The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster • Hacker News Board

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#511

Post by recursivecaveat » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #480

datadrivenangel wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all sharepoint under the hood, which is why it's terrible, but you can just open things in sharepoint...

I only started using MS cloud stuff last year. This whole Onedrive/SharePoint split confuses the hell out of me. I don't really know what SharePoint is. It seems like kind of an online site builder/file sharing platform? I'm not sure why those would go together. In any case, I get the impression it's kind of deprecated and Onedrive seems much easier to understand.

Sharepoint is like a big umbrella intranet/collaboration enterprise product. It's old, has a million sub-products, is heavily customizable, and is not really intended for normal users to actively do too much with beyond swap files. Onedrive is just microsoft branded dropbox or google drive. Since it's more focused and is a consumer-facing product, not really surprising that users prefer it. While I wouldn't call sharepoint deprecated per se, MS will probably continue to encourage larger and larger companies to just work out of onedrive.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#512

Post by thorin » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

rf15 wrote: post #357

dylan604 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notepad is quite simple

It even has usable features, like inserting the current date and time (my cat showed me that one!)

First I've ever noticed this. I was little surprised it now has infinite tabs, did that come in with win11? I also noticed today that it has autocorrect, never noticed that before! I generally just use it as a clipboard for ascii text so it might be it's been like this forever.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#513

Post by rurp » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

righthand wrote: post #379

riffraff wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amazon? I mean they have some data center stuff, but amazon-the-website does not seem infected with artificial idiocy yet.

Aws docs has a chat bot.

They even had a very Microsoft style rollout for it, where a huge modal for the chat bot would pop up and cover most of the page every single time you went to the docs, with no way to disable it. I tried it out with a very simple database sorting question, and got a completely wrong answer. I don't think I've used it since.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#514

Post by mint2 » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

mihaaly wrote: post #100

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.

This hacker news post is refreshing but unexpected. When I’ve one googled reviews of one drive, i’ve usually found the top results are threads of IT folks raving about how great one drive is compared to shared drives.

I have always been puzzled by the threads since it’s a mess with a bad UI with bad default locations for the various programs.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#515

Post by Suppafly » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #506

TheRealSteel wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there has to be some weird cultural problem at Microsoft where nobody wants to speak up about obviously bad ideas. They destroyed the entire Xbox brand overnight and hampered any chance at recovery with a stupid confusing naming scheme... now it seems like they've learned nothing from that?

Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...? But seriously, I do think it's still one of the most hilariously stupid product names EVER in the history of products, to name the third thing in a series "xbox one". They'll have that idiocy forever bahahahahahah!!!!

>Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?

Seriously, I have an xbox one and couldn't tell you which model it is, even after looking at pictures of them. I know there is a newer better model out now that looks similar and has a similar name. If I wanted to spend the $600 or whatever to upgrade tomorrow, I wouldn't know which one to buy.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#516

Post by Suppafly » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

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.

>but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft

I use a bunch of their products, but I have a strong negative emotion towards them.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#517

Post by redwall_hp » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #405

dimator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I tend to think of any substantial writing we do at work as an essay. Proposal, summary, RFC, employee evaluation, whatever. You can tell who writes well, and who is copy/pasting plausibly relevant text into an unedited draft that they then pass off as the final result. Not AI, just sloppy writing. I don't have numbers to back it, but I think that the good writing gets more done in less time. So, people care if you'r…

I want to work with people who can communicate thoughts effectively and will write some damn documentation.

People who whine about writing being difficult or unimportant are going to be deficient in both.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#518

Post by tencentshill » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:45 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #442

xboxcopilot wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the market, I think we can all agree where Microsoft is heading: The XBOX COPILOT, the new handheld PC powered by AI!

XboX ActiveX XP CoPilot 360-365.NET 2025 Pro Azure Edition

Not to be confused with Entra (formerly Azure AD) Edition

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#519

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:53 PM UTC

ogogmad wrote: post #476

sensanaty wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day? Should we disallow changing background images? Should we let people set color accents as they can right now? Should we even let them choose where they want their desktop icons to be, or which desktop icons they can have there? Or should we disable choosing whi…

I don't work as a PM or for Microsoft. Perhaps the problem is a deeper one, which is constant and likely unnecessary UI makeovers. But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto: > Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day? All the examp…

> But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for.

Everyone has their own personal last straw.

Really the pettiness of spending effort to remove a feature for no good reason is the annoying thing here.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#520

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #138

xigoi wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imagine killing the globally recognized Twitter brand for a single generic letter.

The common denominator is ego. Office may be a globally recognized brand, but it was defined by someone else, and the person making the decision needs to mark their territory.