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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

#441

Post by Cthulhu_ »

esafak wrote: post #328
sunaookami wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one? https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...

Rereading that makes me shake my head. Things didn't get that bad overnight. The fact that so many UX crimes were allowed to fester is proof that Microsoft doesn't care about or understand UX.

That is (was?) the problem, it reads like a dozen different teams were involved in that whole process and they all talked past each other, or there was no unified vision, or no process manager involved. But keeping oversight and ensuring a single view of a whole set of products like that is difficult. Of course, Microsoft didn't make it easy for themselves either, at the time having Windows Update via a website and no "app store" equivalent.

That said, the current state isn't that much better; they do have an app store at the moment, but all the alternatives are still there as well. Developer tools you install via nuget or chocolatey or whatever, games via Steam, Epic, or each individual developer's launcher, loads of stuff you just get via a download off a website, etc.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#442

Post by Cthulhu_ »

xboxcopilot wrote: post #335
jay_kyburz wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse. Did you see this ad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYBSNQLsBKk

Looking at the market, I think we can all agree where Microsoft is heading: The XBOX COPILOT, the new handheld PC powered by AI!

XboX ActiveX XP CoPilot 360-365.NET 2025 Pro Azure Edition

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#443

Post by Mashimo »

einr wrote: post #97
1986 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL is a big improvement over the MinGW era

Singling out "you can now pretend your Windows is a reasonable facsimile of a Linux" as an example of innovation is not really a flex.

But it's "a useful thing" from Microsoft.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#444

Post by einpoklum »

PebblesHD wrote: post #319
einpoklum wrote: post #129

This is an excellent opportunity to tell our friends and family: It's time to consider switching to --==[[ LIBRE OFFICE! ]]==-- because: 1. It's a very good office suite that isn't subject to "fashionable remakes" and other Microsoft shenanigans. 2. over 100 million people use it - mostly on Windows and many on Linux and Mac. 3. No AI! And it certainly doesn't keep track of what you do, and it doesn't call home to te…

It does suffer slightly from looking like it was developed in the 90s. The UI kit it uses by default looks very out of place on most modern platforms and despite their being other UIs available, most end users will look at the default and choose something else, likely office. They need to invest some time in modernising the human interface parts of the suite.

Which Desktop environment are you looking at? The "UI kit" is different on different platforms (the idea is to use native widgets)

If you mean the fact that it's not ribbony, with a lot of unused empty space between widgets and with mobile-phone-like aesthetic - the rejection of that style is intentional. Microsoft went that way, and hurt usability; LibreOffice has not. Although some argue emphatically that it's the way to go in order to attract new users.

For those who like a more ribbon'y UI style - it's available as an option. On the menu, choose "View > User Interface..." TBH, that's not fully-developed and I don't like it much.

One other aspect of modernization is that there is a dark mode, which has improved a lot over the past couple of years: https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-dark-mode/

but if you have specific suggestions/rants - UI/UX discussions are always ongoing, albeit slowly given the immense size of the project and the amount of dialogs and UI/UX aspects to be considered and improved. Try the "LibreOffice Design" channel on Telegram for example.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#445

Post by TonyTrapp »

burgerrito wrote: post #383
evanelias wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot) This isn't even a new dumb move for Microsoft. In the early 2000s, they applied the .NET brand to lots of random things that were completely unrelated to the runtime/framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

Ahhh!! So that's when they added .NET to the name Visual Basic .NET

Well, Visual Basic .net is based on the .net framework, can't deny that. It's a very different language from the previous non-.net Visual Basic versions, so much that some people rather argue that "Visual Basic" is the problematic part of the name, not the ".net".

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#446

Post by Myrmornis »

Toutouxc wrote: post #86

I understand people who love Apple (or the OSS world) unconditionally and I understand people who hate either, but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft. Feels like there isn’t a single product person left in the company, no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing.

It does seem like their mainstream products are as tastelessly managed as ever.

But in the (small?) corner of developer products they've been pretty good: Typescript, VSCode, .NET/C#/F#, LSP, Lean are all great and very influential contributions.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#447

Post by whywhywhywhy »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #365
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #248

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.

This just isn't true unfortunately, but the angle of attack that is true is AI replacing the need for the rest of the company for you to be able to make money as an individual.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#448

Post by prmoustache »

philistine wrote: post #228
righthand wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just write with LibreOffice. Your example of special acceleration for Apple made software is unfounded.

Well LibreOffice has at its core the ability to deliver me a text editor that starts in 25 seconds versus the 5 of Pages. I’ll stick to the one that saves me time every time I open it.

That is because you are starting up word processors instead of a text editor. My text editor starts in less than one second.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#449

Post by prmoustache »

olddustytrail wrote: post #262
philistine wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well LibreOffice has at its core the ability to deliver me a text editor that starts in 25 seconds versus the 5 of Pages. I’ll stick to the one that saves me time every time I open it.

Really? It starts in 1 second for me. Must be a Mac thing. I thought they were supposed to be fast?

I think it depends if you preload libreoffice at boot time or not. It makes sense if you are using it daily, not so much if you are using it once every other full moon.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#450

Post by prmoustache »

mrweasel wrote: post #71
blibble wrote: post #46

30 years of their home name Office brand, known by pretty much every person that's ever had a computer let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator the main brand instead certainly a courageous decision

That was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription service. My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't. 30 years of ownin…

> The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office

Are you calling it office when you are starting up Teams, powerBI or Microsoft Stream? I don't.

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