
| reason cannot be a simple button with pop up on click._
|
| Because someone had 'Achieve Copilot feature adoption and
| utilization > 80%' on their VP level OKRs?
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Also now there on Windows
| alsetmusic wrote:
| My company is blocking it.
|
| I don't know by what mechanism, so it may only be possible with
| an enterprise license or through device management. But I know
| it's possible because I'm on the email thread where someone
| sought guidance from management and the directive was affirmed
| to block it on Macs in our fleet.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Fascinating strategy. It looks like they're forcing everybody
| into it, so it's opt-out, except there is no opt-out in the
| initial version of the app. They seem to be in the process of
| adding it now.
|
| > In your app (for example, Word), select the app menu, and
| then go to Preferences > Authoring and Proofing Tools > Copilot
| > Clear the Enable Copilot checkbox > Close and restart the
| app.
|
| > If you do not see the related button, it means this button
| has not been pushed to your Office version yet. Please be
| patient and wait for the development team to release an update.
|
| https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-d...
| _rupertius wrote:
| For those trying to work out an alternative, I've found
| OnlyOffice desktop to be pretty good - it's quite similar to
| the Microsoft products, and fully compatible, but free.
| JALTU wrote:
| Auto opt-in because again, we are what's for sale, not the
| software. And 'scuze me, gotta go check my gmail now...
| liendolucas wrote:
| Honestly thinking it again after re-reading the article. This
| feels like not being hungry at all but someone comes, opens
| your mouth against your will and pushes you a high calorie
| burger, fries and soda through your larynx. You are going to
| eat it, like it or not (just to put it politely).
| thelittleone wrote:
| Not only did the megacorp CEO's drop the ball on AI... we've
| got them gloating over widespread firing of engineers due to AI
| and then quotes like "I'm good for my $80B" like its his own
| personal money bag. And now they're force feeding crappy alpha
| AI products. The egos are well out of hand. And they give this
| group the name "The Magnificent Seven". WTF have we become. We
| trust these companies to be stewards of AGI/ASI?
| tapoxi wrote:
| Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you
| didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there,
| in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.
| fullshark wrote:
| We will solve the cheating problem with more AI, all essays
| will need to be written in 3 hour time windows in web portals
| with key-logging + copilot off and children on webcam the
| entire time. An AI will assess all the data and tell you if the
| child cheated or not.
|
| Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in
| the future, and having that skill just means you're working a
| low paying training data creation job, but we will carry on
| pretending otherwise for a few years.
| graypegg wrote:
| That sounds dystopian...
|
| Essay writing is not a task intended to make you specifically
| better at writing more essays. It's supposed to train your
| ability to explain your point of view clearly and with sound
| reasoning.
| dimator wrote:
| No one has ever cared of you're good at writing essays in the
| future, that was true 50 years ago.
|
| The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at
| writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about
| a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source
| material (book, novel, historical event, political concept,
| whatever).
|
| I'm
| cocoa19 wrote:
| The human ran out of tokens writing this response
| pylua wrote:
| Just for their essays to fed into an llm at the end of the
| day owned by mega corp.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > with key-logging + copilot off
|
| That assumes Microsoft allowing you to do so.
| smt88 wrote:
| I think it's the death of essays and also of reading. Why read
| a book when AI can read it for you? Teachers I know have
| already seen this happening.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > Why read a book when AI can read it for you?
|
| When I was a kid I used short summaries and others' essays
| for composing my "own" essays on the books I did not want to
| read (for any reasons). I'm sure generations before me did
| the same thing, maybe just had it less accessible.
|
| If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most
| likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If
| you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway
| (if you're required to do something with it short summary,
| you'll naturally read the short summary - that was a thing
| way before the "AI" hype).
|
| Text transforming language models only make accessing short
| summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being
| potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything
| else.
|
| If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole
| system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or
| meaningful system in a first place.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _maybe just had it less accessible_
|
| Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the
| work was:
|
| - find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or
| search the internet
|
| - read the summary
|
| - write your paper
|
| It would still take you hours.
|
| Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence
| prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the
| actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too.
