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How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

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Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#41

Post by robocat »

chatmasta wrote: post #29

I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap? This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea…

Niece comment tries to explain a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47643220

Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#42

Post by r0m4n0 »

To be fair, Google does it too. I just had the product I work on renamed to Gemini Enterprise. Sure we use Gemini but it’s confusing because it’s not really an “enterprise” version of Gemini. It’s just a way to name drop what it uses under the hood. This was our third rename in 4 years so probably will change again soon

Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#43

Post by smelendez »

nlawalker wrote: post #27

I actually was just thinking about doing something very similar for this but for "agent," specifically in the Microsoft ecosystem. There are a zillion different proper nouns (products, services, frameworks, toolkits and tools, SDKs etc.) containing "agent" now, plus a bunch of other things that are now "agentic".

A ton of companies use agent/agentic to mean AI that does something with external effects, as opposed to a chatbot. I’m not sure if it’s overused per se or companies are just really pushing their AI features in general.

Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#44

Post by lou1306 »

ethmarks wrote: post #33
giancarlostoro wrote: post #4

Its annoying especially since Copilot exists in Visual Studio (Code too I believe) and its not exactly "the same" thing as far as I can tell. I really hate Microsoft's naming conventions. At least call that one Copilot for Devs or something more meaningful.

The Copilot in Visual Studio (Code) is not the same as Microsoft's Copilot. The former is GitHub's AI product and the latter is Microsoft's AI product. You can tell them apart because GitHub Copilot's icon is a helmet with goggles and Microsoft Copilot's icon is a colourful swirl thing. It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because…

> they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs

Haven't tried it yet but the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode also seems to integrate Claude, Gemini and other non-OAI stuff

Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#46

Post by mrandish »

guidedlight wrote: post #23

Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).

> “Gaming Copilot” is missing

It would be ironic if there was nothing called "CoPilot" for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#48

Post by shireboy »

chatmasta wrote: post #29

I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap? This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea…

Git is a distributed source control system. It's open source and you can use it to version source code on your drive and/or a remote git repository.

Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.

A while back, Microsoft bought Github.

"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.

One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.

Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.

"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".

Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.

Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#49

Post by ValentineC »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30
ieie3366 wrote: post #13

Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product (2022-2023 code autocomplete) but they completely ensloppified it

> Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product Cortana was a great brand. Clippy is still on the shelf. Copilot could have been a deep brand if they pulled it from their flight simulators. Instead it rings hollow of any meaning.

We definitely could have stuck with Cortana for a consumer-facing personal assistant. The first few Halo games were great.

Re: How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

#50

Post by EvanAnderson »

Microsoft is uniquely unable to name / brand anything sensibly:

"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"

.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)

The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"

Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"

"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)

Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"

"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"

"Microsoft FrontPage" / "Site Server" / "Site Server Commerce Edition" / "Office Server" / "SharePoint Portal Server" / "Windows SharePoint Services" / "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Foundation" / "SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Standard" / "SharePoint Enterprise" / "SharePoint Online" / "SharePoint Designer"

"Office Communicator" / "Microsoft Lync" / "Skype for Business" / "Skype" / "Skype for Business Online" / "Skype for Business for Microsoft 365"

Fairly guffaw-inducing branding, to me, was removing the Remote Desktop Client app and introducing something called "Windows App".

The old "System Management Server" became "System Center" and its family of products.

There's the whole accounting software / ERP world, too:

"Great Plains" / "Dynamics GP" / "Navision" / "Dynamics NAV" / "Solomon" / "Dynamics SL" / "Axapta" / "Dynamics AX" / "Dynamics 365" / "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations" / "Dynamics 365 Business Central"

(For most guffaws induced, though, there's the Windows 98-era "Critical Update Notification Tool"[0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Update...

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