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The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

zdnet.com

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Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#91

Post by teddyh »

the_snooze wrote: post #77
teddyh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. How long ago was this?

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 docu…

Do a power move: Convert the document to an iWork Pages file, and send them that.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#92

Post by drdaeman »

smt88 wrote: post #39
tapoxi wrote: post #9

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#93

Post by mcny »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #51
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 cr…

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...

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#94

Post by mystifyingpoi »

donohoe wrote: post #24

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.

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.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#95

Post by cocoa19 »

dimator wrote: post #48
fullshark wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 crea…

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

The human ran out of tokens writing this response

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#96

Post by kyleee »

captn3m0 wrote: post #87
for_i_in_range wrote: post #8

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.

I am still on Office 2021 on my Mac, which was the last “non-subscription” offering I could find. No Copilot yet.

Office 2007 works great in wine

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#97

Post by einr »

1986 wrote: post #37
whalesalad wrote: post #13

I don't think Microsoft has created a single novel or useful thing in the last 30 years, with the exception of vscode.

WSL is a big improvement over the MinGW era

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.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#98

Post by juliendorra »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #22

Worse than CoPilot is the new Notepad. Can close the program without saving the file, open it again and it is still there! WTF?

This is the default for modern Mac apps since several years. So I guess it’s Microsoft catching up to this new norm?

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#99

Post by kyawzazaw »

rsolva wrote: post #74
the_snooze wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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.

no office workers is gonna bother doing that

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#100

Post by mihaaly »

munchler wrote: post #6

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.

> 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.

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