|
| You don't need to take my word for it that things have
| changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that
| kids are doing less of their own reading and homework
| because of AI.
|
| > _If you are interested you 're gonna read that book, most
| likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If
| you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it
| anyway_
|
| This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept
| of education. There are lots of things that people _end up_
| being interested in, but they someone has to force them to
| try it.
|
| You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a
| library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals
| to them, and we know that isn't true.
|
| > _Text transforming language models only make accessing
| short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being
| potentially less reliable), but they don 't change anything
| else._
|
| You're underselling _how much easier_ the access is.
|
| > _If limited scale was only thing that was holding the
| whole system working - well, that wasn 't reliable, fair or
| meaningful system in a first place._
|
| Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a
| system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a
| nonsensical concept.
|
| A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are
| incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat
| that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system.
|
| Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or
| entertaining when it was just humans playing against each
| other? Of course not.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Yeah, I think the existence of Reader's Digest makes your
| point for you. I remember the first time my dad explained
| that it was misnamed because it wasn't really for the
| readers. It was for the people who didn't want to read.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Why read a book when AI can read it for you?
|
| because learning to read and to write is learning to think,
| and if you're the only person with some autonomy while
| everyone else regurgitates the same AI slop that's going to
| give you a lot of opportunity.
|
| Ever since the internet has been around it's been easy to
| outsource your work, it won't do anything for you in the long
| run.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Hopefully its just a return to the in class bluebook essay.
| That is like a force multiplier in learning imo due to how much
| you need to prep to feel confident going into them.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I don't think Microsoft has created a single novel or useful
| thing in the last 30 years, with the exception of vscode.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Windows 2000 was pretty revolutionary
| narrator wrote:
| As an oldtimer, when Redhat 9 came out at the same time as
| Windows 2000, Windows 2000 was ridiculously far ahead. Many
| engineers switched back to Linux from Windows for a while.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 25 years*
| rzzzt wrote:
| NT4 then?
| bluedino wrote:
| It was a security nightmare, but it was so close to what
| we're still using today it's not even funny.
| 1986 wrote:
| WSL is a big improvement over the MinGW era
| einr wrote:
| Singling out "you can now pretend your Windows is a
| reasonable facsimile of a Linux" as an example of innovation
| is not really a flex.
| thepill wrote:
| I like PowerShell :)
| msh wrote:
| I dont like windows these days but I still think they have made
| several useful things in the last 30 years:
|
| C#/.NET Windows 95 Windows 2000 Windows XP WSL SQL server
|
| for a start.
| dingaling wrote:
| I'll credit them for Windows NT, that was a solid system (
| though developed mainly by ex-DEC staff ).
|
| SQL Server was originally licensed from Sybase.
| tsujamin wrote:
| You mean Microsoft Atom? Jokes aside, a lot of the platform
| security work (VBS/ the secure kernel) is pretty novel
| bluedino wrote:
| Let's go 20.
| andy81 wrote:
| Power Query, Powershell, and .net core were revolutionary in
| their niches.
| ptek wrote:
| Encarta 95 with mindmaze 95, spider solitaire?
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Microsoft really has to pull itself together in terms of product
| branding. Microsoft 365 itself was a terrible name for an office
| suite, but adding a "copilot" at the end is hitting too low a
| bar. Not sure how it even got an approval in the first place.
| mrweasel wrote:
| My guess is that the plan will be Office -> Office 365 ->
| Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot -> Microsoft Copilot.
| pylua wrote:
| Why was it Microsoft 365 in the first place? Does it not work
| on leap days ?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Good question, 360 would have been better, full circle
| coverage of all your (office) productivity needs.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Then the next version would have been Microsoft One.
| TOMDM wrote:
| Microsoft Series X Copilot
| einpoklum wrote:
| Today, I noticed there was a new App on my Windows laptop at
| work, because the Apps section was highlighted. "That's weird,"
| I thought "I don't _remember_ installing anything."
