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simonw 13 hours ago [-]
The thing that really confuses me about this is that it has very real negative consequences. I cannot have a conversation about Copilot!
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.
idle_zealot 9 hours ago [-]
> I cannot have a conversation about Copilot!
> 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.
zuminator 8 hours ago [-]
The problem for Microsoft is that branding only works if it's built off a solid, widespread product with a good repuation. Github Copilot might be solid but it's a niche product that most people have never heard of. So people wind up associating the entire Copilot brand with the mediocre to bad Copilot experiences they are exposed to on a daily basis, such as the useless Copilot button on Copilot+ PC keyboards.
Barbing 2 hours ago [-]
If Satya predicted someone would map their frustration with his company['s naming] out like this, is there anything he could have done to prevent the embarrassment?
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.
saltwatercowboy 1 hours ago [-]
Stupidity and avarice, despite being unsatisfying answers, are sometimes the correct ones.
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
This comment brought me a bit of that satisfaction instead, thanks :)
qnleigh 1 hours ago [-]
Among many other issues, the experience doesn't come anywhere close to seamless, right? Because each of these things is distinct and can't interface with the others? They could have tried to build a unified assistant, but they prioritized the rush job instead.
Lihh27 2 hours ago [-]
It's a feature, not a bug. If nobody can pinpoint which instance is crashing, you can't confidently figure out if you need to cancel the $19/mo, the $30/mo, or the $39/mo SKU. Obfuscation as a service.
Barbing 2 hours ago [-]
Quick cry for help, please someone help me cancel a stupid Office 365 subscription on an old credit card where the number changed and no longer have access to the email - their website possibly intentionally sucks considering the hours I’ve spent on this
cmsefton 10 hours ago [-]
What are being called GitHub Copilot Products seems to confuse products with licensing plan and features.
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.
cineticdaffodil 9 hours ago [-]
They wouldnt intentionally prompt mangle the product for their default offering to have a bigger up sales path ?
rzzzt 7 hours ago [-]
I agree, this looks like ~4 products expanded for comedic purposes: GitHub, Windows, Office (M365) and Azure has a thing that can be used for many things.
xgulfie 2 hours ago [-]
It must be intentionally obtuse, nobody could ever confuse copilot for copilot
siva7 5 hours ago [-]
If people ever wonder how this happens... let me tell you this is the organic evolution for giant multinational corporations. You have thousands of teams doing some computer stuff. And never, ever will it happen that responsibilities and product design get clearly cut for the hot ai stuff. At least hundreds of teams will fight to own a part of this "copilot" thing which leads to over a hundred new products named copilot. It's not just Microsoft, every single one of the big boys does this. You can't escape it. You know why? Because they all know the alternatives are even worse.
qxxx 10 hours ago [-]
at my workplace some of the devs are using github copilot (their own private account). Boss said that our company already has copilot and everyone can use it instead of private accounts.. it is enabled in our microsoft account. Of course, this is not what the devs need. Now I understand why this is so confusing, because there are many copilot products.
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
It's similar to how difficult it was to search for .NET or C#
cmiles8 4 hours ago [-]
This.
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.
varjag 2 hours ago [-]
Copilot is Microsoft Watson.
whilenot-dev 11 hours ago [-]
That almost seems like a deliberate strategy by some "genius" PM... a lot less bug reports for specific products with actionable items for their teams, in favor of more insufficient reports to blame the one creating the report instead.
Melatonic 7 hours ago [-]
Clippy is finally getting his revenge
thedelanyo 20 hours ago [-]
Someone said - in Linux, everything is a file. In Microsoft, everything is a copilot. Lol.
MarsIronPI 16 hours ago [-]
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux is in fact not the origin of the "everything is a file". More properly, "everything is a file" is a Unix concept and Unix's creators deserve credit for the idea. Though Plan9 carries it out much better: Unix networking isn't file-based, Plan9's is.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
zahlman 15 hours ago [-]
I was thinking more along the lines of "what you're referring to as Windows is in fact Copilot/Windows"....
zenoprax 14 hours ago [-]
SlopPilot/NT?
> 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.
netbsdusers 6 hours ago [-]
Plan 9 implements some sort of "everything has a directory entry" concept. Sockets are files already in Unix. "Everything is a file" in Unix means they have a uniform treatment as file descriptors. Its perfection is probably in Capsicum where when you create a new process, you get a process file descriptor referring to it instead of a PID.
cenamus 5 hours ago [-]
Sockets really aren't files im Unix though, you don't create them with (f)open, and you don't read/write with (f)read/(f)write
somat 29 minutes ago [-]
As much as I like bsd I think the socket interface is their biggest failure, don't get me wrong, the socket interface is not bad, it is an amazing accomplishment that most of the internet is based on. The reason I regard it as a failure is because it is so close but not quite touching. A core unix idea is to have a single namespace registry and a simple universal api(open, seek, read, write, close) to access resources on this registry. and you can tell the bsd socket team was trying(like I said it's close) but they failed to close the loop and shipped an api that did not match the core unix api.
