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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

#131

Post by xigoi »

mrweasel wrote: post #71
blibble wrote: post #46

30 years of their home name Office brand, known by pretty much every person that's ever had a computer let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator the main brand instead certainly a courageous decision

That was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription service. My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't. 30 years of ownin…

Why would shareholders have a problem with it? People with big money currently value AI bullshit more than recognizable branding.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#133

Post by alsetmusic »

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.

My company is blocking it.

I don’t know by what mechanism, so it may only be possible with an enterprise license or through device management. But I know it’s possible because I’m on the email thread where someone sought guidance from management and the directive was affirmed to block it on Macs in our fleet.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#134

Post by drooopy »

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.

TextEdit is my editor of choice for 90% of all RTF word processing that I do, when on a Mac.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#135

Post by kibwen »

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.

I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages and somehow it has become completely unfit for purpose. Two series of data, one table of 300 cells containing one automatically extrapolated formula that multiplies the value of the cells in the series. A trivial spreadsheet use case that was solved 40 years ago. Changed the values in one series, and the table just... didn't update. Clicked into the cells and the formulas are right, they're referring to the right cells, it just doesn't update. I edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?! How is such a fundamental feature of the spreadsheet so utterly broken?? You expect me to go and manually verify that all dependent cells have updated every time I change anything anywhere? Microsoft, you have failed at your most fundamental purpose, zero points awarded.

So yeah, I have some pretty strong feelings about Microsoft right now.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#136

Post by Cumpiler69 »

dunham wrote: post #75
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.

> Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off. They should put it in the bottom corner, next to an animated paperclip instead.

I wish Microsoft would have the balls to do this. Meme it all the way. At least we'd get some good laughs out of it.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#137

Post by notahacker »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #103
alangibson wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not weird to be upset by a button which is entirely useless to the functionality of the product, and exists only to add politicization where there needs to be none. In fact, it's shameful that Microsoft did this. Let's put it this way: if the button was for something you didn't agree with - say, it was a button for "show your support for the sanctity of marriage", would you blithely say "there are lots of button…

> say, it was a button for "show your support for the sanctity of marriage", would you blithely say "there are lots of buttons in the preferences so it's weird to get mad about it"?

if I was pretending that my dislike of a button for people to show their support for abolishing gay marriage was rooted in sincere concern for how much time was spent in porting the skin and menu button to another platform versus other more complex features, it would be absolutely right to observe I was being disingenuous in feigning neutral interest in feature prioritization decisions every time I called for it to be removed...

If you don't want the pride skin "shoved in your face", it's relatively easy not to visit the relevant area of the preferences menu and select it, just like people that aren't particularly interested in marriage or Christmas are welcome to refrain from using any of Office's wedding-related or Christmas-related templates

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#138

Post by mrweasel »

xigoi wrote: post #131
mrweasel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription service. My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't. 30 years of ownin…

Why would shareholders have a problem with it? People with big money currently value AI bullshit more than recognizable branding.

Because Microsoft just pissed away their biggest brand after Windows and maybe Microsoft. Brand recognition holds value, a lot of value.

Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max, arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because pretty much everyone who needs it already have their subscription.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#139

Post by roskelld »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #27

For those just skimming the article and who haven't heard, as an existing subscriber to Microsoft 365, you can switch to the Classic variant without AI and without the price increase, by clicking on "Cancel subscription" on your account page and selecting Classic. ...at least for now...

Based on the fact of them using a dark pattern to hide a subscription tier, and effectively hiding the one that they're claiming to no longer exist hence the price increase would have me cancel out of principle.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#140

Post by smt88 »

drdaeman wrote: post #92
smt88 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> maybe just had it less accessible

Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the work was:

- find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or search the internet

- read the summary

- write your paper

It would still take you hours.

Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too.

You don't need to take my word for it that things have changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that kids are doing less of their own reading and homework because of AI.

> 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

This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept of education. There are lots of things that people end up being interested in, but they someone has to force them to try it.

You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals to them, and we know that isn't true.

> 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.

You're underselling how much easier the access is.

> 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.

Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a nonsensical concept.

A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system.

Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.

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