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Because everyone loves brand marketing on their keyboards... Microsoft would incur far less wrath if they would stop letting their marketing department run their company.
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It's the only thing MS^H^H Bing has that offers a prayer of beating Google at something. Expect saturation.
> It's the only thing they have that offers a prayer of beating Google at something I'm guessing their office suite offerings (hosted and desktop) dwarf anything that Google has.
They would really, really like you to use Bing for search instead of Google. Until the OpenAI partnership started to bear fruit, they had no way to get their foot in that particular door. Now that they do, they will never let us forget it.
Translation: Someone at Microsoft is already getting very, very worried about the return on all this investment they've put into generative AI.
Microsoft's goal is to have copilot present and monitoring everywhere you input data & interact with Windows (CP is always ready to help!) This will provide an unprecedented layer telemetry gathering for Microsoft, including personal and sensitive data that wasn't as reliably available before. Achieving one of the Gold Rings of surveillance is a powerful motivator.
What happens when you plug this keyboard into a Linux box? Is it just another Meta/Super key, except one that doesn't support combinations? Is it using one of the reserved USB HID keyboard scan codes? Or is it a separate device driver just for that one key?
The good news is, whatever they spec it to do will be available to Linux and other OSes because there's really no practical way to spec something Linux couldn't handle as well as Windows without risking antitrust action over something far too stupid to justify such a thing.
The bad news is that people do sometimes do dumb things with keyboards for no reason. I'm using a Dell laptop here. I'm used to the common Fn key on the laptop keyboard mapping the Left Arrow to Home and the Right Arrow to End. Instead this keyboard maps Fn-F11 to Home and Fn-F12 to End. No problem I sez to myself, I'll just map Fn-Left and Fn-Right myself. I've got a number of keyboard customizations already set up anyhow. Alas. The Fn key is supermagical bullshit, and according to XWindows, Fn-Left is nothing. Not an undefined keycap or something suprising... it's just plain nothing. I haven't dug any deeper to see if maybe something lower than X is eating it because I don't care enough (I remapped Windows-Left and Window-Right, retrained my fingers, and called it a day), and I judge the probability that the keyboard hardware is literally emitting no key events for this event too high to be worthwhile.
So, they could spec the Copilot key to be a super magical key that doesn't let you play with others and blocks all other keystrokes while it is held down or something. The good news is, I doubt they'd even want to do that; they're going to want to be able to tell people "Use Copilot+X" to do things themselves, even if they don't have anything for that on day one. They could in principle do something like my Fn key, though, and rigidly insist that only certain defined shortcuts could be used and everything else results in no events, and that is at least an outside chance. Hopefully they don't do anything like that, though, it's honestly more work than just letting it be an otherwise normal key.
I honestly thought this was a joke since the key icon seemed like a female menstruation pad to me. Oh, how times have changed.
I get so tilted at the idea of a specific OS vendor having a dedicated keyboard button on all non-apple computers. And now they are doing it again, wild.
I'm not a huge fan it has a Windows logo printed on it, but there are good usability reasons for the key, even on non-Windows systems, and there was just a big hunk of empty space between Ctrl and Alt before. So nothing is really lost for non-Windows users. It seems to me there are more pressing matters to get angry about than the logo on a keyboard. And whether we like or not not, Windows is the dominant desktop OS,…
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I'm not a huge fan it has a Windows logo printed on it, but there are good usability reasons for the key, even on non-Windows systems, and there was just a big hunk of empty space between Ctrl and Alt before. So nothing is really lost for non-Windows users. It seems to me there are more pressing matters to get angry about than the logo on a keyboard. And whether we like or not not, Windows is the dominant desktop OS,…
I knew someone would bring up the utility of the key as a meta-modifier.[0] Sun keyboards had a diamond to mark that key, which is better to my mind than a third party commercial OS logo. I wouldn't even mind if it was the keyboard manufacturer logo. [0]: https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:Suntype7sf.jpg
Comically to me, it has both the diamond and Apple's command key logo. Windows is the only one missing.
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I see the word "clickbait" on HN so often it's lost all meaning. The headline is fine, not 11/10, and not wild. "Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards" - true, descriptive. "for the first time since 1994" - provides context to the weight of the decision of adding a new key, absolutely fine. The headline is not wrong, this is the first key added that will be required as part of the standard keyboard layout sin…
> "the company told us that the key isn't mandatory now, but that it expects Copilot keys to be required on Windows 11 keyboards "over time." It's not mandatory, and there is a chance it never will be. Just like the office key.
I don't recall seeing similar statements from Microsoft about the office/emoji/etc. keys being expected to be mandatory. Was there statements along those lines?