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:)
beAbU 9 hours ago [-]
did you remember to push your glasses up your nose bridge before writing your comment
MarsIronPI 2 hours ago [-]
No sorry, I forgot (i.e. I don't wear glasses (yet)).
rzzzt 7 hours ago [-]
It also flashes white for a brief moment and you can hear a faint chi-wii sound.
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
While UNIX is famous for everything is a file, in reality this concept is only true in Plan 9, in UNIX IPC not everything is a file.
We are still missing "Windows Subsystem for Copilot".
rhet0rica 17 hours ago [-]
Never understood this about Windows Subsystem for Linux naming, nor its predecessor Windows Services for Unix. Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows? Should we now reinterpret Windows for Workgroups as a means of astrally projecting your organization inside Windows 3.11?! The dative only works ONE way, Microsoft!
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...
layer8 17 hours ago [-]
A "Windows subsystem" is a specific interface between user-mode applications and the Windows kernel. It's a technical notion that exists in Windows. So there are different Windows subsystems for different types of applications. The naming convention is "Windows subsystem for <application type>". It makes more sense when you read it as "Windows subsystem for [running] Linux [applications]".
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.
dataflow 13 hours ago [-]
I believe you're almost entirely wrong unfortunately. It is true that Windows has subsystems as a technical feature, yes. However, I don't think it's true that WSL (v1, let alone v2) was part of that architecture, despite the name. AFAIK that existing subsystem notion was a user-mode one, where each subsystem was built mostly in user-mode on top of the NT ("native") subsystem, with binaries in the PE format. WSL just completely ignored the whole thing, and even the existing notion of processes, and came up with a separate new thing called "picoprocesses" that it (barely?) wired through some critical kernel components via a custom driver that executed Linux binaries intact, implementing the Linux syscalls.
If you want a list of actual subsystems Windows recognizes, this should be pretty accurate:
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).
lxgr 6 hours ago [-]
That doesn't seem like a contradiction to the idea that "Windows subsystem" is (at least after WSL 1 and especially 2) a description for a functionality (i.e. running binaries targeting a different OS's interfaces), not an implementation.
dataflow 2 hours ago [-]
No, as I explained, that's not what the actual subsystem architecture did. The binaries very much targeted Windows and did not target any other OSes. They weren't (say) ELF files targeting Linux, they were PE files targeting Windows, and you had to compile them from source with special flags to target those subsystems on Windows. You could not run those binaries on other OSes. The compatibility was at the source level, not at the binary level.
rusk 6 hours ago [-]
It needs an apostrophe then it makes more sense “Windows’ Subsystem for Linux”
It is a Windows Subsystem, that caters to running Linux.
It’s a functional title not an architectural one.
Jenk 6 hours ago [-]
Or a colon:
Windows Subsystem for: Linux
jasomill 15 hours ago [-]
This, and it may have also been a legal thing. "Product for Third-Party OS" has been accepted as a descriptive use of a third-party trademark for decades, requiring only proper attribution rather than a license, whereas marketing a product that didn't even originally use the Linux kernel as a "Linux Subsystem" might have been considered riskier by Microsoft's lawyers in spite of the nonstandard use of the former.
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
It could be even more simple. Microsoft would want to their own product, Windows, to come before Linux in the name.
I 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.
GeekyBear 14 hours ago [-]
WSL was a traditional subsystem in the Windows NT tradition, it just never worked properly.
WSL2 runs real Linux in a virtual machine.
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
Actually no, that is what many without Windows background think.
WSL 1.0 was based on Drawbridge research project of library OSes, also used to port SQL Server into Linux.
Microsoft had to warn users that they would corrupt the original WSL subsystem if they touched Linux files using Windows tools:
> 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.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
That is no different from having file systems problems across OSes, as old as there are multiple OSes.
Even Linux best practices for SMB access have been as read only.
zarzavat 17 hours ago [-]
> It makes more sense when you read it as "Windows subsystem for [running] Linux [applications]".
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.
ternaryoperator 16 hours ago [-]
There are many exceptions to what you state as an ironclad rule: i bought a display case for my baseball, i bought an album for my photos, etc. “for” can go in either direction.
tempaccount5050 17 hours ago [-]
It's a Windows subsystem. For running Linux.
nandomrumber 15 hours ago [-]
Sub for system Windows Linux.
It’s a proper noun, there are no rules.
wtallis 17 hours ago [-]
> Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows?
Only in version 2. WSL1 didn't run a Linux kernel, just provided binary compatibility to run Linux userspace programs.
astafrig 14 hours ago [-]
The thing they “didn’t want to [do]” was infringe on the Linux trademark.
ChadNauseam 17 hours ago [-]
> I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product.
Probably, but I doubt linux wants it either. People might think it's some official linux product.
xattt 18 hours ago [-]
Copilot Subsystem for Copilot
netule 17 hours ago [-]
Copilot Copilot for Copilot
microtonal 11 hours ago [-]
Someone can probably make a valid "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" out of Copilot.
