Given how hard Microsoft is leaning into AI, and how important Office 365 is, the Copilot for 365 is shockingly bad.
That’s because the alternative is worse.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
11–20 of 591 posts
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#12But 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…
We did an enterprise license renewal with them last summer. They offered and we accepted a purchase of a large block of m364 license in exchange for a substantial discount in the overall price. Worked for us, worked for them, so no complaints there. We are measuring engagement and time-savings per user and we are doing pretty good on the engagement side while time savings side is barely breaking even (comparing the price of the product versus monetary value of the time saved per user on a monthly basis).
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#13I don't think Microsoft has created a single novel or useful thing in the last 30 years, with the exception of vscode.
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#14My 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.
Copilot is a button. ;)
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#15My 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.
It was all part of Microsoft 365 already; Copilot just adds the AI slop.
Yes, and I was already struggling to understand what Microsoft 365 actually meant. Adding AI and renaming it all to Copilot is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#16Microsoft really has to pull itself together in terms of product branding. Microsoft 365 itself was a terrible name for an office suite, but adding a "copilot" at the end is hitting too low a bar. Not sure how it even got an approval in the first place.
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#17But 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 startup ecosystem in which the goal is to get bought to be killed by the monopolies would help us how anyway?
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#18My 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.
[deleted]
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#19It's even dumber than it seems at first glance; what people do has changed to the degree where besides a niche market segment of users with deep product knowledge and usage, most activities and work happens in much simpler shapes than a productivity suite is a good fit for. It's primarily tasks using surface level functionality.
This essentially (along with subscriptions and bundling) makes the fit just worse, which in turn makes the value proposition even worse.
The global idea of having something that does what a publisher's desk needs but "on the computer" became irrelevant over 10 years ago, and at the same time, the work that remained moved to where specialised work has always been: in specialised tools. The space between emulating the physical world and processes that are mostly digital but somehow still have to relate to the physical world is pretty much self-eliminating.
I suppose the only thing that remains is a spreadsheet, because it is a tool that has no direct analog. But even there you end up with people using it to manage lists (which you can do with practically anything else) or doing actual spreadsheet work. That split is not really apparent with the other many products in the Copilot suite as the processes it used to be used for are themselves shrinking. For example: we're not writing a larger number of internal memos in Word, we're not creating more brochures in Publisher, and we're not printing letters all day long. Our meetings aren't better because we have outlook, planner, project and onenote. Even if all of those products had 1000 AIs built in, that wouldn't change.
Sprinkling AI around to try and manufacture relevant improvements or relevance for the processes that used to be the primary way to spend a working day only hurts the product.
Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
#20My 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.
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...