Posted by gpi 4 days ago
If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
And if I ask them (which I always do) they still have trouble describing the product, because Microsoft give them no help at all. How DO you explain that something was the Copilot thing that's a feature on GitHub.com that shows up in the web interface there, as opposed to whatever the heck other forms of GitHub Copilot.
(Amusingly there are 15 "GitHub Copilot..." products listed on the linked website and I can't tell which if any of those 15 corresponds to the chat UI on the logged in GitHub.com homepage, or that's available in the "Agents" tab in a repository.)
Surely Microsoft feel this pain all the time? Bug reports in "Copilot" must be almost impossible to interpret.
> If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
I think this is basically a rephrasing of the reason for the shared name. This appears to be an attempt at brand unification.
Microsoft wants user's experiences with their products to blend together into an undifferentiated (in more positive terms, "seamless") set of interactions. Not a set of discrete pieces of software, just interacting with Microsoft via Copilot to... ask it to do their work for them, mostly. This is the AI-native future they're building towards. You complain that users can't talk about what tool they're using. Microsoft doesn't want people knowing or caring what tool they're using. Just pay your subscription and have Copilot read and respond to your email for you.
This is insane.
I see how excited the executives would get about one single interface for computing all locked behind the subscription. The article makes Microsoft look stupid. It's tough to believe they're doing it the best way. Was this really a necessary intermediate step? And haven't they burned the brand a good bit…
And apparently when the writing was on the wall however many months ago after they had 20 or 30 different copilots, they believed the best decision to be doubling down.
I always think of GitHub Copilot as the product.
I can purchase the Business or Enterprise plan.
That enables features like Reviews, Chat and so on.
IMO this chart (at least for GitHub Copilot) is confusing products, features and licensing.
That's not to say it isn't confusing understanding what features are available when you get a GitHub Copilot license, but calling them all Products feels wrong. I can't purchase GitHub Copilot Reviews separately as far as I'm aware.
Github CoPilot is decent but the rest of the copilot ecosystem is a hot mess. It’s not surprising MSFT is struggling to monetize AI.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Windows, is in fact, NT/SlopPilot+Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Copilot plus Copilot plus Copilot.
And for free, a rant, I think this is why Microsoft's registry is so bad. On paper it sounds great "a single place to put all your config" I could totally sell it. But in practice it is miserable to use. When proposed nobody said "we already have a hierarchical namespace where all our config can go and it already has pretty great tooling, lets just make it better" so they invented a custom one that required custom special access patterns and custom special tooling and custom special api's, and... it sort of sucks to use. I guess in their defense they were not fully onboard the idea that you could have one tree(they liked their many trees A: B: C:)
What exactly is the thing, that you think is lacking, though?
Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)
I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product. I bet Copilot can fix this...
WSL2 deviates from the native concept of what a Windows subsystem is; it is named that way because it is the successor of the original WSL.
If you want a list of actual subsystems Windows recognizes, this should be pretty accurate:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for...
The real reason for calling it a subsystem was almost entirely for familiarity with the previous concept of running Linux programs on Windows, which were based on that subsystem feature (the POSIX subsystem and the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications).
It is a Windows Subsystem, that caters to running Linux.
It’s a functional title not an architectural one.
Windows Subsystem for: LinuxI read through the brand guidelines where I work, and we have a similar stipulation. Maybe there is some law mixed in there, but from a pure branding play, a company will never want to put someone else first.
WSL2 runs real Linux in a virtual machine.
WSL 1.0 was based on Drawbridge research project of library OSes, also used to port SQL Server into Linux.
> DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, access, create, and/or modify Linux files inside of your `%LOCALAPPDATA%` folder using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc.
They did overcome that problem eventually, but by then everyone had moved on to WSL2.
Even Linux best practices for SMB access have been as read only.
That's why Microsoft abandoned it in favor of WSL2 running real Linux in a VM.
What is this goal post moving? First the was file system access, then it became being unstable, what is going to be the next point?
Let me make it easier, WSL 1.0 did not support the syscalls for X Windows implementation.
If you can't touch the Linux files with Windows tools without corrupting them, your implementation is unstable.
WSL1 was unstable, unfit for purpose, and never worked properly.
It was abandoned in favor of just running real Linux in a VM.
You can't have ellipsis when the shortened version already has its own meaning.
X for Y when both X and Y are nouns means that X is part of Y, not that Y is part of X.
e.g. "I bought new tyres for my car". The tyres are part of my car. You can't flip it and say "I bought new my car for tyres", it's just not how the word "for" works.
Grammatically it has to be "Linux for Windows subsystem", or "Windows subsystem for running Linux" as you said. The verb is essential for it to parse correctly.
It’s a proper noun, there are no rules.
Only in version 2. WSL1 didn't run a Linux kernel, just provided binary compatibility to run Linux userspace programs.
