Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#91

Post by ntoskrnl_exe » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:42 AM UTC

dangus wrote: post #28

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.

The product naming is completely insane. In the span of a year my corporate portal changed name from portal dot office dot com, to Microsoft 365 dot com, and now its copilot something or other dot com. The portal completely changed in design and the former portal functionality is hidden in a tiny search icon in a knock off chatgpt interface. The average non-technical corporate user must be so confused.

The confusing nature of product naming is I think pretty typical of MS. It’s just like with personal accounts, where there is no Outlook or Hotmail domain for logging in, it’s still live dot com, and Windows Live hasn’t been a thing for at least 13 years.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#92

Post by airstrike » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:43 AM UTC

btown wrote: post #43

browningstreet wrote: post #37

I used M365 Copilot at work, and it's amazing at summarizing discussions in Teams meetings, and terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called. I'm guessing that will improve with time and a few releases.

> terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets? Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't? I've long thought that…

I am doing exactly this. In stealth, launching soon

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#93

Post by stevage » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:44 AM UTC

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 did not know that - what an unpleasant choice.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#94

Post by IanCal » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:45 AM UTC

dingaling wrote: post #85

w0m wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint. on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of. I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now. If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and…

Isn't that just indexed search?

No.

Search is part of this, but that doesn’t necessarily work from an error message.

It doesn’t mean you get the relevant parts of the thread either.

It certainly doesn’t mean you get a populated meeting invite for a relevant team.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#95

Post by stevage » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:46 AM UTC

bix6 wrote: post #7

I had a subscription for a year and it was absolutely worthless. Has anyone found any single worthwhile use case?

My partner uses it. Her use cases are often things like "go to all these URLs and collect some information from each one" or "collect all instances of X from these documents"

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#96

Post by 9dev » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:03 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #34

tuatoru wrote: post #17

Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory. If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.

Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite. Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.

Well to be fair, Entra is still backed by AD behind the scenes as the database. But yeah, I’m also not sure a directory server is still required to store domain objects; tree structures are pretty much solved in all kinds of databases and don’t warrant LDAP anymore anyway.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#97

Post by johnnienaked » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:03 AM UTC

I doubt the bleed stops there. Hell, I stopped my outlook subscription and am getting an Apple next after they shoehorned that absolute garbage into my email.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#98

Post by jukkan » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:05 AM UTC

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.

The crazy thing is how the premium M365 Copilot has only gotten worse as the free Copilot Chat has been rolled out. When the AI assistant from Microsoft can't create a calendar entry in Outlook, what are they even doing with this tech at MS?

You either get A) hallucinations of "I created the calendar entry now" (it didn't) or B) an .ics file you need to download, then import to Outlook manually.

More tests about this scenario in here: https://www.perspectives.plus/p/assistants-without-hands

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#99

Post by jiggawatts » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:06 AM UTC

p_ing wrote: post #49

jiggawatts wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite. Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.

Windows Server 2025 included many AD changes that were non-cloud related. They're not actively killing it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...

Most of those are scalability / security improvements that are only relevant to fortune 500 sized megacorps.

These are the kind of release notes you'd expect to see for a dying product on life support, used only by those few remaining customers that are too big and too invested in it to migrate away.

Also, the Server 2025 release is the first one to change anything in Active Directory, the 2022 and 2019 versions had essentially nothing in the release notes for AD.

A few performance tweaks and a long-overdue security catch-up or two in a decade is not a vibrant, living and breathing product. It's a shambling zombie.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

#100

Post by jukkan » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:11 AM UTC

alirath wrote: post #70

In my limited experience using copilot at work, i think it has been a game changer for non-technical computer users. Many of my coworkers and i use it as the first attempt at research especially now that it is connected to SharePoint within my company and provides references to the documents it is pulling from. Saves hours for things like compiling international regulations or standards documentation. Additionally, i…

The recent Copilot search that was rolled out to replace the traditional M365 search is actually pretty good. When you use that search UI specifically.

If only asking from Copilot in a chat, the results are less spectacular or reliable. That just shows how a chat UI isn't the best solution for everything. Yet taking the M365 Search terms as input for the LLM to translate into a query that doesn't require the user to know the exact keyword to search - yes, that's a clear step forward.

And Graph grounding remains one of the features behind the premium license. So, only ~2% of M365 users will currently see this benefit. Unless the pay-as-you-go pricing option has huge adoption that we don't have any leaked figures on yet.