You're talking about the aladeen or that aladeen? I don't understand which aladeen you are talking about.
GolfPopper 15 hours ago [-]
You could try Copilot Copilot for Windows with Windows Copilot. I know it's still got Copilot in it, but not as much as Copilot Copilot Copilot Copilot MS Office for Windows Copilot.
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.
x______________ 10 hours ago [-]
I just woke up, please for the love of ai slop, stop before you break my definition of the word copilot!
(Fun fact: If you repeat a word sufficiently, it will lose its meaning..)
MarsIronPI 2 hours ago [-]
> (Fun fact: If you repeat a word sufficiently, it will lose its meaning..)
Too late. Microsoft already caused that to happen.
tkrn 7 hours ago [-]
After reading this thread, my brain is now convinced that copilots are actually some sort of small South American mammals.
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.
Pssh.. your joke surely won't be a joke inside Microsoft..
wlesieutre 16 hours ago [-]
It’s IBM 15 yers ago when everything was Watson
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
We see how that worked out for them.
jeffhwang 19 hours ago [-]
Halo Cortana AI: Copilot for Combat 2026
beAbU 9 hours ago [-]
At some point there was an "AI" assistant in windows called Cortana. I think it was a lovely little joke and a nod to their fun side. Unique name, easy to remember. Like Apple's Siri.
I'm sad they replaced it with copilot.
Waterluvian 20 hours ago [-]
Microsoft .NET Copilot
NooneAtAll3 18 hours ago [-]
Microsoft .Copilot ?
gedy 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Azure .NET Copilot 365
VladVladikoff 19 hours ago [-]
I’ve been wondering lately if the next Xbox will have “copilot” in the name. With an easy to accidentally press dedicated button on the controller that interrupts the game you’re playing to start an AI chat.
They have that on windows game bar. Then you press the xbox button there’s a copilot “for games” there
anal_reactor 19 hours ago [-]
A valid use case would be AI pretending to be the second player so that you can pretend you're having friends over while actually you're alone. Schizophrenia-as-a-Service.
juliusceasar 18 hours ago [-]
Haha, actually funny.
hypercube33 8 hours ago [-]
You jest but there is the Office Hub that seemed like a solution in search of a problem and it was renamed into Microsoft Copilot 365 and has basically the same icon as Copliot. The 365 is paid the non is not.
gpi 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 355
malfist 18 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 355 (classic)
FridgeSeal 18 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 365 (classic) Professional Edition
marcosdumay 16 hours ago [-]
Make it a cloud, on premisses and a desktop versions. All different.
hbarka 12 hours ago [-]
MS Power Azure Copilot 365
19 hours ago [-]
jen20 18 hours ago [-]
Live Ultimate Edition for Developers.
anal_reactor 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Azure .NET Copilot 365 Series X
aleph_minus_one 19 hours ago [-]
> Microsoft .NET Copilot
Not to be confused with "Microsoft Copilot .NET". :-)
pluc 19 hours ago [-]
or Microsoft Copilot for .NET Core
aleph_minus_one 19 hours ago [-]
.NET Core does not exist anymore: it was renamed to .NET with .NET 5.0 (skipping version 4.0):
That's because .Net 4 has been the .Net Framework's current version since 2010. It's basically the same reason they never made Windows 9.
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.
hideout_berlin 11 hours ago [-]
loool
dwedge 11 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has always seemed to be a little chaotic and buggy in everything it did, but it was always dominant and assertive. Recently it seems like they might be about to do the impossible and throw away that market position - their cloud is imploding, they all but gave up on their AI goals, apparently the Windows UI is designed now by employees who use Macs so never use their own dog food, and while I don't believe all the people saying they'll move the Linux, I'm wondering what it takes for a few large businesses to make to the macbook Neo. At this point it's mostly 365 holding people in, and that's cross compatible
jazzcomputer 8 hours ago [-]
We use Teams at work and when you choose the icon it takes you to a screen that has a large icon of a door with a rope in front of it. From there you get to choose Teams on web or Teams the app. The point of the door is to tell you that Teams classic is no longer available, which is a huge part of the visual hierarchy. It's very strange - Teams classic was phased out long ago, but they still tell you this, and the negative connotation of a door with a rope in front of it resides in your mind as you move forward. This is one of the many operating quirks one sees from day to day.
chirau 9 hours ago [-]
Do you have any numbers to support your claim that Azure is imploding? Or that they gave up on AI goals?
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.
This won’t last for long too. Valve with SteamDeck and apparent future release of SteamMachine/SteamOS is preparing users for Linux gaming
hypercube33 8 hours ago [-]
My consoles (Xbox and switch) are terrible at the basic thing like updates. My steam deck on the other hand does update all the time but I never notice and haven't ever picked it up off the dock and been stopped from playing a game because it needed to update something. I think they'll start eating everones lunch if they keep making it easier to use and if their 2026 products are good.
knollimar 4 hours ago [-]
is there any hope for linux native anticheat? I always felt like this was what was holding it back
zero_bias 2 hours ago [-]
That’s the question, yes.
