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The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

zdnet.com

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Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#401
post #34

A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.

> Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system. I feel exactly the same way about that. And I often use it for stuff I don't need to collaborate on. But for paid jobs with stuff I need to round-trip with people who I know are using Microsoft products, I just use the Microsoft products myself. It's cheap insurance against giving the peopl…

I have used OnlyOffice for my collaborative writing needs the last year, and it has been great. They offer a free hosted version, everything is open source and it can be self-hosted.

I can invite people in with SSO so they do not need to make yet another account.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#405
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will solve the cheating problem with more AI, all essays will need to be written in 3 hour time windows in web portals with key-logging + copilot off and children on webcam the entire time. An AI will assess all the data and tell you if the child cheated or not. Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in the future, and having that skill just means you're working a low paying training data crea…

No one has ever cared of you're good at writing essays in the future, that was true 50 years ago. The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source material (book, novel, historical event, political concept, whatever). I'm

I tend to think of any substantial writing we do at work as an essay. Proposal, summary, RFC, employee evaluation, whatever. You can tell who writes well, and who is copy/pasting plausibly relevant text into an unedited draft that they then pass off as the final result. Not AI, just sloppy writing. I don't have numbers to back it, but I think that the good writing gets more done in less time. So, people care if you're good at writing essays.

Then there's the whole "clear writing is clear thinking" angle, but I suspect that people who write poorly do so out of laziness rather than any deficiency.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol. I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do" so it doesn't surprise me that 365 went the same way. I'm saying this and I'm a person that's usua…

> So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol. The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.

CEO is the one job role that AI can’t take because AI lacks accountability. Who is the person using the AI that will get blamed by the board if they screw up? That’s the CEO, even if you decide to give them a different title.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...

Teams is the most loathsome piece of collaboration software I have ever used. When it comes to finding basic things, the UX is so far from intuitive that it makes you wonder if they're just trolling us with these awful designs. I remember being excited about a Slack competitor when it first came out, but the same issues it had back then still exist to this day. I wish they would just pull the plug on that piece of cr…

And if you're a consultant and need to move between the multiple Teams instances that your clients use... it is so very painful.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#408
The author touched on the multiple accounts problem in the article.

I don't use MS products but some of my clients do and when I get an account on their system, it's always been a hassle to set things up. It remembers old accounts which i can't delete, Random error 500s, Teams doesn't work in the browser, and several paper cuts which has made me dread the idea of logging in into any MS account.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#409
post #402

Feels like madness to get rid of the Office brand, such a strong name and brand, like Twitter or iPhone. Office must be worth billions in brand recognition. Ingoring everything else, that alone feels like a mistake.

You don't need brand recognition when you have market capture. Microsoft can murder a small puppy every time you buy Office and send you a photo, and you will still pay them because what else will you do.
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