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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

wsj.com

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Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#241

Post by romanovcode »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #149
tester756 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success. False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers. I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go

Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?

Yes, also it's not even encrypted. It's the worst case of all major browsers.

Firefox & Safari: E2E encrypted, you hold keys, not possible for Mozilla/Apple to access it.

Chrome: Encrypted, Google holds keys meaning it is useless, they can read and give away the data. One can enable sync passphrase which would enable E2E however.

Edge: Nothing is encrypted and no way to change this.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#242

Post by Lio »

bunderbunder wrote: post #208
saidinesh5 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations. I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting…

The thing about giving your application a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it is, then your application has a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it.

For the usecase of "How do I do thing X in Excell" you could probably get pretty far with just adding a small, local LLM running on the user's machine.

That would move the cost of running the model to the end user but it would also mean giving up all the data they can from running prompts remotely.

It would probably also make Office users more productive rather than replacing them completely and that's not the vision that Microsoft's actual customers are sold on.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#243

Post by netsharc »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #229

Does anyone know why microsoft thought it would be a good idea to alter the right-click menu in a folder to hide all the important choices behind a second, "Show more options" click? Just making the user click once more where previously they didnt have to?

God, it's so dumb. And these 2 menues have 2 different looks, because I guess for Windows 11 they reimplemented it in whatever fancy fucking UI framework they decided to make, but they didn't complete the implementation so they still had to offer the "legacy" version of the menu.

For a long while "Settings" had 2 interfaces, 1 that looks like it's from the iPhone, and the other which is from "Control Panel"...

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#244

Post by nosianu »

bunderbunder wrote: post #209
shigawire wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma. I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.

Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t. It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people wh…

Consumers is nice, but far more important are the big corporate purchases. There may be a lot of people there too who don't want AI, but they all depend on decisions made at the top and AI seems to be the way to go, because of expectations and also because of the mentioned prisoner's dilemma, if competitors gain an advantage it is bad for your org, if all fail together it is manageable.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#245

Post by isoprophlex »

Nadella is in the position he's is, clearly, and I'm just a nobody. The guy must be onto something, and I'm just a delusional internet commentator.

However.

No-one I know, literally not a single soul, is delighted by using any of the copilot-branded tools. What's more, almost everyone seems to resent these tools due to their hamfisted design, poor performance and seedy marketing.

The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit.

Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base?

I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are.

The mind truly boggles.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#246

Post by Schlagbohrer »

netsharc wrote: post #243
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #229

Does anyone know why microsoft thought it would be a good idea to alter the right-click menu in a folder to hide all the important choices behind a second, "Show more options" click? Just making the user click once more where previously they didnt have to?

God, it's so dumb. And these 2 menues have 2 different looks, because I guess for Windows 11 they reimplemented it in whatever fancy fucking UI framework they decided to make, but they didn't complete the implementation so they still had to offer the "legacy" version of the menu. For a long while "Settings" had 2 interfaces, 1 that looks like it's from the iPhone, and the other which is from "Control Panel"...

I forgot that there are three different, separate, different-looking settings menus for the mouse, which show three layers of legacy OS implementation.

Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#247

Post by RugnirViking »

pjmlp wrote: post #230
direwolf20 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.

Most gamers rather chose PlayStation, Nintendo and XBox instead of Windows PC.

I believe it was only a year or two ago that a study showed PC gaming surpassed all consoles combined by a small amount by MaU

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#248

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #225
codeulike wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive

Only because they have enough money in the bank.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#249

Post by Melatonic »

zuminator wrote: post #216
ChuckMcM wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect this is the crux of the problem. There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value. Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. Th…

100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment. They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granu…

I thought Copilot was just ChatGPT - isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI ?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#250

Post by pjmlp »

RugnirViking wrote: post #247
pjmlp wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most gamers rather chose PlayStation, Nintendo and XBox instead of Windows PC.

I believe it was only a year or two ago that a study showed PC gaming surpassed all consoles combined by a small amount by MaU

If we are going by the numbers, then casual gaming on mobile phones and tablets is even higher.

> Mobile gaming generated USD 140.53 billion in 2025, accounting for 48.50% of the video game market share. Console revenue followed at USD 56.2 billion, slightly ahead of PC’s USD 46.3 billion. Cloud-gaming services are the fastest-rising category; the segment’s video game market size is projected to reach USD 24.68 billion by 2029 on a 26.25% CAGR. Wider 5G rollout and aggressive platform bundling are converting non-traditional gamers who do not own dedicated hardware. Source: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/video-ga...

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/video-ga...

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