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Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

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Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#121

Post by dangus »

p_ing wrote: post #79
dangus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we have “Chat” it doesn’t even seem to have what I would describe as “quick” access. It seems to just do nothing. Not a very compelling product in terms of tempting companies to buy a license.

You can get trial full licenses if you’re interested in it. Chat isn’t meant to be anything more than the consumer experience with some business data.

A company that’s looking to grow doesn’t wait for customers to proactively start a trial. That would involve IT departments and approvals and all that stuff.

In the pattern I described, Microsoft would just enable this feature for everyone and sit back and wait for employees to start begging their employers to expand their license because they got a taste of some great functionality.

That’s exactly what OpenAI does with ChatGPT Pro.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#122

Post by dangus »

samch wrote: post #42
dangus wrote: 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…

The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.

I assume my company isn’t paying specifically for copilot and what you’re saying is exactly true.

I’m just not sure why that makes any bit of sense as a product growth strategy.

Instead of trialing an amazing experience they’re just showing their customers that copilot sucks. But if you buy a license it’s awesome, we promise!

Why not actually give me something useful and then cut me off from access when I hit a usage cap? Then uncapping my usage is the upsell. Literally copy what OpenAI does.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#123

Post by raddan »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #36
dangus wrote: 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…

"The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything." I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home. Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace we…

I was listening to an NPR story yesterday about how fashion designers are now using “AI” to spot fashion trends. Aside from the fact that it is now unclear whether a journalist means “software” when they say “AI”, a recurring thought I had was that maybe lots of people are now using AI to make inconsequential decisions. One of the predictions they hyped in the story was that “yellow will be hot”. Ok, sure… but if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter. I can see that AI “helps” in this scenario to reduce decision fatigue, but you might have been just as well off flipping a coin. Even if you buy yourself an expensive coin, it’s a lot cheaper!

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#124

Post by junto »

bix6 wrote: post #7

I had a subscription for a year and it was absolutely worthless. Has anyone found any single worthwhile use case?

Yes I regularly use it for things like “I remember communicating about subject X in 2023, please find all references to that topic since that date”, and it will search and summarize all Teams, Outlook and OneDrive datapoints that I have access to in the organization and neatly summarizing it and linking directly to said datapoints.

I also use it to play around with data and roughly graph it to understand trends without having to roll out a Jupyter notebook.

I find it quite useful.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#125

Post by wkat4242 »

I agree. Copilot 365 has been really underwhelming to me. It was also released way too early, half the features in excel didn't even work. That will have left a bad impression on the earliest of adopters. Which are usually the biggest advocates.

But also, 30$ per month is a lot. For around 300 users you're already talking 100k per year! It's also many times the price that companies pay for their existing M365 licenses including office apps, hosting etc. So it means a completely rebudgeting of their entire IT operations. That kind of money leads to highly critical evaluations that reach the very top. They don't do much volume discount because it's all compute heavy.

Another thing I've been seeing is that users who get Copilot often don't use it at all. From the users buying it, I've heard that in our org only 5-10% actively use it. Others might tap it once a month or use only one or two specific features like the teams meeting summaries. Only the most serious AI bros use it for everything.

I'm in that group myself too. I use it for asking questions about meetings (like "i was distracted for a bit, what did I miss") and for finding stuff in SharePoint which always ends up being a huge mess.

I don't use the email rewriting because Copilot can't match my style which makes it very obvious that I've used it which automatically leads people to devalue the message ("he didn't even bother to write it"). Something the end of this article also alludes to when it refers to an all hands email from Nadella being made with copilot.

Also the pushiness of Microsoft is exhausting. Since that ignite 2022 it's's constant Copilot this Copilot that. For me that has the opposite effect. I just end up rolling my eyes when they rebrand entire product groups and keep rolling their product names. It makes it feel like they have no idea what they are doing and just scrambling to keep up.

The dumbing down is also a problem. When 'researcher' was released first it would spend half an hour on my queries making really great and lengthy well-researched results. It was really powerful and comprehensive. Now all I get is a couple of minutes. It's already lost its value. I'm sure they do this to tune the compute costs but it makes the value prop even worse.

I don't know where this is going but our company is not buying much of it for now. And tbh I can see why.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#126

Post by wkat4242 »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #22
ares623 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boring doesn’t bring in the billions and billions in stock though

Boring is a short term thing - I think it's most useful to think about things like copilot AI for all windows users as a longer term initiative. Right now, I think MS is just letting people get used to a basic free tier. They will observe how Windows users put it to use, see to what degree of involvement people have with it, and evolve the product (and its pricing) from there. Is it raking in cash right now? No. But…

Part of the problem is that this "free" stuff is obviously not remaining free. I'm very hesitant to invest my time in it because I don't want to run it into my workflow and then be held by the balls when they make it paid.

I'm definitely not hoping for a crash but I do think it's inevitable. The amount investment is insane and I don't see how this can be recouped. It's a textbook bubble. And the collapse of a bubble always has pretty bad effects on the industry which will impact all of us. This is probably the biggest bubble to blow since the dotcom crisis.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#127

Post by wkat4242 »

teruakohatu wrote: post #84
Cruncharoo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use it in finance for the reasons above. Microsoft actually just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be. I’ve used it to help write scripts in VBA and it’s really good for my use cases. Before GPT 5 it was worse than useless.

> just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be Only marginally in general office use. Maybe is has better coding capabilities, but there is no way its the same sized model used on ChatGPT or via. OpenAI API.

This is the impression I get too and I hear it a lot from our users too. Some have provided clear examples of something prompted to their personal ChatGPT sub and the company copilot one, and yes, it is often much lower quality. As it is the same product under the hood, there must be some kind of squeezing going on behind the scenes. And understandably because they're just reselling a third party service and they want their own margin on it.

I also wonder why Microsoft pushes it so hard when they don't even have a competitive LLM themselves. They're basically admitting failure (similar to when they moved Edge to a rebranded Chrome by the way).

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#128

Post by wkat4242 »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #18

I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier. That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree…

> I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, late

Yes that is inevitable. But it's exactly why I won't use it. It feels like a scam, the typical drug dealer model. Get them hooked on free stuff, and then milk their addiction.

I almost only use local LLMs now. They're not as good, no. But at least they are mine and nobody will raise the price suddenly. Some pro AI models I just use with API, for the rare instance where local just doesn't cut it. It costs me a few bucks per month that way, not 20 or 30.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#129

Post by wkat4242 »

ryukoposting wrote: post #120
blibble wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the generic public start associating all AI with the useless "Copilot" then Microsoft will succeed in killing off the entire AI industry

Remember Cortana? Microsoft was eroding consumer trust in these chat-style "agent" tools before we even had a name for them.

And clippy before that. It's a running joke since the early 2000's with all the memes. And even this hilarious music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#130

Post by wkat4242 »

dangus wrote: post #26
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #18

I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier. That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree…

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…

Then you have Copilot Chat, that's the free version. It indeed can't interact with company data unless you manually upload it.

If you have a tab selector "Work / Web" at the top, you do have the paid version. Select Work to make it able to find stuff in sharepoint, look at your calendar and emails etc.

If you don't have this selector you only have the free version.

> 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 data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.

Upselling of course. Finding stuff in the gigantic trash heap that is Sharepoint is its main added value for me.

Also, RAG will cost a lot more compute.

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