[HN Gopher] Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems
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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-
product-is...
Author : fortran77
Score : 62 points
Date : 2026-02-04 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| fortran77 wrote:
| Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-
| product-is...
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| > push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft
| into an AI-first company
|
| Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the
| user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-
| first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-
| users. It's large government agencies and big corporations
| where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual
| decision to buy or not to buy something.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence
| on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy
| Microsoft.
|
| But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs
| and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it
| really is.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source
| zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand
| office suite which is so bad that the government worker's
| union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| Most people are just highly resistant to change, even
| change for the better.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.
| jetbalsa wrote:
| Which one did they switch to?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Here's a case of a recent one which is early in the cycle
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-
| microsoft...
| wolvoleo wrote:
| LibreOffice isn't bad at all.
| senko wrote:
| The unironic use of "off brand office suite" here is
| hysterically tragic.
|
| Also, the productivity suite formerly known as Office is
| these days called "365 Copilot".
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You mean Munich, and Microsoft bribed them millions of
| dollars to put Microsoft Office back.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all
| about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The
| mainstream of Linux GUI is _Android_ for crying out loud and
| X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
| hangonhn wrote:
| From the article, "its productivity software is used by
| hundreds of millions of corporate users, a captive audience to
| whom it can easily promote new AI products."
|
| Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive
| audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never
| been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user
| experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision
| makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI
| adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides
| presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to
| them.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't
| remember.
| InfamousRece wrote:
| I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is
| that.
| fsflover wrote:
| This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic
| walled gardens like Microsoft.
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| The 3.3% paid conversion is not great.
|
| Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse
| primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to
| 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.
|
| People who paid are leaving.
|
| That's a churn problem.
|
| The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to
| Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and
| Gemini at higher rates.
|
| Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO
| of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but
| won't share the numbers.
|
| That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.
|
| This is the Ballmer story all over again. -
| Massive distribution advantage - Captive enterprise base
|
| Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use.
|
| Windows Phone had carrier deals too.
|
| The problem is the same: _you can 't mandate delight_.
|
| This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:
| > "About a year ago, Nadella sent a frustrated email to Rajesh
| Jha, > executive vice president of experiences and
| devices, detailing an incident in which > Nadella had
| asked the enterprise version of Copilot on the Edge browser
| > to help with a public webpage he was on, > but it
| couldn't fulfill his prompt"
|
| Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something
| called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.
|
| Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just
| explodes with the market.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| > Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own
| something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.
|
| I audibly winced
| wolvoleo wrote:
| There are in fact almost 30 products with Copilot in the name
| now. Though they've seem to have cut a few recently like the
| sales version
| mook wrote:
| > unlike anything we've seen before
|
| They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat)
| negative three billion percent growth before either...
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > growth is "unlike anything we've seen before"
|
| This says nothing about where the growth is going
| ryandvm wrote:
| Don't worry, after a decade or two of having Windows reinstall
| and re-enable it every couple weeks against their users' wishes
| I'm sure they'll get the market penetration they're looking
| for...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| This is repeated endlessly by non-Windows fans I assume,
| because I disabled AI and other annoyances in Windows long ago
| and they haven't come back. I even used to worry about updating
| Windows because I saw this warning so many times, but then I
| did and it just never came to pass.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Microsoft has a _long_ and _well documented_ history of
| resetting user preferences.
|
| _Multiple_ times I 've disabled the cortana taskbar search
| widget, only to have a windows update turn it back on and
| proudly gives me a popup telling me they noticed it was
| disabled and turned it back on for me.
|
| Microsoft _will_ forcibly re-enable AI features eventually.
| Again, this is an established pattern for them.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Starting when you selected "don't install Windows 10" and
| it asked you a few times and you kept selecting that and
| then you woke up one day and your computer was running
| Windows 10, and blue screened when you logged in
| kotaKat wrote:
| Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet
| engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.
|
| Go back to fixing what's wrong with Windows, then worry about the
| AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value
| proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is
| continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows
| 11.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Can't say Win 11 is really that bad.
|
| Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work"
| and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I
| bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball...
| beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball...
| Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless
| transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather
| look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of
| everything for now reason.
| exceptione wrote:
| > which "just doesn't work"
|
| Some are more tech savy than others here, but I guess almost
| anyone can do the following trick successfully:
| step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/ step 2. download
| iso step 3. flash iso on medium step 4. boot
| medium, installation window shows step 5. you choose
| KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks. step 6. system
| tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.
|
| Done.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| According to the CEO peddling AI, software engineers are about
| to be replaced by AI, how come AI hasn't fixed all of their
| atrocious software hmmm..
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular.
|
| Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal
| (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become
| nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an
| opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which
| became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief
| window of time.
|
| They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk
| out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up
| there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is
| notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have
| carved out some of this search space with web-search being native
| to the tools now.
|
| But microsoft was _way_ ahead of everyone here for a brief
| period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware
| vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Over and over Microsoft kills products with mis-marketing.
|
| One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put
| three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows
| for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
|
| Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they
| push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office
| uses it as the default save location and when it is down _you
| can 't save your work!_) that makes sure you'll never use it
| again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically
| reliable.
|
| Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI
| experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about
| it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that
| don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| Recently had to download actual Adobe Reader for the first
| time in at least a decade and... christ. Requires most of an
| H100 in resources and you can't do what you actually want to
| do because of multiple AI related popups and attempt to get
| you to subscribe to some Adobe cloud nonsense.
|
| I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of
| it, just utter garbage
| basch wrote:
| >it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was
| that unfounded of an opinion
|
| if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself
| still is. if not even worse.