|
| So, I expand "Apps", and I see an item named "Microsoft CoPilot
| 365". It absolutely did not occur to me that this was a
| rebranded/updated Office. I simply thought "Aww, man, Microsoft
| is at it again, raining some new crap on me that I never asked
| for." Without a moment's thought I right-clicked it and
| uninstalled. Only now as I read this thread I realize I may
| have accidentally uinstalled MS Office.
| wiredfool wrote:
| My iPad now has a "windows" app.
|
| Teams is now named "Teams (work and school)"
| oneplane wrote:
| It's even dumber than it seems at first glance; what people do
| has changed to the degree where besides a niche market segment of
| users with deep product knowledge and usage, most activities and
| work happens in much simpler shapes than a productivity suite is
| a good fit for. It's primarily tasks using surface level
| functionality.
|
| This essentially (along with subscriptions and bundling) makes
| the fit just worse, which in turn makes the value proposition
| even worse.
|
| The global idea of having something that does what a publisher's
| desk needs but "on the computer" became irrelevant over 10 years
| ago, and at the same time, the work that remained moved to where
| specialised work has always been: in specialised tools. The space
| between emulating the physical world and processes that are
| mostly digital but somehow still have to relate to the physical
| world is pretty much self-eliminating.
|
| I suppose the only thing that remains is a spreadsheet, because
| it is a tool that has no direct analog. But even there you end up
| with people using it to manage lists (which you can do with
| practically anything else) or doing actual spreadsheet work. That
| split is not really apparent with the other many products in the
| Copilot suite as the processes it used to be used for are
| themselves shrinking. For example: we're not writing a larger
| number of internal memos in Word, we're not creating more
| brochures in Publisher, and we're not printing letters all day
| long. Our meetings aren't better because we have outlook,
| planner, project and onenote. Even if all of those products had
| 1000 AIs built in, that wouldn't change.
|
| Sprinkling AI around to try and manufacture relevant improvements
| or relevance for the processes that used to be the primary way to
| spend a working day only hurts the product.
| markdeloura wrote:
| When CoPilot showed up in my Word, I was writing a pitch doc that
| asked me to also describe whether I was using GenAI for anything
| for this pitch. It made me realize I didn't know whether this doc
| was getting auto-pushed to CoPilot and would be used for training
| in some way. Dislike.
| malnourish wrote:
| fyi, it's "Copilot"
|
| Microsoft is evidentially bad at all forms of naming -- I have
| it on good authority that even (some) of their sales people
| think so (and will discretely admit to it).
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Worse than CoPilot is the new Notepad.
|
| Can close the program without saving the file, open it again and
| it is still there! WTF?
| morsch wrote:
| The default editor in Ubuntu, presumably just the default gnome
| text editor, is the same. I struggled to get rid of a
| scratchpad of notes once. Really weird and unexpected and I'm
| sure it gets people in trouble occasionally.
| Lev1a wrote:
| That's why my go-to way of closing that editor has become
| Ctrl+W+Q (add more W if more than one tab is open in the
| editor).
| optionalsquid wrote:
| Sublime Text and VS Code both do the same thing. I can imagine
| that it takes a bit to get used to, assuming that you'd even
| want to, but I've found it to be very handy: At this point in
| time 6 unsaved text documents open in Sublime Text, covering a
| variety of subjects that I haven't quite finished working on,
| or that I just want to remember for later
| beowulfey wrote:
| IMO, that is encouraging a very bad habit.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| How so? None of this would more than mildly inconvenience
| me if it were lost. Important notes/files are of course
| saved in appropriate locations, but a lot things aren't
| that important
| caspper69 wrote:
| This is the default behavior of Notepad++, and is quite useful.
|
| There are times I want a scratch file to stick around without
| saving it to disk (I know it's still saved to disk somewhere,
| but that's not the point).
|
| The answer is to close the file you don't want to stick around.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I do the same in Sublime and VScode. I believe both ask you to
| save when exiting, but in a forced exit or reboot both restore
| the complete session including unsaved files and unsaved edits.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| It's not that long ago that there was all the hullabaloo about
| Notepad being updated for the first time in years, to support
| Unix line endings. Now it has been replaced wholesale with a
| slow app that crashes.