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
make3 5 hours ago [-]
either that or AAA games mostly becoming streamed from Clouds like Nvidia now
pluc 5 hours ago [-]
Google tried that and there's still some blood on the wall
lateforwork 21 hours ago [-]
Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI. How many products have Copilot? Just about all of them.
ValentineC 20 hours ago [-]
> Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI.
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".
siva7 5 hours ago [-]
As everything is grouped under cloud and ai at Microsoft, Azure means now basically anything produced by Microsoft.
lloydatkinson 18 hours ago [-]
I’ve absolutely seen adverts on TV in the UK by Microsoft advertising Microsoft Cloud. Azure was not mentioned anywhere…
wildzzz 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe that's because they don't want people who've never heard of Azure to just let it blend into the wide spectrum of cloud products whereas Microsoft is something almost everyone would recognize.
Pxtl 20 hours ago [-]
Except they named their local hosted version of TFS/VSTS Azure DevOps Server (where the cloud version is Azure DevOps Services).
They just like branding their dev tools for whatever they're pushing at the time. In 2002 they named Visual Studio "Visual Studio .NET".
mynameisvlad 13 hours ago [-]
That's because TFS/VSTS followed the same naming convention where the "S" stood for either Server or Services. Once they rebranded the Azure-backed hosted version Azure DevOps Services, then it no longer really made sense to do anything but rename the self hosted version in the same fashion.
It would have been more confusing to have Visual Studio Team Server and Azure DevOps Services being the same product but hosted differently.
jasomill 15 hours ago [-]
Not just developer tools, reusing trademarks in general.
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.
nandomrumber 14 hours ago [-]
There is no perfect pasta sauce.
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.
It makes sense. And Google is its own way to name all AI products “Gemini”.
yreg 20 hours ago [-]
Which is unusually simple. I would expect Google to use 10 more marketing names simultaneously without any logic to the product lines.
jayknight 19 hours ago [-]
Next year they will introduce "hAIngouts" as an AI chat bot.
layer8 19 hours ago [-]
Ouch. Maybe "Google wAIve" for collaborative chats.
ayewo 19 hours ago [-]
> Which is unusually simple. I would expect Google to use 10 more marketing names simultaneously without any logic to the product lines.
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?
chirau 16 hours ago [-]
The r/Bard subreddit is still quite active for some reason. Reminds me of Google Glass.
spencerflem 17 hours ago [-]
I still like the name Bard
owlninja 18 hours ago [-]
Didn't it start as Bard?
surajrmal 15 hours ago [-]
Well it depends on what you're talking about. The model names were originally called lambda, followed by palm and then finally gemini. The chatbot product was internally known as meena, launched as Bard, and then transitioned to Gemini once the Gemini model came out.
chatmasta 19 hours ago [-]
They’ve improved it since the initial launch when the service, model names and plan names all sounded similar and contradictory.
nurettin 12 hours ago [-]
there is vertex ai, notebooklm, antigravity, nano banana, veo, lyria, the open models are gemma and gato
Twirrim 19 hours ago [-]
And IBM has "Watson"
lschueller 19 hours ago [-]
SAP sales reps used HANA for "cloud" in the beginning... Which was bs back then and is today. But while everybody wanted to be in the cloud, SAP sales was scared to not be with the cool kids, when they do not somehow add to the cloud talk
tylerchilds 18 hours ago [-]
And Silly has Silly!
idontwantthis 19 hours ago [-]
But they put Gemini in google docs, they didn’t rename Docs to Gemini like Microsoft did.
conductr 18 hours ago [-]
Probably will use other astrology terms. Like the way android is named for desserts.
throwaway173738 13 hours ago [-]
Google Scorpio will be their best model yet, except sometimes it will say things that cut you to the core.
hanspeter 11 hours ago [-]
It most certainly isn't astrology that was on Google's mind when they decided for Gemini.
croes 7 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t make sense.
Google has a least its own LLMs, MS just uses others.
So Copilot could be OpenAI or Anthropic.
At work we have licenses for Copilot and Copilot but not Copilot and everyone gets Copilot but only some get Copilot.
gedy 19 hours ago [-]
I think they'll more likely launch competing AI projects like 'Aquarius' and 'Doh' or something
michaelcampbell 3 hours ago [-]
Naming all your products with X because it uses some fashion of X is certainly a choice.
I think Satya has lost the thread, even in a CEO context.
jtokoph 20 hours ago [-]
Great point. We’re about to get a wave of Apple Products with “Apple Intelligence” in a similar way.
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t think we’ll see Apple actually rename all their apps over it. It’s simply a feature, it doesn’t change what the app is.
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.
vjvjvjvjghv 18 hours ago [-]
If they ever get Apple Intelligent going.
