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Posted by gpi 4 days ago

How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?(teybannerman.com)
808 points | 385 commentspage 3
Razengan 4 days ago|
It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again
function_seven 4 days ago||
I’m waiting for .Net Copilot with integration to Passport.
xfactorial 4 days ago||
Kid: you are playing with forces of nature you cannot comprehend :-)

That being said: I would love someone from Marketing and Branding to explain me this “Copilot everywhere” because it is unintelligible (unless they want to dilute it through over exposure).

darkwater 4 days ago|||
I wonder if they have more or less the same marketing team over all these years or now it's just part of the mindset.
frankzander 4 days ago|||
But beware if someone say to them Microslop ... they don't like it if someone other make up new names :-)
zdragnar 4 days ago||
Is it unreasonable to not appreciate an insult?
RGamma 4 days ago||
Fabric is the one place for all your data!
r0m4n0 4 days ago||
To be fair, Google does it too. I just had the product I work on renamed to Gemini Enterprise. Sure we use Gemini but it’s confusing because it’s not really an “enterprise” version of Gemini. It’s just a way to name drop what it uses under the hood. This was our third rename in 4 years so probably will change again soon
dsteel 3 days ago||
The naming confusion points to a deeper problem. Everyone is building the "AI does a thing" layer (coding, writing, searching). It looks like no one is building the "AI things work together" layer.

We run 14 AI agents. CrewAI, LangGraph, Google's 8 patterns... all solve how agents pass data to each other. None of them answer: which agent has authority over which domain? What happens when two agents disagree? Who owns the escalation path?

Those are organizational problems, not technical ones. And organizational problems don't get solved by naming a product "Copilot."

aimemobe 2 days ago||
The Copilot chaos is exactly why I moved to on-device AI. No rebrand can touch it, no API policy can gate it, no subscription required. aiME runs Qwen, Gemma, Mistral on your phone — forever — one-time purchase. https://coticsy.com/aime.html
yieldcrv 4 days ago||
The real question is how many products could AWS call the same thing

two extremes at play here. A single brand name masquarading as the same product, versus a hundred brand names that don’t tell you a thing about what the product is

Kind of why I’m fond of GCP now. Just name it what it is

leokennis 4 days ago||
While Microsoft in general is a mess, this article is like saying: what even is “save”? Microsoft has 1286 save products! Save in Word, Save in Paint, Save in Notepad…

Copilot means there’s a button/menu/command in the Microsoft app/site/tool that allows the user to pass whatever text/file/site/context/prompt is on the screen to the Copilot AI backend so it can summarize/transform/expand/explain it, and then have the user wait an inordinate amount of time for a mediocre response.

Heloseaa 4 days ago||
I don’t think the comparison is fair. Some of the products presented here are named copilot themselves, or at least for some, copilot + the domain of the base product. It’s not just a functionality like saving.

Which can get even messier in people’s head, since they will usually reference any product they use as to copilote, when they may be talking about different ones sometimes.

For instance, my friends who uses teams or the 365 suit refer to copilot as the integrated AI tool within these softwares. When, as a SWE, where I hear about copilot, it usually refers to the coding assistant/AI code completion/agent tools for me.

siva7 4 days ago||
That's a bad analogy you made. Copilot is a Product Platform, Save is a basic software function that even my grandma could explain what it does. You don't have to believe me, test it yourself: Let your grandma explain what save does in Microsoft Word or Excel. Then let her explain what Copilot does in Outlook, VSCode, Bing, Github Copilot, Bing, Sharepoint, Microsoft 365 and so on..
LiamPowell 4 days ago||
> Microsoft 365

That's Microsoft 365 Copilot now actually.

Dwedit 4 days ago||
I have personally nullified one of those, namely the Copilot Key. It took a low level keyboard hook, and blocking a specific sequence of keys, then injecting the right ctrl key back.
gucci_breakfast 4 days ago||
What an absolutely ridiculous and deeply unserious organization
claysmithr 4 days ago||
I can't wait for Copilot Copilot for Copilot 365 X Copilot X
benatkin 3 days ago|
Before any of these Copilots, there was Project Aardvark. It was a summer project by Joel Spolsky's company Fog Creek Software in which they created a remote desktop product called Copilot. They made a documentary about it: https://youtu.be/YbrkZ07LKbk?si=LAYznsR6Zd1YdGkb
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