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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

#111

Post by dijit »

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.

If you find a place, hit me up.

Very tired of the popular “productivity” suites, I moved my entire company to Googles last year (which was as painful as you can imagine) and now they’re springing Gemini on us, which is less terrible, but we’ll be paying for the pleasure.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#113

Post by tethys »

richm44 wrote: post #47
WaltPurvis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn it off. Go to preferences -> Copilot and uncheck the Enable Copilot checkbox.

As the article explains, that's not been implemented on Mac yet.

That's not correct and also not what the article says. They are only talking about Excel and PowerPoint.

"We're working on adding the Enable Copilot checkbox to Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint on Windows devices and to Excel and PowerPoint on Mac devices."

I am using Word on my Mac (version 16.93) and do have a checkbox that disables Copilot.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#114

Post by ozim »

rkagerer wrote: post #105
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.

Office 2003 is my preferred pick for productivity, I use it for all new documents - and best of all there's no ribbon.

Why not LibreOffice?

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#115

Post by dijit »

logicchains wrote: post #4

Microsoft can't even make Teams pleasant and bugfree to use; it's unreasonable to expect them to make a compelling AI product.

But people (who have never used any non-microsoft communication software) are always telling me that Teams isn’t so bad.

Never underestimate the docile nature of a captive audience.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#116

Post by numpad0 »

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?

I've uninstalled new Notepad and switched to a third party app for this reason. The point of notepad.exe is it's the same thing as ever was.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#117

Post by hedora »

Toutouxc wrote: post #86

I understand people who love Apple (or the OSS world) unconditionally and I understand people who hate either, but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft. Feels like there isn’t a single product person left in the company, no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing.

It switched from being a software company to a cloud provider about 10 years ago.

Things like Azure, LinkedIn and GitHub are where the focus is, since they have recurring revenue and also help them build their surveillance apparatus.

Windows and Office are legacy monopoly products, so all you’re going to see from those divisions are price hikes and more mandatory surveillance.

Edit: VS Code is an interesting play. It’s “free” because of the telemetry stream and built-in aggressive bundling of GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, etc.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#118

Post by dartharva »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #3

But what consequences will a really large company face for such a prominent disaster? They got what they wanted, which is an excuse to force everyone into paying for new AI products through price increases forced into enterprise contract renewals. It is the same thing that Google just did with Google Workspace or Google Apps or whatever their office suite is called now, where everyone is forced to pay for their new G…

> The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit.

Unfortunately, it's much worse - logically, such stunts are detrimental to revenue in the long term if they lead to loss of customer confidence. But they don't care about that, they are doing this to hype up and remove legitimate skepticism for "AI" products among the investor class and solidify the bubble.

AI is the next big thing suckers, look how all of our customers are using it. WDYM we "forced" it on them, just shut up and buy MSFT

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#119

Post by for_i_in_range »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #63
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.

> Just let me write TextEdit all the way. I used to edit a market-leading print magazine with TextEdit. I don’t need layout features, the designers do that in InDesign. I don’t need a grammar checker or AI because I can write.

I am old school. I write books and print them out to edit with red pen. Need all of Word's print features. Not everyone is a "digital writer."

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#120

Post by notahacker »

the_snooze wrote: post #61
rsolva wrote: post #34

A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.

>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…

Yeah. I'd go further: Office is a clear exception to the rule that the alternatives tend to be better than the complacent market leader with the massive lockin. Using LibreOffice (or cut down stuff like Pages/Numbers or Google Docs) gets me missing Office features pdq even when I don't need the compatibility, despite me not particularly loving Office's last couple of decades of interface changes, having limited interest in "cloud" and "AI" features, not exactly being a power user of Excel and even having fond memories of other systems' features like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes. And the compatibility issue is obviously massive
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