|
| the 'new' ai mode routinely creates these silly categories that
| are not what i was looking for and my screen is filled with
| repetitive ai summaries of articles. it will ingest a source as
| fact, and then use that fact to create confirmation bias across
| other articles. it will even use words like "confirm" when it
| finds a source saying something, even if the source is junk or
| seo spam. it becomes somewhat impossible to escape the
| assumptions the model has made, and i have to resort to
| traditional web search to get diversity in my results.
|
| and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no
| easy way to tone down the wordiness.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I don't use it often, but at least now I can get _an_ answer.
| I swear in early 2023 I would just get completely irrelevant,
| borderline spammy results to the point I gave up and felt
| helpless because there was no real alternative at that time
| for how I used google. It felt like the internet broke for a
| window of time and Bing (very briefly) brought me out of that
| hell. To this day I still can 't believe they didnt
| capitalize on it.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| It cost them (as a guess) -1T of market cap..
|
| In other words they still got rewarded by the market despite
| all the missteps. I don't agree with this reality but here we
| are.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the
| desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the
| "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI
| mode.
|
| When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster.
| Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just
| take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If
| you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document
| you'll regret it.
|
| For advice about how to do things on the command line or how
| bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in
| Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but
| you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in
| bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I
| use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people
| seem to swear by Claude Code.
|
| I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot
| because I will miss it.
| zwaps wrote:
| The reality is that Copilot's laughable performance is almost
| entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.
|
| Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by
| other products.
|
| However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very
| basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.
|
| Copilot should not have been released. A large majority of people
| involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc
| should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.
|
| For everyone who has been building similar products it is
| immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and
| unprofessionally executed.
|
| People hate it, and for hood reason.
|
| It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or
| that it even exists in its current form.
|
| Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars
| each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or
| hundreds of other teams
|
| Bah
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately),
| Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or
| be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so
| that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.
|
| PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards,
| managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.
|
| There certainly other examples that I failed to address.
|
| This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for
| OKRs and whatever other goals.
| exceptione wrote:
| And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything
| ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-
| notch.)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed
| at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd.
| ..
| brg wrote:
| I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv
| being the strongest technical organization at MS than its
| provenance.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer
| experience in Visual Studio.
|
| Also VS 2026 was released with a hard milestone, thus
| while there is a new settings experience, many options
| show a dialog from VS 2022, because the new UI is still
| not implemented for the new experience.
|
| Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual
| Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality.
|
| Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think after the failure of Metro, I think Microsoft
| gave up on native apps entirely and now the story is web
| or Electron.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It appears the problem is more deep than that.
|
| From what I could infer from some community talks,
| podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have
| the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like
| OSes and Web.
|
| Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded
| anything for Windows, and management instead of having
| proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and
| Electron all over the place.
|
| I might be wrong, this is more my perception than
| anything else.
| h3lp wrote:
| > nowadays they have the problem new hires have been
| educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.
|
| So, in other words, the kids grow up learning and using
| Linux, right?
| exceptione wrote:
| Ah, thanks. That must be the link with Simon Peyton Jones
| as well. Seems to be another case of a marketing machine
| running away with foundational research coming from
| Europe.*
|
| * no hard feelings
| _fat_santa wrote:
| The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI
| adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then
| actually delivering a product people want to use.
|
| Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how
| they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a
| deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product
| offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that
| but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.
|
| Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in
| ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how
| integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user
| experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot
| was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a
| chat window, there is zero integration.
|
| Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more
| about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on
| what users are actually experiencing.
| llama052 wrote:
| It feels like that's the entire MO of the Azure platform as
| well. Make a minimum viable product and then get adoption by
| selling at all costs, despite the products edges.
| mook wrote:
| Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd
| make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest
| of the company.
| basch wrote:
| The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly
| promoted.
|
| Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field.
| https://designer.microsoft.com/
|
| If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you
| click to get to Designer?
| mzajc wrote:
| > Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field.
| https://designer.microsoft.com/
|
| It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that
| do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is
| infesting search engine image results with their horrible
| low-quality output.
|
| ...
|
| On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft
| seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of
| page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now
| gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
|
| [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aig
| ener...
| WillAdams wrote:
| Or, scaling back trying to keep their datacenter bill
| manageable.
|
| Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at
| a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now
| one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a
| limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given
| 24-hour period.
| apercu wrote:
| > "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality
| around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers
| up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."
|
| That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you
| just change a word and remove a couple:
|
| The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses
| more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a
| product people want to use.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built
| into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails,
| grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why
| integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company?
|
| But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell
| questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers.
| Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product
| for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
| AJRF wrote:
| They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the
| year.
|
| When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all
| cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but
| the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash.
|
| I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the
| company to open source, naturally not without their own
| intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer
| branding, anything related to Windows.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Microsoft's focus was making it so that AI could allow unskilled
| workers to replace skilled workers. The hope was that everyone
| but sales/management could be offshored to SEA/India/etc and AI
| would somehow make up for the skill differential.
|
| The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers
| can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...
|
| Text-only, no Javascript:
|
| https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1VBKdf...
| dang wrote:
| Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted
| in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.
| eddyg wrote:
| If you have Apple News, you can open the article _in Safari_
| and then "Share" it to the News app.
| hvb2 wrote:
| This still works for me
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887565
| dang wrote:
| Ok, let's put that in the toptext. Thanks!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original
|
| _Microsoft 's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems_
|
| ...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical
| problems
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 1.htm contains article text, including hyperlinks, no Javascript,
| no CSS, only 2 tags used: 1. <p> and 2. <a> with attribute href
| x=AA1VBKdf { echo "<meta charset=utf-8>"; (printf
| 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x' HTTP/1.0\r\n'
| printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \ |busybox
| ssl_client assets.msn.com \ |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d
| '\134'; } > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into
| YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising
| willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to
| save a new struggling product.
|
| Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every
| Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet
| said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS
| component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be
| called "internet"?
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