[solsane]

By all means I’m pro AI - but I feel like Microsoft has no idea what they’re doing with Copilot. I have to use the windows shitstack for work and I was open to trying some of this stuff out. Truly a hammer looking for nails scenario. Sounds like they’re focused on being able to interact with Windows solely with text / voice… because someone asked for that, I guess.

Findings summarized:

They added a chat window with a half-rate model and access to OneDrive and sharepoint. Obviously useful integrations like setting up meetings based on a thread or creating tasks are not present.

I don’t care about email summaries or drafts. I talk with developers and our emails are precise.

Github copilot: The shared naming is confusing. There’s not even a shared UI language between the two. I use it because I don’t have Claude code at work. They’ve added some little things like pulling errors from the terminal but it’s mostly just a chat window. Meh.

Also if I edit the file outside the editor (maybe stash some changes with git) before approving edits things get broken and the LLM will start adding in old changes and it becomes part of the context and it’s kind of a mess.

Copilot (browser): -separate ‘work’ and ‘web’ mode for some reason. As far as I can tell it can see my web page in ‘web’ mode but I lose my OneDrive and sharepoint junk. Minimal utility. ChatGPT is better.

Outlook/teams: It’s totally inconsistent and missing integrations. Long email thread? Let’s use Copilot to avoid having to draft a meeting invite with everyone on the thread! There’s a context menu option to do this!

Oh, ok. They removed that in the past week.

Oh ok. It has no context of what I have open. I have to describe the email I’m currently in to their sidebar. This is already not worth my time.

Hmm. It made zero attempt to schedule a time where everyone is available.

This goes on, and I wanted to try because scheduling with our big wigs is a pain. No dice.

Post meeting. We’ve got takeaways. Convert these to MS Todo tasks? No dice! No integration. Want to find teams messages or schedule from teams? Also no.

Excel: neat for making formulas. But sometimes I want to do LLM classification or structured response on a tabular level. That’s the next thing. Also includes a useless chat window.

Powerpoint: also useless. Strangely, I can’t use another powerpoint as a reference for a powerpoint. I want to create clipart. Make a theme. They have ‘make a slide with copilot’ that I actually like, if I could use what it generates as a theme and apply it for all slides.

Generating a slide deck based on a bunch of input is actually pretty cool - but the generic ‘synergy business’ lingo and clip art it uses is so cringe.

[d3Xt3r]

Let's not forget how they also killed the iconic "Office" brand - which is now called Microsoft 365 Copilot.

And if you go to office.com, it says "Welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app", which doesn't even make any sense - the page I landed at is clearly a web page, NOT an app.

I can't even picture the kind of people who would come up with these dumb names, and the kind of people who actually approve it.

[MattPalmer1086]

They were using the Microsoft Branding Copilot Experience Assistant ;)