| sunaookami wrote:
| It's so weird that Notepad has been enshittified with AI and
| Bing search (!) but they haven't bothered updating WordPad.
| juliendorra wrote:
| This is the default for modern Mac apps since several years. So
| I guess it's Microsoft catching up to this new norm?
| dartharva wrote:
| My work laptop as 64 gigs of RAM and the latest processor. It
| is admittedly the most high-spec work laptop I have ever used.
| Unfortunately it has Windows 11, which means it runs slower
| than a crappy Windows XP laptop from 2005.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I've uninstalled new Notepad and switched to a third party app
| for this reason. The point of notepad.exe is it's the same
| thing as ever was.
| nrclark wrote:
| FWIW, I like that a lot in my text editors.
| donohoe wrote:
| This is why, short of real financial hardship, I will never work
| again at a company where I need to rely on Microsoft products.
|
| Have to use Windows as an OS? No thanks. Microsoft Teams as core
| employee platform? Nope.
|
| I get it's not a choice for many.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| I was pleasantly surprised how well WSL works under Windows 10.
| Unfortunately, it is also considered a security threat, because
| corporations don't like users having effective root on their
| machines.
| dijit wrote:
| If you find a place, hit me up.
|
| Very tired of the popular "productivity" suites, I moved my
| entire company to Googles last year (which was as painful as
| you can imagine) and now they're springing Gemini on us, which
| is less terrible, but we'll be paying for the pleasure.
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| For those just skimming the article and who haven't heard, as an
| existing subscriber to Microsoft 365, you can switch to the
| Classic variant without AI and without the price increase, by
| clicking on "Cancel subscription" on your account page and
| selecting Classic.
|
| ...at least for now...
| roskelld wrote:
| Based on the fact of them using a dark pattern to hide a
| subscription tier, and effectively hiding the one that they're
| claiming to no longer exist hence the price increase would have
| me cancel out of principle.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Upvoted because it's an actually helpful comment -- I've just
| downgraded mine to classic. I dont need to pay for several AI
| subscriptions -- they all do the same thing.
| rsolva wrote:
| A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and
| because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have
| helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything
| they need from their office suit. Most people also like that
| LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before
| Microsoft changed up the menu system.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and
| because they are simply not aware of any alternatives.
|
| This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because
| everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an
| alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will
| render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.
|
| I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had
| to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a
| Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But
| when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office
| installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto
| for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of
| times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I
| accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved).
| That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external
| stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student._
|
| How long ago was this?
| the_snooze wrote:
| This was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late
| 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago.
|
| It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office
| documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them
| "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You
| either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur
| when your figures are the wrong size and the text is
| overflowing off the side of the document.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Heh! Maybe 14-15 years ago I got my small employer to
| start using OpenOffice. They couldn't afford Office
| licenses for everyone, but it was super handy to give
| everyone a word processor.
|
| One time we were having a hard time exporting Word docs
| that a customer was able to open and view correctly.
| After much back and forth, it turned out they were also
| using OpenOffice and it was having trouble opening the
| emulated Word docs we sent. We cut out the middle man and
| started sending them OOo's own native docs. Problem
| solved!
|
| I know that's far from the common case, but it made me so
| happy at the time.
| teddyh wrote:
| Do a power move: Convert the document to an iWork Pages
| file, and send them that.
| rsolva wrote:
| It is much better today, but still not perfect. For
| relatively simple word processing tasks, it is not a problem
| anymore.
|
| And saving as a pdf is a fine compromise when the receiver
| doesn't have a need to edit the document.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| no office workers is gonna bother doing that
| notahacker wrote:
| Yeah. I'd go further: Office is a clear exception to the rule
| that the alternatives tend to be better than the complacent
| market leader with the massive lockin. Using LibreOffice (or
| cut down stuff like Pages/Numbers or Google Docs) gets me
| missing Office features pdq even when I don't need the
| compatibility, despite me not particularly loving Office's
| last couple of decades of interface changes, having limited
| interest in "cloud" and "AI" features, not exactly being a
| power user of Excel and even having fond memories of other
| systems' features like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes. And the
| compatibility issue is obviously massive
| bluedino wrote:
| I use a free office suite at home because I don't want to pay
| $99/year to edit resumes and the occasional other document.