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
A product doesn’t have to have every feature baked into the name.
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.
illusive4080 6 hours ago [-]
No, it’s also the official name of Microsoft Office. That moniker is no more. Office is Microsoft 365 Copilot.
whynotmaybe 20 hours ago [-]
Is it in solitaire or minesweeper?
hebelehubele 19 hours ago [-]
Be careful what you wish for
excalibur 16 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft Flight Simulator
MarsIronPI 16 hours ago [-]
Microsoft Flight Copilot for airline pilots!
aleph_minus_one 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft should add a new game to Windows to accustom Windows users to Copilot.
hcs 16 hours ago [-]
There's a restrictions on games with even simulated gambling
didgetmaster 18 hours ago [-]
Just what we need...AI agents that will play our games for us!
shiandow 18 hours ago [-]
Didn't they kill those?
iAMkenough 14 hours ago [-]
Does Office exist or not? I thought it was rebranded to Copilot365
croes 7 hours ago [-]
Too bad that different products have different licensing.
So I have to license a certain Copilot not just AI.
Do we have Copilot? Yes and no.
IshKebab 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah imagine if they had unique product names for "AI in OneDrive", "AI in SharePoint", "AI in Outlook"... That would be even more ridiculous.
mynameisash 17 hours ago [-]
I think this is the right answer. I am frustrated by Copilot and by many aspects of AI, but to me it seems like straightforward branding: you use a Microsoft product, you want to use AI in it, you look for Copilot (name and/or icon).
To me, the issue isn't that they've named so many things 'Copilot' but rather that Copilot is in every goddamn product.
marcosdumay 16 hours ago [-]
You are the second person that implies that "Copilot" is just a complement that identifies part of some software...
Microsoft has been replacing most of their brands by Copilot. There's no searching for it in a product, the product is named "Copilot".
ddtaylor 19 hours ago [-]
Not if AI is ultimately a commodity, which it likely is. We don't want or need branded terms for other common features, like networking or files. In the early days of networking, before it was standard, there were attempts to brand things like NetBIOS with IPX and such. I don't want to repeat all of that every time some company wants to establish vendor lockin or branding.
chatmasta 21 hours ago [-]
I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap?
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?
shireboy 20 hours ago [-]
Git is a distributed source control system. It's open source and you can use it to version source code on your drive and/or a remote git repository.
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.
aucisson_masque 20 hours ago [-]
Sidenote but I don't get why you would want to pay github to run Claude on your code.
Yeah github pays Claude but what's the point ?
gWPVhyxPHqvk 19 hours ago [-]
It's massively cheaper. Copilot charges per request, which with some clever prompting, can lead to huge amounts of work being done at fractions of the cost of Claude Code. Millions of tokens for mere pennies. MS must be taking a huge hit somewhere, because I'm probably getting 10-20x my value out of GH relative to CC.
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.
amy1173 16 hours ago [-]
I'm spending a literal fortune on CC - we also have GH Copilot but the devs imply that CC is better? Will the Github Copilot let us access skills and agent frameworks in CC?
mynameisvlad 13 hours ago [-]
Devs say a lot of uninformed things. With a heavy predisposition to hating the "legacy" monoliths that are Microsoft and by association GitHub.
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
It's a bit rich to go around calling people uninformed because they prefer one harness to another, particularly when you are recommending GHC as comparable to CC.
nfg 11 hours ago [-]
Have you used the gh copilot cli? What would stand out most to you as gaps right now?
walthamstow 11 hours ago [-]
IME is is less capable of performing complex work, more frequently goes down blind alleys and needs correcting, that kind of thing. It's night and day vs CC.
ValentineC 4 hours ago [-]
That's probably because the 200k context window means that it'll end up compacting things sooner.
I've just had a chat with Copilot's Opus 4.6 go off the rails after compaction today.
nfg 11 hours ago [-]
And this has been comparing like for like with CC - say Opus 4.6 on the same reasoning effort? Hasn’t been my experience particularly but fair enough. I do tend to use them in different situations (CC outside of work).
walthamstow 11 hours ago [-]
Even if it is close, maybe GHC CLI has improved in the last month since I last used it, I know you didn't say it but calling people uninformed because they prefer one or the other is just wrong.
nfg 11 hours ago [-]
I’d agree, though maybe there’s a more charitable reading of the OP - “uninformed” is one of those accusations that it’s rarely very polite or fair to level against an individual but sometimes is reasonable against a group based on observation. My experience would be that it’s true that “devs says lots of uninformed things” - and I’d include myself in that. It’s been my experience that it’s particularly tough in this space at this time because:
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.
11 hours ago [-]
ValentineC 4 hours ago [-]
Claude (and most other models) in GitHub Copilot still only have 200k context, with a hefty amount being reserved for some reason. It's 1M at many other providers.
