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Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

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Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#131

Post by wkat4242 »

pjc50 wrote: post #90
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> LLM will replace web search. This kills the crab. I mean, kills the Internet. And it's not clear what happens to the existing search advertising business in this scenario.

Google already killed the internet as we knew it. There's a reason engines like yagi have their own spider for "the small web" because google basically ignores everything but the big commercial clickbaity crap.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#132

Post by wkat4242 »

discordance wrote: post #55
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…

If that's the case, it's a very complacent strategy compared to ChatGPT, which people yearn for and automatically turn to. It also disregards a big chunk of people not using Windows, where the little Copilot icon is not built in.

ChatGPT also don't make a common mistake that Microsoft does, they don't squeeze on the compute too much. Microsoft does which makes it worse than ChatGPT even though it's literally the same engine. That keeps the GPT brand valuable.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#133

Post by wkat4242 »

hulitu wrote: post #112
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…

> That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. A thing that gets in the way is not usable, is annoying.

Yes. We work a lot with Microsoft and they are very hardball on "adoption". They are always pushing us to send weekly "did you know..."? emails, yammer campaigns, seminars blablah. Very American also, this does not work in Europe where people are much less 'team players' and much more critical of advertising.

I personally thinks this just pisses people off. It certainly does me. I don't want to be told what to do, especially by some vendor. If I don't want to use it I don't want to be herded into using it. If they try anyway I will just push back and start hating on it just out of annoyance.

However this has always been Microsoft's adoption model. Very pushy. Unlike for example Apple's where they make things look, feel and work really good so people actually want to use it.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#134

Post by wkat4242 »

RachelF wrote: post #14
Bayaz wrote: 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.

Many other recent Microsoft products are below average. I'm thinking Teams, Outlook, Windows 11. Azure and Office are better. I guess they spend their money on sales and licensing and not on developing good products now?

Even office isn't that good. It's basically been static in features for 25 years (until copilot came around). It took them a decade to surpass the 65535-row problem in excel. Microsoft get really lazy when they have a virtual monopoly. We saw the same with Internet Explorer. They just left it to whither away until it was too late.

And yeah Teams, I can't stand it. Outlook too, in particular the "new" one that doesn't do half the things the old one could do and requires all your email to be in MS cloud even if you have another provider.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#135

Post by wkat4242 »

gtowey wrote: post #29
RachelF wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many other recent Microsoft products are below average. I'm thinking Teams, Outlook, Windows 11. Azure and Office are better. I guess they spend their money on sales and licensing and not on developing good products now?

Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really. They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together. Who else can offer that? For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature list…

Yes, that's the thing. I see the same. Every time we had to move from a third party product to a MS one we always had to limit what we wanted to do because the MS solution was far less capable and if we asked about it we'd just get stupid answers like "why do you want to do that, we don't work that way".

But they push it through the CTO with really good initial pricing, then when you're hooked they screw you on the next contract negotiation.

The old saying is: "Microsoft is much better at talking to your boss than you are". Which still rings true IMO.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#136

Post by wkat4242 »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #71
jukkan wrote: 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 don't know, does it matter? What I mean is that the product only just, in the grand scheme of things, got rolled out. MS isn't under some instant pressure to make loads of cash off this new feature. Year by year, people will just become used to having a tool, part of their OS, that they can ask questions to to get some general information on whatever topic. It's easy to pick an arbitrary date and point out the lack…

> MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.

Hmm no, but they are clearly under pressure. Integrating Copilot Chat in office was a pretty big move, and the constant rebranding of everything also feels like they have zero vision and are losing control and scrambling to fix it.

I wonder if Copilot Chat in office will really convince users though. As it doesn't have access to Graph it will lose some of the most valuable 'intelligence'. And thus users will try it, get convinced it's pretty useless and be more hesitant to pay for a license in the future.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#137

Post by wkat4242 »

jukkan wrote: post #5
leakycap wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason is Microsoft's borgy/corpo-confusing service levels. I have a paid 365 account and couldn't determine from logging in or account info screens if I was on paid or just the freemium version with my 365 plan In testing out what I did have access to with Copilot, it was incredibly bad compared to ChatGPT or Claude, so I decided not to pay for Copilot whenever I see an ad for it.

Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot. If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.

And then they have differerent versions of copilot. The consumer one at copilot.microsoft.com, the office one at really hard to remember m365.cloud.microsoft/chat etc. It's really annoying.

And it used to be better. Copilot.microsoft.com would just redirect to the best version you had access to. But they dropped that for whatever reason.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#138

Post by wkat4242 »

chris_wot wrote: post #23
jukkan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot. If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.

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…

Sharepoint has been a complete mess ever since its inception. It lacked any data organisation features so unless you had really strict processes and oversight it turned into a shitheap within months. This is still really the case.

Even now it's mostly useful as a teams backend. But even that doesn't solve the shitheap problem, as any team you create in teams, or every yammer group automatically creates sharepoint sites which are not very useful as a sharepoint site and clutter up search results.

Users often don't understand that when they share something in teams there is an actual sharepoint behind it and sometimes people fiddle with permissions there and then other people don't understand why they're not allowed to do X or Y because the controls aren't fully exposed in the Teams interface. It's such a mess.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#139

Post by wkat4242 »

omcnoe wrote: post #62

Github Copilot is a pain too. Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's, but can't build a working subscription billing system? I'm completely locked out of my Copilot access, that I paid for, with no response from support. Whole experience has somewhat soured me on relying on Microsoft for any critical part of my workflow if the response when things go wrong is complete silence. Put the L…

> Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's

Copilot doesn't run on Microsoft's own LLMs, they're all third party. ChatGPT in office copilot, in github you can choose various other ones too.

Microsoft is really just a reseller there.

Personally I think Claude Code (with Opus in particular) is far better. Unfortunately they are very aware of this and thus it is eyewateringly expensive.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#140

Post by wkat4242 »

DecoPerson wrote: post #117
mrandish wrote: post #60

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…

I agree. Making deals with laptop manufacturers to put their trademark on keyboards is an unhealthy-for-society abuse of their market power and should be treated as such in every jurisdiction that they trade in. However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently. It shows up in the PowerToys keyboard remapper tool as an F23 key. (Yes, there are more…

> However, I've had no issue remapping it to the Context Menu key on the Chinese Lenovo Xiao Xin laptop I bought recently.

That's probably because you're not using it as a modifier so the OP's complaint of the automatic key-up event doesn't impact you (it's not necessary to have a keep-pressed state in this type of use).

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