Probably, but I doubt linux wants it either. People might think it's some official linux product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
Like an imperative, because copilot can exist as a verb, I copilot a plane, and Copilot can exist as a software product, and as a helper in a software product that is itself a software product that helps you use the software product it is a helper to
So Copilot copilot! could be an imperative for Copilot to Copilot, and Copilot Copilot could be a description of a software product that helps people use a software product named Copilot, but the second is not really grammatically correct as a sentence, whereas the imperative is.
So in the end I guess you could have a Copilot Copilot..[infinite Copilots]..copilot!
Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots, which other Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots assist, themselves assist Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots.
(Fun fact: If you repeat a word sufficiently, it will lose its meaning..)
I think I'll stick to that definition; I don't want to lose my mental image of the daft-looking little copilots roaming around the Inter-Andean valleys that their more menacing-looking ancestors once inhabited. Yeah, cute little things.
Too late. Microsoft already caused that to happen.
I'm sad they replaced it with copilot.
Not to be confused with "Microsoft Copilot .NET". :-)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=.NET&oldid=134276...
They dropped the Core designation because they're still trying to encourage people to migrate so they can take .Net Framework out behind the shed where Silverlight went. v5 was a convenient time to start that whole process of re-integration.
Good points/considerations.
This comment really helps me put things in perspective.
I'm guess now that it's Microsoft's way of naming their LLM-powered products/features, the same way "Azure" is basically their codename for "cloud".
They just like branding their dev tools for whatever they're pushing at the time. In 2002 they named Visual Studio "Visual Studio .NET".
It would have been more confusing to have Visual Studio Team Server and Azure DevOps Services being the same product but hosted differently.
At one point the next version of Windows Server 2003 was going to be Windows .NET Server.
Also Windows CE, Outlook Express, Xbox App, Xbox Game Pass for PC, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, etc.
Only perfect pasta sauces.
Howard R. Moskowitz is an American market researcher and psychophysicist. He is known for the detailed study he made of the types of spaghetti sauce and horizontal segmentation. By providing a large number of options for consumers, Moskowitz pioneered the idea of intermarket variability as applied to the food industry.
I think they were lucky this time that they landed a good name after only a few iterations that has since stuck.
Anyone remember Google Bard or LaMDA?
At work we have licenses for Copilot and Copilot but not Copilot and everyone gets Copilot but only some get Copilot.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-gemini...
Also, Apple tends to make system services that are implemented once and work across all apps I the OS, like with their writing tools. The app didn’t change, it can just take advantage of a new system level feature… and so can 3rd party apps.
I use win95 emulator in the browser to play it.
They could simply have marketing that talked about “<product name>, now with Copilot”. Eventually the marking moves on to the next thing, Microsoft products already became synonymous with Copilot/AI due to the marking and general use, and the names stay clean and consistent over time.
To me, the issue isn't that they've named so many things 'Copilot' but rather that Copilot is in every goddamn product.
Microsoft has been replacing most of their brands by Copilot. There's no searching for it in a product, the product is named "Copilot".
I think Satya has lost the thread, even in a CEO context.
So I have to license a certain Copilot not just AI.
Do we have Copilot? Yes and no.
Both Azure and Intelligent Cloud continue to beat expectations in revenue and adoption.
Don't just make stuff up because you don't like the product or company.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-lowers-ai-softw...
The main issue is an ability to rebuild literally any part of the system from sources. A few changes here and there allow cheaters to bypass anticheat protection in a significant amount of ways
This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea which GitHub MCP server I setup in Claude Code, but the domain has “githubcopilot” in it. Am I burning copilot tokens (or “requests” or whatever is their billing unit) when I use this from Claude?
Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.
A while back, Microsoft bought Github.
"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.
One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.
Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.
"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".
Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.
Yeah github pays Claude but what's the point ?
I am not locked in to Anthropic, either. I can easily switch between GPT and Gemini models based on how I think each would perform in various scenarios. That's a big win. I use a lot of design with Opus, implement with GPT 5.4.
Also, Github Copilot CLI is pretty much at feature parity (for the stuff that matters) with Claude Code. Using both at work and home, I don't think there's much difference in features between the two. Maybe I'm not a super power user, and just a regular dumb user, but GH doesn't seem buggy and everything I think I'd want to do with CC I can do with GH.
Yes, Copilot supports skills. Practically all agents support very similar feature sets or are actively building up parity support if not already there. The only real difference between systems is the prompt and payment method. Copilot even allows you to use Anthropic's own skills repository: https://github.com/anthropics/skills
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/about-age... details the support for skills. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/copilot-c... details the CLI tool in general, which seems more or less on par with Claude Code's.
Unfortunately it’s self defeating to educate them.
1. Tooling is changing very fast but people tend to form sticky opinions (reasonably enough - there’s only so much time in the world).
2. It’s just hard to form robust objective opinions - you have to make a real effort to build test cases and evaluation processes and generally the barrier to entry there is pretty high.
So - I agree, calling people uninformed is not a great way to win them over, but maybe that’s the price of living in a world of anecdotes which become fixed in people’s minds.
I've just had a chat with Copilot's Opus 4.6 go off the rails after compaction today.
And, ultimately, proving my point. Did you actually explain why you thought it’s superior? Or is it just because GitHub bad? Have you even tried it recently?