12 hours ago [-]
11 hours ago [-]
maille 19 hours ago [-]
How can I learn that clever prompting?
esafak 18 hours ago [-]
Try to pack as much clear work into your prompt as you can so you don't go back and forth.
chatmasta 17 hours ago [-]
Do hacks like “read prompt.md, and follow its instructions. When you’re done, read it again and follow its instructions.” And then you have some background process appending to the file to keep it warm and you just keep writing there?
cylemons 7 hours ago [-]
There is a limit on how much copilot can do in one request, pretty generous but after some time vscode will say "this request is taking very long, do you want to continue" and that would count as a seperate request
ValentineC 4 hours ago [-]
> but after some time vscode will say "this request is taking very long, do you want to continue" and that would count as a seperate request
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.
17 hours ago [-]
esafak 16 hours ago [-]
You could do that. I was just trying to say that if you make your original prompt complete enough, and you have well-defined success criteria, you can tell it to keep going until they are met.
Cerium 14 hours ago [-]
Agreed - my experience mirrors this.
> "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.
mschulkind 19 hours ago [-]
I use it because they offer absurdly cheap prices that they're clearly losing money on. I can get $1000 at API prices of Opus 4.6, for in the range of $2 my cost through copilot.
ponkpanda 20 hours ago [-]
Tighter (read better) integration with VSCode and Github than what you could get running claude code on the side.
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.
everfrustrated 20 hours ago [-]
The workflow that GitHub has for prompting agent inside the ide itself is by far and away the nicest and most intuitive I've used.
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.
chatmasta 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the workflow is superb. That’s what I miss most using Claude in a terminal inside VSCode. It doesn’t integrate with VSCode native diff tools like the native VSCode (GitHub Copilot does. The Claude extension in non-terminal mode is crap.
SturgeonsLaw 20 hours ago [-]
From a user point of view there's no real reason for it, from an admin point of view if your team is already using Github Enterprise then deploying it is basically hitting a toggle switch, and it has some more fine grained controls about what it can or can't do compared to Claude Code.
yreg 20 hours ago [-]
Most corporations have Microsoft already greenlisted as a vendor.
Making it possible to buy something from Anthropic might require tedious paperwork for many of them.
duzer65657 19 hours ago [-]
you can also get a service contract via MS quite easily/cheaply, which mightnot help you with hard problems but does solve the easy ones. example: in earlydays we bought OpenAI API directly and via Azure; when we needed account service we got it immediately from MS instead of waitlists from OpenAI.
chokolad 20 hours ago [-]
> I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap?
There is no VSCode Copilot. There is Github Copilot integration inside VS Code.
Tldr yes they're the same agentic harness in different UIs. Web browser, android app, ide extension, cli tool. They all change the "how" but not the "what".
You buy premium you get more prompts and models.
quag 21 hours ago [-]
It reminds me of around 2002 when Microsoft named everything ".net".
amanzi 20 hours ago [-]
Yep, I remember downloading a beta version of what would be eventually released as Windows Server 2003. The beta version was called Windows .Net Server 2003.
rdhatt 19 hours ago [-]
I had some books that referred to it as .NET Server printed before the name change. In the long history of terrible Microsoft names, this was a rare case where they were able to right the ship.
Findecanor 19 hours ago [-]
"Microsoft Surface" ...
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".
Or no, you must be referring to the Azure Portal sections.
pcurve 20 hours ago [-]
And “one” like most Fortune 500 companies.
auselen 20 hours ago [-]
one.copilot.net
bdcravens 20 hours ago [-]
Then they did the same thing to a lesser degree with "360", including the Xbox.
debugnik 19 hours ago [-]
Also Live. Windows Live [whatever], Xbox Live [whatever], Games for Windows - Live, Office Live.
karlitooo 19 hours ago [-]
Also 365 -_-
userbinator 11 hours ago [-]
The joke is "expect one day of downtime every leap year", but in practice it seems a bit more than that.
rowls66 20 hours ago [-]
Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.
aleph_minus_one 19 hours ago [-]
> Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.
You mean "Web's fear"? ;-)
vjvjvjvjghv 18 hours ago [-]
And then Watson
FartyMcFarter 20 hours ago [-]
Soon: Copilot .NET .
Pxtl 20 hours ago [-]
Azure PowerCopilot Live .NET
marcosdumay 16 hours ago [-]
... 360 (+5)
Andrex 17 hours ago [-]
Being a (very) young script kiddie I was so confused it had nothing to do with the TLD. None of the sites were even hosted on a .net domain! "Wtf?"
hsbauauvhabzb 19 hours ago [-]
Which was arguably more problematic. Are you referring to a web address or a Microsoft product?
layer8 19 hours ago [-]
More importantly, you couldn't usefully search for it with the search engines of the time.
hsbauauvhabzb 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many human lifetimes of effort have been wasted due to poor naming decisions by Microsoft.
alex1138 14 hours ago [-]
None of us had any idea what updates were supposed to be back then and yet those updates were probably less broken than they are now
andrewmcwatters 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
uda 4 hours ago [-]
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.
chatmasta 19 hours ago [-]
Related: a list of all Microsoft login portals (there are 609 of them).
