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Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

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101–110 of 173 posts

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#101
post #31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint. Is it the IT department’s fault for not enabling something? I don’t know, but does that matter? If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company…

> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint. on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of. I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now. If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and…

The part where it gave you access to a thread you were not a part of seems scary to me..

In this case your absence from the thread was probably an oversight, but in general there could be a very good reason for it

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#102

1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's key…

Remapping right control works fine for me on win11

It doesn't work like it did before and will fail in some contexts. For example, if you try to use it with other modifier keys (as I do), you cannot because they are ALL already pressed and those presses cannot be masked. A real modifier key can be combined with any or all of the other modifiers. There is now no way to use that key in combination with the other modifiers.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remapping right control works fine for me on win11

It doesn't work like it did before and will fail in some contexts. For example, if you try to use it with other modifier keys (as I do), you cannot because they are ALL already pressed and those presses cannot be masked. A real modifier key can be combined with any or all of the other modifiers. There is now no way to use that key in combination with the other modifiers.

It seems to work fine in vscode setting custom keybinds at least.

I havent tried it anywhere else to be fair

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#105

Since when has Microsoft had a hit product before version 3? It's simply not in their corporate DNA. Besides, I just recently saw a review of the newest Copilot for Excel by a serious spreadsheet jockey, and he was truly blown away. Basically, it knows everything Excel can do, how to do it, and it now truly understands numbers as numbers and when to use formulas, etc. etc. Basically, it went from smart automation to…

Could have been leveraging the new Agen Mode in Excel preview released as a Labs feature. Built on Claude and not GPT-5, this is what the MS teams behind apps like Excel, PowerPoint etc. are now doubling down on.

Possibly the Office Agent can become a V2 of what M365 Copilot was originally sold as. It's not at all surprising that it takes a few years to figure out what LLMs can really be used for in Office tools. Whereas asking for businesses to fund all these experiments with a $30pupm license is not the best move to create early adoption and fans...

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#106
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint. on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of. I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now. If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and…

The part where it gave you access to a thread you were not a part of seems scary to me.. In this case your absence from the thread was probably an oversight, but in general there could be a very good reason for it

The only way I can reasonably interpret it is that it was a discussion on a Teams channel they had access to but weren't involved in.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft did this same thing with Teams and OneDrive back in the day. It took quite a while before they straightened that mess out. Not to mention ton when they renamed Lync to Skype…

And .NET Core to .NET, not to be confused with .NET Framework

.NET was always a clusterfuck of naming, as in the early 2000s Microsoft was slapping the .NET label everywhere. .NET Passport (now known as Microsoft accounts), .NET My Services, Visual Studio .NET (which was the same as regular VS, just with support for building C# and VB.NET apps added), .NET Server 2003 (Windows Server 2003), et weary cetera.

In this respect, as in many others related to .NET, Microsoft was inspired by Java. In the late 90s, Java wasn't just a language, it was a VM, runtime environment, enterprise platform (Java EE, now Jakarta EE), smartcard technology, remoting protocol, operating system, desktop environment, floor wax, dessert topping...

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#108
post #8

I still think there's a potential niche for 365 Copilot in its boringness. At work (not a tech company), there's an ongoing, slow, 365 rollout. The people who participate in the rollout are not technical in any way, but they all love it because they're not regular ChatGPT/Claude users, either. In a way, the restricted feature-set of Copilot compared to ChatGPT helps them, they're overwhelmed enough by Copilot. IT lov…

I am not even sure what is 365 Copilot. But Copilot is included as part of our Office / Teams package, and literally every one is using it in my organisation. And it is perhaps one of the biggest organisations in the country as well.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#109
post #48
post #9

Unsurprising. I tried it probably a year ago. I asked it what meetings were in my calendar for the day and it couldn’t even tell me that. To add insult to injury, they wanted an annual commitment with up front payment at the time.

The Meeting Management MCP server (aka Outlook calendar) can do that easily with pretty much no configuration required on the end user side. A year is a long time in the tech industry, let alone LLM (or Copilot) history.

The difference is that Copilot will have access to your calendar _and_ associated resources (messages, meeting transcripts, etc.) and be able to relate them to files you have access to. It’s become quite useful in telling me which of the action points for a specific meeting are being handled by whom _now_ and where the resulting documents are even if the meeting was weeks ago.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#110
post #2

8 million active users after almost 2 years from making the $30pupm license available. Less than 2% of Microsoft 365 paying customers choosing to pay extra for Copilot. It's not difficult to see why Microsoft themselves have stopped reporting on AI revenue, as well as not disclosing any official numbers on M365 Copilot sales. Luckily, a source leaked these figures for Ed Zitron to report in his newsletter.

I’m pretty sure those figures aren’t global, since very few people at Microsoft have access to that kind of data outside their area of direct accountability.
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