They should just go with the full aviation crew naming scheme. Rename some of them to FO (first officer), second officer, navigator, flight engineer, radio operator. The cheaper models for quick answers will be the "relief crew". Data filtering and loading would be "loadmaster". Instead of referring to the user as "user" call them "captain". Who doesn't like to feel important and in charge!? Embrace the ridiculousness, at least they will all have some distinctive labels to go by.

Title is fantastic, had me laughing at my own ignorance to copilot's offerings before I even started the article.

I do feel like if any of the major companies could do with a rebranding it would be copilot. They are tossing that name on all of their stuff, and it just doesn't carry the weight of any of the big names even though its chatgpt models under the hood. Personally i associate it with annoying bloatware, and silently judge windows users based on if that icon is still on their tasbar.

The author calls it an ecosystem at one point. That’s overselling it.

I suspect “Copilot” is cargo culted naming across disparate parts of an org that’s home to upwards of 100,000 engineers who must all justify their latest bump in your subscription cost.

It’s amazing how much product Microsoft ships - that’s 95% of the thing.. unfortunately the last 5% is the product polish that’d make their stuff actually good. :(

> "Actually, I made a mistake. I meant Cursor."

Someone who can't describe the model they're using after asking 3 times across several months, probably isn't the 10x engineer you think they are.

This is weird to me because I don't think I talk to anyone regularly who even uses Cursor anymore, let alone Copilot. It's Claude and Codex now, and then people with more interesting/oddball TUI agents or async web agents.

Everything MS does can be summed up in one word: "Clippy"

I've been using their data reporting product for ever. It's not fancy but you'll be amazed at how many data people use it. Back then it used to be called "SQL Server Reporting Services" or "SSRS". It is now called Power BI Paginated Reports. Over the years, the product has gradually become worse. Publishing, subscriptions, several features are now hard to use. All in the service of Clippy and the Cloud.

I genuinely don't understand how one company can be so bad at naming products for multiple decades. It makes Sony's names for its headphones seem downright catchy.

Maybe I should have complained more loudly about them using the same name as that thing I wrote that I called Copilot. https://hewgill.com/pilot/copilot/index-old.html

I’ve been saying the same thing to people I work with for the past few months. When everything is labelled as copilot it creates such confused ideas when someone says they have created something with copilot… or created a copilot agent. It always invoked 20 questions to interrogate what actually was created, and with what ‘version’ of copilot.

MS really needs to distinguish between them all.

It feels like the Microsoft version of "IBM Watson", where they renamed seemingly unrelated projects to Watson.