[HN Gopher] Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, u...
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Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT
authority
Author : rntn
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-10-01 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| JohnFen wrote:
| Microsoft's desperation is getting embarrassing.
| therein wrote:
| This is pretty unacceptable in so many ways.
|
| Facebook should do bring your Meta glasses to work day for all
| the companies that are not as hip as they are.
|
| Some companies might have IT departments that blocked X. Elon
| should buy xatwork.com or better yet use twimg.com to serve X but
| only at your workplace.
|
| PirateBay is probably blocked at many workplaces. That's pretty
| backwards thinking. I think PirateBay should focus on creating
| more alternative frontends to bring back torrenting at work.
|
| CloudFlare should smuggle in WARP so that you can tunnel out of
| your workplace.
|
| Could put some cloud policies in place for IT departments to
| maintain control if they want.
| monkeydreams wrote:
| This should be a strike against MS's trustworthiness, if true. A
| lot of workplaces are hesitant to utilise AI models due to
| privacy or sensitivity concerns.
| zrobotics wrote:
| FTA: "Government tenants (GCC/DoD) for some reason don't
| support this capability, the one that Baroudi insists "does not
| create new data exposure risks."
|
| So the government customers that can really strike back at MS
| don't get this enabled by default. Very interesting...
|
| I would also wonder if this would trigger IT review due to data
| access patterns. Having copilot start accessing documents would
| likely trigger certain security systems at many companies that
| are designed to prevent corporate espionage. It seems like a
| good possibility anyway, I certainly wouldn't be willing to
| risk it just so I could generate AI slop emails.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The KPIs of some random Microsoft middle manager trumps customer
| priorities. They have a quota to meet!
|
| But to play the Devil's advocate: back in the good old days,
| before Google was a thing, I would go out to customer sites and
| they would ask me with a straight face "why I needed the
| Internet?" to do my job. (These days I just tether to my phone,
| but this was long before that was a viable option.)
|
| Soon, access to AIs will be like access to Google: mandatory for
| getting your work done to an acceptable standard in a reasonable
| time.
|
| Those that fight against this are trying to hold the tide back
| with a broom.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Bring Your Clippy to Home Day
| lazystar wrote:
| > Samer Baroudi, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft,
| insists this is for your own good. > > "This offers a safer
| alternative to other bring-your-own-AI scenarios, and empowers
| users with Copilot in their daily jobs while keeping IT firmly in
| control and all enterprise data protections intact," Baroudi
| explained in a blog post.
|
| whew. they seem to be confusing exactly who the customer is here.
| they think their target customer is the everyday windows user,
| but in reality the customer is every company's internal IT and
| infosec teams. theyre trying to persuade regular users to use the
| product, bit these users will in turm need to persuade their IT
| teams before this product can be used. big mix up for microsoft.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Microsoft enables self service trials and purchases on 365
| tenants by default. Every new feature they deploy is on by
| default. This new personal account thing is also enabled by
| default.
|
| Microsoft has been hostile to internal IT teams for a long
| time. They burned that bridge with me and my peers a long time
| ago. Unfortunately, MS knows it's a captive audience and
| enterprises aren't rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so
| they continue to get away with it.
|
| MS hopes that users will start a trial for something, become
| reliant on it, then convince managers to override the IT teams
| and buy it. Just like how other SaaS products market to
| individual users instead of to IT departments.
|
| It's scummy.
|
| No one should do business with Microsoft anymore at this point.
| That includes NPM, GitHub, VSCode too don't forget. MS will get
| away with anything they want unless people push back and dump
| them.
| danudey wrote:
| If Copilot was so great, surely I would have been asked to opt-in
| to a better Office 365 family plan with Copilot enabled, rather
| than trying to dark-pattern me into paying for a more expensive
| Copilot-enabled plan against my will (forcing me to attempt to
| cancel in order to be offered my old plan).
|
| It probably doesn't help that Microsoft is using 'Copilot' to
| mean so many different things - their Office AI integration,
| Github's Copilot thing, some laptops now apparently - so that
| users who know what's going on get irritated and ones that don't
| get confused.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Microsoft will clarify the situation by offering "CoPilot One".
| jaggederest wrote:
| CoPilot One XS Series X? You really don't want the CoPilot
| One Series X, it's really a neutered version, and the CoPilot
| One XS Series S is decent but really doesn't cost any
| different, unlike the CoPilot XS Series S, which is obsolete.
| willis936 wrote:
| I cancelled my 365 subscription last night and was surprised to
| see that I was scheduled to pay $100 next month for an annual
| subscription tier that adds AI features that I would never use.
| The most valuable plan they offer is the one they charge the
| least for.
| watwut wrote:
| Microsoft is master of confusing programs, confusing naming and
| plans. Pretty much everything they produce is royally unclear
| in its naming.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What's this "Office 365" you're mentioning? Microsoft has, I
| kid you not, actually renamed Office 365 to Microsoft 365
| Copilot. Of which Copilot is one part, like Word and Excel.
| Yes, a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription gives you access to
| Microsoft Word and Microsoft Copilot. Please don't confuse it
| with GitHub Copilot, a completely different product. Or with
| Copilot Search in Bing.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh my good gravy you weren't joking.
|
| How long until the brand pinata .NET gets renamed?
| shrubble wrote:
| They did exactly this in the early days of computing, having
| people who bought microcomputers run DOS and set up ad job
| networks etc. then later, IT had to formalize it and support it.
| bn-l wrote:
| Recall was my final straw.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Are they trying to get more training data?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It's all about data hoarding so they can not left behind in the
| AI race, something that will inevitably happen anyways.
| furyofantares wrote:
| From the linked blog post it sounds like IT still fully controls
| permissions to use or not use this. It's just that users can pay
| for it.
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