|
| It works, but its clunky, you have font shenanigans, it just
| overall feels weird and not smooth...
|
| Then again, I'm one of the people who would force you to pry
| Office 2003 (the last version before the ribbon) out of my
| cold, dead hands.
| dartharva wrote:
| For most professionals Excel alone carries 99% of the worth of
| an O365 subscription.
|
| I would give anything for a standalone, offline spreadsheet
| software as robust and powerful as Excel. Unfortunately, that
| doesn't exist.
| n144q wrote:
| I am not a power user by any means. In fact I use Word and
| Excel maybe no more than 5 times a year for both professional
| and personal use. Yet I quickly run into things that are not
| well supported in other word processor/spreadsheet applications
| and need to go back to Office.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| > Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word
| and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu
| system.
|
| I feel exactly the same way about that. And I often use it for
| stuff I don't need to collaborate on. But for paid jobs with
| stuff I need to round-trip with people who I know are using
| Microsoft products, I just use the Microsoft products myself.
|
| It's cheap insurance against giving the people who are paying
| me to collaborate with them a bad experience.
| blibble wrote:
| 30 years of their home name Office brand, known by pretty much
| every person that's ever had a computer
|
| let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator
| the main brand instead
|
| certainly a courageous decision
| mrweasel wrote:
| That was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out
| that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now
| Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it
| anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real
| fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription
| service.
|
| My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it
| Microsoft 365, which they don't.
|
| 30 years of owning the term "Office", having almost every
| single person who ever touched a computer know that Office is
| the Microsoft office productivity suite, then deciding that a
| sort of working, but yet to be 100% defined LLM is more
| important. The fact that no one stopped this or that
| shareholders aren't pissed tells you something about how
| absolutely broken modern computing is.
| xigoi wrote:
| Why would shareholders have a problem with it? People with
| big money currently value AI bullshit more than recognizable
| branding.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Because Microsoft just pissed away their biggest brand
| after Windows and maybe Microsoft. Brand recognition holds
| value, a lot of value.
|
| Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max,
| arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and
| decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all
| references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down
| well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because
| pretty much everyone who needs it already have their
| subscription.
| pylua wrote:
| Yeah, right now it's a feature of a product, not a product.
| Neywiny wrote:
| An interesting note on the making a PowerPoint out of a folder of
| pictures. That isn't a task. It's a few non-obvious button clicks
| but it'll just make each slide a picture. Used to use it for my
| grandfather's travels. Just in case anyone thought they needed a
| LAM or whatever for that.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I understand people who love Apple (or the OSS world)
| unconditionally and I understand people who hate either, but I
| find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards
| Microsoft. Feels like there isn't a single product person left in
| the company, no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| It seems like you get a promo for changing names of things. The
| more convoluted, the higher you get.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I wonder if it's partly about the well-known phenomenon where
| new product people come in or are promoted and feel they have
| to assert their dominance by making a change just for the
| sake of making a change.
| hedora wrote:
| It switched from being a software company to a cloud provider
| about 10 years ago.
|
| Things like Azure, LinkedIn and GitHub are where the focus is,
| since they have recurring revenue and also help them build
| their surveillance apparatus.
|
| Windows and Office are legacy monopoly products, so all you're
| going to see from those divisions are price hikes and more
| mandatory surveillance.
|
| Edit: VS Code is an interesting play. It's "free" because of
| the telemetry stream and built-in aggressive bundling of
| GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, etc.
| Yeul wrote:
| Well there is only so much you can do with Word and Outlook.
|
| Let's be real the difference between Office 2024 and Office
| 2019 are largely cosmetic. That stuff stopped being exciting
| a long time ago.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| What about the super exciting new Teams and Outlook!
| userbinator wrote:
| Exciting, and not in a good way.
