alt Hacker News> I cannot have a conversation about Copilot!
> If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
I think this is basically a rephrasing of the reason for the shared name. This appears to be an attempt at brand unification.
Microsoft wants user's experiences with their products to blend together into an undifferentiated (in more positive terms, "seamless") set of interactions. Not a set of discrete pieces of software, just interacting with Microsoft via Copilot to... ask it to do their work for them, mostly. This is the AI-native future they're building towards. You complain that users can't talk about what tool they're using. Microsoft doesn't want people knowing or caring what tool they're using. Just pay your subscription and have Copilot read and respond to your email for you.
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I'm sure it happened in a meeting where the word SYNERGY was said a lot but it clearly doesn't work and it's not the first time Microsoft makes this blunder everything was .net then everything was live then everything was xbox then everything was 365 now everything is copilot and if someone tell me they use copilot 365 I still have no idea if they use web apps or desktop apps or anything because they confuse a brand with an actual product.
This is insane.
If Satya predicted someone would map their frustration with his company['s naming] out like this, is there anything he could have done to prevent the embarrassment?
I see how excited the executives would get about one single interface for computing all locked behind the subscription. The article makes Microsoft look stupid. It's tough to believe they're doing it the best way. Was this really a necessary intermediate step? And haven't they burned the brand a good bit…
And apparently when the writing was on the wall however many months ago after they had 20 or 30 different copilots, they believed the best decision to be doubling down.
Among many other issues, the experience doesn't come anywhere close to seamless, right? Because each of these things is distinct and can't interface with the others? They could have tried to build a unified assistant, but they prioritized the rush job instead.
The problem for Microsoft is that branding only works if it's built off a solid, widespread product with a good repuation. Github Copilot might be solid but it's a niche product that most people have never heard of. So people wind up associating the entire Copilot brand with the mediocre to bad Copilot experiences they are exposed to on a daily basis, such as the useless Copilot button on Copilot+ PC keyboards.