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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#91

Post by Aperocky »

shevy-java wrote: post #84

It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop. It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and…

Putting "AI integrations" on Windows 11 is like layering surstromming on a turd.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#92

Post by Avamander »

nitwit005 wrote: post #71

I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product. Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

That was the only time when YouTube actually had a proper comment system and you would actually get notified when someone replied to you consistently.

I wish they'd've kept the parts people used the most.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#93

Post by toomuchtodo »

anthonypasq wrote: post #86
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…

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.

> 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.

Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.

Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.

Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026

This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...

> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.

> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology

> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked

> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died

("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#94

Post by profsummergig »

nitwit005 wrote: post #71

I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product. Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

Also Teams and OneNote.

If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.

CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#95

Post by eboy »

nitwit005 wrote: post #71

I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product. Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#96

Post by wolvoleo »

simonask wrote: post #76
wolvoleo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice isn't bad at all.

LibreOffice is catastrophically bad. It is slow, buggy, and everything it does is either pointlessly emulating a bad product, or pointlessly going against expectations. It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.

I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.

I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.

In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.

I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.

Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.

What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.

But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.

So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#97

Post by reaperducer »

anthonypasq wrote: post #86
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…

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.

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.

It's happened before.

Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.

Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#98

Post by ChuckMcM »

anthonypasq wrote: post #86
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…

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 a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#99

Post by JohnMakin »

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.

Then prove it? There have been actual studies that confirm this fact. You could also use the fact that google search has been losing market share steadily since 2023 and since search was supported on things like chatGPT as evidence it has been in decline. But, as I have in the past also said, I refuse to argue about this with google employees/devotees because there seems to be a fair amount of delusion involved.

For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#100

Post by rightbyte »

anthonypasq wrote: post #86
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…

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.

The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.
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