Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#321

Post by delecti » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

missingdays wrote: post #293

MBCook wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want games, you want Windows. Though Valve is finally chipping away at that. But mostly it’s cost. It’s simply far cheaper to buy a Windows computer than a Mac if you just want a computer. There are no sub-$300 Macs brand new. In so many ways, for so many reasons, people “must” use Windows.

It's cheaper to buy a Linux machine compared to a Windows machine by roughly the cost of the Windows license

Maybe in theory, or for power-users, or a couple niche company. In practice for the vast majority of people if it's not a Chromebook, then they're either buying a laptop or a pre-built tower, and it comes with Windows. It should be cheaper to buy a linux machine, but try and find a computer without an OS at Walmart.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#322

Post by Sharlin » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:07 PM UTC

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #233

Sharlin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.

Flashback to the days when literally every MS product had “.NET” shoehorned into its name somewhere because they had to show they were hip to this newfangled information superhighway thing. The development platform that still has that name 20 years later was just one of a zillion confusingly named marketing initiatives back then. Edit: Wikipedia sums up the "failed branding campaign" quite scathingly: https://en.wiki…

ASP.NET has the dubious honor of featuring two generations of MS buzzwords: "Active" and ".NET".

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#323

Post by jansper39 » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

deckar01 wrote: post #115

_fat_santa wrote: post #33

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…

For years I've used this as a home page of sorts for Microsoft products. It's very annoying not to be able to use it now.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#324

Post by kalap_ur » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #33

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

I wonder if there is somebody here high up in the MSFT stack who understands the tech/code but also oversees more stuff to be able to opine.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#325

Post by kalap_ur » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #303

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…

I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low. In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of…

Yeah. Hyperscalers who are building compute capacities became asset heavy industries. Today's Google, MSFT, META are completely different than 10 years ago and market has not repriced that yet. These are no longer asset light businesses.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#326

Post by kalap_ur » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #98

anthonypasq wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe. AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize…

How do you diversify now? I presume you don't refer to stock portfolio, do you?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Post by rossdavidh » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

petersumskas wrote: post #205

AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying. People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity) I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting. It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existe…

If what they are getting is "not much, plus a side order of hallucination", then connecting the dots is exactly what they DON'T want to do.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#328

Post by analog31 » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

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…

The perception may be that anything AI related will be obsolete in months. So why pay to have it built into a laptop?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#329

Post by Gud » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:26 PM UTC

anthonypasq wrote: post #87

JohnMakin wrote: post #12

Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.

Your comment makes me wonder how long have you been online? Google was amazing from ~1999 until 2010 and has slowly deteriorated since.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#330

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

ManlyBread wrote: post #310

bunderbunder wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 who aren’t. I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no dif…

I’m not sure that really explains how people get onto hype trains like this in the first place, though. I doubt many people intentionally stake their livelihoods on a solution in search of a problem.

My guess is that it’s more of a recency bias sort of thing: it’s quite easy to assume that a newer way of solving a problem is superior to existing ways simply because it’s new. And also, of course, newfangled things naturally attract investment capital because everyone implicitly knows it’s hard to sell someone a thing they already have and don’t need more of.

It’s not just tech. For example, many people in the USA believe that the ease of getting new drugs approved by the FDA is a reason why the US’s health care system is superior to others, and want to make it even easier to get drugs approved. But research indicates the opposite: within a drug class, newer drugs tend to be less effective and have worse side effects than older ones. But new drugs are definitely much more expensive because their period of government-granted monopoly hasn’t expired yet. And so, contrary to what recency bias leads us to believe, this more conservative approach to drug approval is actually one of the reasons why other countries have better health care outcomes at lower cost.