|
| Teams has _popup ads_ inside the app itself. No, I don 't
| give a bloody damn about whatever stupid new feature
| you're trying to force upon me when I'm in the middle of
| a deep conversation with a coworker.
| kibwen wrote:
| I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages and
| somehow it has become completely unfit for purpose. Two series
| of data, one table of 300 cells containing one automatically
| extrapolated formula that multiplies the value of the cells in
| the series. A trivial spreadsheet use case that was solved 40
| years ago. Changed the values in one series, and the table
| just... didn't update. Clicked into the cells and the formulas
| are right, they're referring to the right cells, it just
| doesn't update. I edit the cell and hit enter without changing
| anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?!
| How is such a fundamental feature of the spreadsheet so utterly
| broken?? You expect me to go and manually verify that all
| dependent cells have updated every time I change anything
| anywhere? Microsoft, you have failed at your most fundamental
| purpose, zero points awarded.
|
| So yeah, I have some pretty strong feelings about Microsoft
| right now.
| PapaPalpatine wrote:
| > I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages ... I
| edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That
| cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?!
|
| You sure that wasn't an operator error? Sounds like a pretty
| basic feature to not have working.
| kibwen wrote:
| Trust me, I assumed I did something wrong. 20 minutes of
| investigation later, I exhausted every other reasonable
| possibility other than that the software is simply broken.
| Fun fact, the key combo to manually recalculate all cells
| is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9. That fixed it, but I'll never, ever
| trust Excel for anything again.
| Khaine wrote:
| There is a setting in excel that disables auto calculation.
| This is useful for people who are (ab)using excel with
| massive data sets and crazy calculations. It sounds like this
| setting may have been on
| kibwen wrote:
| Trust me, it wasn't. It was the first thing I checked. It
| was set to automatic mode.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| They used to make relatively good desktop OS and Office
| software with a consistent UI/UX - Windows 2000/XP/7, Office
| 97/2000 (if you disable Clippy). Then IMHO it went downhill
| first slowly and now faster. May be people are still attached
| to the platform they used for years.
| infecto wrote:
| It is an interesting data point that two large companies (MSFT
| and AAPL) have both failed to properly implement AI tooling
| within their ecosystem. In MSFT case it is such a terrible
| experience as a end user, especially in MacOS. I don't even think
| its an issue with the LLM themself or the engineering talent but
| a complete lack of talent at the product level. I have never used
| the capabilities they have built (they are bad implementations)
| and on top of that the UI is so in your face that it is pathetic.
| In MacOS Outlook they have a quarter inch sized bar in the main
| UI with just a button to summarize. It is so bad.
| dartharva wrote:
| > Microsoft is halfway through its 2026 fiscal year. It's almost
| like someone was given instructions at the end of the calendar
| year to bump up that revenue line for the Office Consumer
| division.
|
| It's always this surprisingly mundane decision behind every
| fuckup.
|
| Just pump up numbers this quarter, the evident crash in user
| confidence and subsequent revenues is the next sucker's problem.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Is it worse than apple intelligence butchering news summaries
| though?
| n144q wrote:
| It is.
|
| I have colleagues who used Copilot for generating slides in
| PowerPoint. Copilot created slides that are completely
| unrelated to the prompt.
|
| Apple Intelligence is horrible and hallucinates a ton, but at
| least it spits out nonsense on the same topic.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Coming next week, another 8 versions of Teams, all called Teams
| but with subtly different icons and you can only sign into one of
| them with your license tier
| malfist wrote:
| Don't worry, AI will tell you (possibly incorrectly) which one
| to use
| einpoklum wrote:
| This is an excellent opportunity to tell our friends and family:
| It's time to consider switching to
|
| --==[[ LIBRE OFFICE! ]]==--
|
| because:
|
| 1. It's a very good office suite that isn't subject to
| "fashionable remakes" and other Microsoft shenanigans.
|
| 2. over 100 million people use it - mostly on Windows and many on
| Linux and Mac.
|
| 3. No AI! And it certainly doesn't keep track of what you do, and
| it doesn't call home to tell anyone about you or share a copy of
| your private documents.
