It's a corporate practice they find hard to shake, and sadly enough, it seems to work.

The idea is about platform solutions vs. best of breed, and they keep betting on the platform. In big organizations with lengthy and complex contracting procedures, platform solutions will always win.

The actual solution for the economy is Interoperability, if we fight for governments to require it, we can get platform providers that allow best of breed bundles. We will gain open market platforms, where you choose the market platform that works for you with the combination of solutions that work for you with one or just few contracts. Markets that close themselves or fight their vendors will lose both vendors and customers.

For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.

Just this last week, I wrote about the confusion this creates in the workplace[0]. My coworker said "copilot" literally referring to any code assistant, the same way we say bandaid or kleenex. I thought he was talking about Copilot, the one I see nagging me on Microsoft teams. We had a full discussion about completely different tools without realizing it.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231

I actually was just thinking about doing something very similar for this but for "agent," specifically in the Microsoft ecosystem. There are a zillion different proper nouns (products, services, frameworks, toolkits and tools, SDKs etc.) containing "agent" now, plus a bunch of other things that are now "agentic".

Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson

I remember Joel of Joel on Software publicly working through the process of creating a remote desktop for normals type product called Copilot back in the day. If I remember correctly he had to pay quite a pretty penny to acquire copilot.com.

I wonder if MS Copilot meant he made money on that investment?

It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.

Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product (2022-2023 code autocomplete) but they completely ensloppified it

That's the point: If you receive a bug report about "Copilot" and it will take you forever to triage what's actually broken, then the ticket gets closed because it becomes stale eventually. Therefore you don't have a complaint anymore!

It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.