At least some of those were from acquisitions. All the Copilots are their own fault.
cranium 12 hours ago [-]
For a client I had to use "Windows App" to connect remotely to their cloud machine – and finding the app was the easy part.
fortran77 19 hours ago [-]
These drive my password manager nuts, especially when there are actually different logins for them. I just put a note in it saying exactly what service it's for.
stackghost 15 hours ago [-]
Holy shit.
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"?
guidedlight 21 hours ago [-]
Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).
mrandish 20 hours ago [-]
> “Gaming Copilot” is missing
It would be ironic if there was nothing called "CoPilot" for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
mcmcmc 19 hours ago [-]
The PM: “People love watching streamers play games, so people who play games must want to watch a game play itself! Introducing Xbox GamePass CoPilot with Microsoft Flight Simulator CoPilot+, all included with your GamePass Ultra subscription for $199.99 a month! Never play your games again!”
The only Microsoft products I’ve actively heard people desire within the last 5 years are VSCode and Excel. Microsoft have so severely damaged their brand that they’ve finally shed the image of oddly gray Dell midtowers running XP on Pentium 4.
Anamon 10 hours ago [-]
Not sure if it qualifies as a "product", but .NET is (these days) uncharacteristic for Microsoft as well. It's community-driven, very active, and quite liked by the people who use it.
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.)
tempaccount5050 17 hours ago [-]
The last company I worked for had copilot pretty well integrated into M365/Sharepoint/Teams. It didn't really help me get more work done but it was pretty clutch at finding information. "What meeting did we discuss such and such for X project?" And it'd get me the meeting with the notes and recording. "Which SharePoint site do the docs for that live in?" Etc. That was about all it was good for though.
marcosdumay 16 hours ago [-]
Copilot on Teams has become pretty good at transcribing meetings. What's a shame, because the previous system was very funny.
rr808 20 hours ago [-]
I work in big financials. Everything used to be built on Excel. A lot still is but Python/Jupyterhub or custom applications has taken over a lot of the complex stuff. Excel isn't really essential any more.
slaymaker1907 19 hours ago [-]
While less necessary with AI, Excel is still the king of data entry and basic data manipulation (sorting, filtering, updating, etc.). I’d say that SQLite with a GUI for visualization is a far stronger competitor than Jupyter at those sorts of things. You can do that stuff in Jupyter, but it’s easier in Excel.
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.
tonypapousek 19 hours ago [-]
Not sure they count as “products” in this context, but TypeScript and Playwright are still nice.
ivanjermakov 18 hours ago [-]
And LSP, but because of TypeScript.
tomjen3 10 hours ago [-]
Windows is still the king for gaming. Word is better than Google Docs for anything but the absolute basics[0].
But as a professional, it has no further use.
[0]: Please tell me how I add a new paragraph style in Docs?
oneeyedpigeon 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think you can add a new paragraph style in Docs. However, 99% of people I've known to use a word processor have never used that feature. Heck, I'd bet the majority of users don't even understand what a 'style' is; people just change the font size directly.
bdangubic 20 hours ago [-]
this is true only on HN. in reality, if you wanted a job where you did not use microsoft products you’d probably have to get a wrench and start doing plumbing work :)
lpcvoid 20 hours ago [-]
Nah, especially in technology it's very easy to avoid Microslop. I've done it successfully for many, many years.
bdangubic 18 hours ago [-]
possible, sure. easy, I would disagree. starting with government and any government contracting through most enterprises. startups etc perhaps but avoiding msft severely limits your options
Zambyte 18 hours ago [-]
Using Microsoft products and desiring Microsoft products are not the same thing.
schappim 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft is not alone in this. Apple does the same thing!
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...
flexagoon 19 hours ago [-]
Idk, at least in Apple's case it all refers to a voice assistant and some of the features integrated with it.
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.
schappim 19 hours ago [-]
These are all non talky talky: Siri Suggestions, Siri Knowledge (Safari / Spotlight Intelligence), Siri Shortcuts (Automation, not voice), Siri Intelligence (On-device ML features), Siri Widget/Watch face… you get the idea. There was a time when “Siri” was the catch all for Smart/ML.
ryandrake 18 hours ago [-]
> (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")
Siri 365 Communication Suite .NET Enterprise Edition With Copilot
rationalist 17 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the stroke. Where do I send the hospital bill?
phillipcarter 18 hours ago [-]
In Microsoft's case it refers to an LLM system with some features integrated.
goldenarm 18 hours ago [-]
The best move of Apple this decade was to ignore LLMs and let the others burn cash. Now they can use the mature Gemini for $1B. Brilliant.
dangus 18 hours ago [-]
Music the app and Music the subscription service are the two worst, tied with TV the app, TV the hardware device, and TV+ the subscription service. At least TV+ is named differently.