> "Fix the following compile errors" -> one shot try and stops.
> "Fix the following compile errors. When done, test your work and continue iterating until build passes without error" -> same cost but it gets the job done.
I don't think that's true. In VS Code, that's also configurable via the chat.agent.maxRequests setting.
There was absurd latency in the Copilot Opus 4.6 model on 1st and 2nd April which led to lots of my requests timing out with nothing to show though.
"Maximum number of requests that copilot can make using agents"
I don't get how this setting is relevant?
Holy moly
I guess it won't last long, abuse it as much as you can right now.
Your question does raise a valid point - Github Copilot's value proposition is fairly limited in my opinion. Not to say worthless but limited and clearly varies depending on how Githubbey your dev workflows are.
Claude's integration looked like trash in comparison.
Why would I lock myself into a single vendor when I can have access to all models.
Also the GitHub subscription is a very good price.
Making it possible to buy something from Anthropic might require tedious paperwork for many of them.
There is no VSCode Copilot. There is Github Copilot integration inside VS Code.
If had first meant a coffee table form factor PC with touch screen and special software, which was able to sense special objects placed on top of it. Then that was renamed to "PixelSense" [1] and "Surface" instead got put on a line of touchscreen tablet form factor PCs launched together with Windows 8. OK, reusing a strong name for a product line expected to sell more, and which still fit the theme made sense.
.. but then the brand was also put on laptops, convertibles, desktop PC and an Android phone ... eh, OK, but at least those also had touch screens.
... but then the brand was also put on generic peripherals: keyboard, mouse, headphones, earbuds, etc. which diluted the brand to mean practically nothing. For example, a search for "surface keyboard", could result in a "type cover" for some kind of tablet PC or a keyboard intended for desktop computers.
Microsoft later did the same with the "Microsoft Sculpt" brand. It was first a compact curved "sculpted" ergonomic keyboard with chiclet keys and an ergonomic mouse that were most often sold as a set. That got quite popular and so the brand achieved recognition. But later, Microsoft decided to reuse that brand for completely generic peripherals with no special ergonomic designs whatsoever.
BTW. Not long after, Microsoft also released products with the similarly ungoogleable names "Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard" and "Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard".
Do you mean blades?
Proof that I'm not hallucinating that name: https://www.windowscentral.com/meet-surface-music-kit-new-bl...
Or no, you must be referring to the Azure Portal sections.
Of course, this meant that the next time they tried to get anybody to install a patch, some of us felt annoyed because. RealOne Player wasn't "the One" after all. Why should we get back on the treadmill of waiting for downloads that rarely seem necessary?
Ahem. I think this event sensitised me against all attempts at using "one" like that. I mentally flip a table every time.
You mean "Web's fear"? ;-)
What the hell is Kevin Scott (Microslop's CTO) doing with his time? How can any reasonable leader look at this disaster and go "hmm, yes, this looks like a sane and sustainable setup for future growth"?
It would be ironic if there was nothing called "CoPilot" for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Somewhat more niche, I'd also add Access to the list. There is worryingly little development going on these days, but after all these decades there is no other product who came even remotely close to its quality. For quick local RDB stuff and some RAD, nothing is as quick and reliable. I still use it for all of my personal collection tracking, data modeling and prototyping for hobby projects, etc. The speed at which I can set up and adjust is unreal. I appreciate that LibreOffice are giving it a try with Base, but every time I try it, it takes me about 2 minutes until I find a basic, essential feature that's severely broken. (I guess I know which project I should start contributing to if I ever got into the mindset of doing some open-source work.)
Jupyter also has a janky execution model. It doesn’t track dependencies so you have to be very careful in how you separate cells from one another and just running the whole notebook every time seems kind of pointless vs just writing a pure Python script.
But as a professional, it has no further use.
[0]: Please tell me how I add a new paragraph style in Docs?
World has had ctrl+b for bold forever, so people can start to use it and then upgrade to styles when they run into the limitations. Alternatively someone knowledgable could set Word to only allow a selection of styles.
Open and Libreoffice has had style support since forever. Its only docs that kneecaps its users learning journey like that.
There is Siri on iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, Apple TV, and CarPlay and are all different different incarnation of Siri (with different capabilities). Then there is everything else like the Siri Remote, Siri Suggestions (and all their types: Siri apps suggestions, Maps, keyboard, Share Sheet, etc), Siri Shortcuts, and Siri Knowledge (WolframAlpha + Wikipedia + other databases?).
I'm sure 75% of these will be rebranded "Apple Intelligence" by the end of the year...
If they were like MS, they would add Siri into everything and then call it "Siri Cloud", "Siri Messages", etc (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")
Nowadays Apple would brand such features as "Apple Intelligence", but since they already existed long before, they are "Siri".
Though I agree that it's not quite as badly ubiquitous as Copilot.
Siri 365 Communication Suite .NET Enterprise Edition With Copilot
Most Apple customers probably don’t even realize you can still do all the original iTunes stuff in Music (local music and syncing, CD burning, etc) purely due to the horrible branding.