|
| 4. No logging into anything or managing licenses.
|
| 5. You can download and use it for free: www.libreoffice.org (and
| it's on Chocolatey and WinGet too I think, if you're in Windows-
| land) . But of course it helps a lot when people also donate.
|
| 7. It has good community support; and there are also options for
| paid support, training, transition and deployment if you're in a
| business or organization.
|
| 8. There are also written guides in several languages for those
| who like that format, and there are some video tutorials etc.
|
| and finally:
|
| 9. It is managed by a democratically-run public foundation with
| members from across the world. There are no large companies or
| governments pulling the strings or calling the shots.
| oezi wrote:
| I subscribed for a trial month because I had a lengthy word
| document which was bilingual in a side by side table. I wanted it
| to fill maybe 20 trivial items which needed to be put in several
| obvious places.
|
| Oh boy! It couldn't do anything except append to the end of the
| document. It couldn't create tables! It couldn't search and
| replace! It couldn't maintain formatting.
|
| What a failure!
| timthelion wrote:
| The interesting thing is that they do not own copilot.com
| safgasCVS wrote:
| Cancelled immediately after getting the email. I bought a pair of
| Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for PS20 each
| for myself and my wife within the hour
| alok-g wrote:
| >> Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for PS20
|
| Is this key authentic? Which reseller is this?
| noAnswer wrote:
| To avoid 365 Copilot you have to downgrade to "Classic":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVPThx7yss
| xoxxala wrote:
| I currently have a 365 Family plan, but have never used any of
| the family features. Wanted to downgrade to a 365 Personal
| Classic plan, but that option is not available. Spent an hour
| waiting for Microsoft Support to help. Nice gentleman on the
| other side of the chat window directed me to Business Sales and
| closed the chat.
|
| So I just cancelled outright.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| I mean, the ONE thing I want is when I am writing an email to
| coordinate a meeting and it says "how about tomorrow at 1:00" in
| the email body, that I can reply with a meeting and the time is
| set for tomorrow at 1:00 automatically?
|
| Surely we can do this MSFT???? The most basic AI help please,
| thank you.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Microsoft just renamed Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on
| Windows for everyone_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726 - Jan 2025 (47
| comments)
|
| _You don 't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42640180 - Jan 2025 (250
| comments)
| zb3 wrote:
| This is fantastic news for LibreOffice ;)
| hcurtiss wrote:
| The crazy part to me is that, with a family subscription, the new
| AI privileges are only available to the primary account holder
| and not the rest of my family. That's nuts.
|
| > For Microsoft 365 Family subscribers, Copilot will be available
| to the subscription owner and cannot be shared with others.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/01/1...
| Smar wrote:
| Maybe they are at least trying to avoid collecting data of
| underage people...
| cma wrote:
| There's an easier way, don't collect and train on the data
| for them.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Is there a single big company out there that sanely has not
| decided to ride this "AI" wave? People being pushed stupid
| features that no one has ever needed nor asked for? It's Clippy's
| revenge and you can't get rid of it this time? Microsoft really
| deserves ton of prizes for ruining so many products.
| riffraff wrote:
| amazon? I mean they have some data center stuff, but amazon-
| the-website does not seem infected with artificial idiocy yet.
| RavlaAlvar wrote:
| What are you talking about, they added a chat bot on
| amazon.com
| ok123456 wrote:
| Amazon has its own AI, "rufas," plastered on the site.
| manosyja wrote:
| Everything at home is OSS, I switched to OSS everywhere in 2000.
| I love reading these news, gives me a chuckle.
|
| At work, everything is Microsoft, Copilot 365 and everything.
| Gives me a headache using it. And a chuckle seeing IT struggle
| with disgruntled users...
| daft_pink wrote:
| They should have made it something we wanted. Crazy thing is a
| year ago I wanted to pay for it but I had to have a business plan
| and pay annual instead of monthly. They really missed an
| opportunity there because I would have paid.
| jomoho wrote:
| Aren't all Microsoft launches disasters?
| 65 wrote:
| Does this allow Micro$oft to train their AIs on your word
| documents?
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