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.
firefoxd 18 hours ago [-]
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.
What's fun is getting into the co-pilot comparison conversational because they are definitely not all equal. Co-pilot 365 is a donkey for one
eterm 17 hours ago [-]
I refuse to believe any are as bad as the Azure Portal one.
It feels like pre-GPT levels of smart.
TradingPlaces 21 hours ago [-]
For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.
harvey9 21 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of Microsoft OneCare which sounds like saying 'wanker' with a slight French accent
lucb1e 19 hours ago [-]
Claude sounds like bollocks in Dutch ('kloot')
Pretty sure bollocks was the literal example I read on HN like 10 years ago of what your cool-sounding product name will turn out to mean in Spanish, but I can't remember if the moral of the story was to check every language or to just accept it because it'll happen anyway
Anyway, the various tech podcasts caught on after a few episodes and seem to now pronounce it more foreignly, so it's now more like clod
Joeri 19 hours ago [-]
The name that still takes the cake is Github Advanced Security for Azure DevOps.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
Now 365 is also called Copilot, so it's Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft Copilot
chrisjj 21 hours ago [-]
> Naming things is hard
... for people really bad at it.
tanseydavid 18 hours ago [-]
"I'm Daryl. These are my 608 other brothers named Daryl"
moezd 11 hours ago [-]
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!
billforsternz 13 hours ago [-]
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?
duxup 3 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of the old .NET marketing mess where everything was .NET
OJFord 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's fair enough that 'the assistant in the GUI/cloud program X, like Clippy++' has the same name for all X.
But it's absolutely bonkers that that's the same name as the IDE auto-complete integration, and the GitHub agentic worker, and the GitHub chat, and the GitHub reviewer.
nlawalker 21 hours ago [-]
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".
smelendez 20 hours ago [-]
A ton of companies use agent/agentic to mean AI that does something with external effects, as opposed to a chatbot. I’m not sure if it’s overused per se or companies are just really pushing their AI features in general.
georgeburdell 21 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson
gwf 21 hours ago [-]
It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.
layer8 20 hours ago [-]
It means “the AI thing we bolted on here”.
ieie3366 21 hours ago [-]
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
JumpCrisscross 20 hours ago [-]
> Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product
Cortana was a great brand. Clippy is still on the shelf. Copilot could have been a deep brand if they pulled it from their flight simulators. Instead it rings hollow of any meaning.
ValentineC 20 hours ago [-]
We definitely could have stuck with Cortana for a consumer-facing personal assistant. The first few Halo games were great.
twobitshifter 19 hours ago [-]
Right, they had Cortana right there for the built in windows function!
hocuspocus 19 hours ago [-]
I think it's fine. GitHub Copilot is popular as ever, especially in companies that have enterprise tier subscriptions. Plans for personal use pretty good too, pricing is competitive. The VS Code integration and agentic features aren't bad either.
Developer tools live in their own space. And I assume most devs don't really care that "Copilot" started to show up everywhere, especially in MS365 products. At least I don't. Conversely, do non-technical people care where the term comes from, and now means "LLM integration" in a bunch of MS products?
I think it's better that Google going through Bard, Gemini, IDX, Firebase Studio, Antigravity, ...
yunnpp 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
leokennis 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
> Microsoft 365
That's Microsoft 365 Copilot now actually.
ajaimk 2 hours ago [-]
Is this more than Google's Hangouts?
6 hours ago [-]
r0m4n0 20 hours 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
gucci_breakfast 14 hours ago [-]
What an absolutely ridiculous and deeply unserious organization
claysmithr 17 hours ago [-]
I can't wait for Copilot Copilot for Copilot 365 X Copilot X
nfw2 16 hours ago [-]
Is there a copilot for Microsoft flight simulator though?
ape4 5 hours ago [-]
Didn't they rename everything "dotnet" when that was the hot thing
Dwedit 19 hours 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.
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
And where is Microsoft Flight Attendant, I need a cup of coffee.
tedk-42 18 hours ago [-]
Microsoft slowly becoming the IBM of the 21st century.
tosti 7 hours ago [-]
So... That means all of those products are for entertainment purposes only. Truth in advertising!
cylemons 12 hours ago [-]
I guess Microsoft wants us to think about all these copilots as a single product.
Like, "the copilot in visual studio", "the copilot on github", "the copilot on office" etc.
yunnpp 21 hours ago [-]
Plot twist: he used Copilot to generate the figure.
EvanAnderson 20 hours ago [-]
Microsoft is uniquely unable to name / brand anything sensibly:
"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"
.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)
The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"
Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"
"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"
"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"
Their Xbox consoles have also uniquely terrible naming:
“Xbox” / “Xbox 360” / “Xbox One” / “Xbox One X” / “Xbox Series S” / “Xbox Series X”
Anamon 10 hours ago [-]
I forgot about that one.
What should we call our third product? -- One. -- Brilliant!
What should we call the fourth product in the series? -- Series. -- Brilliant!
reincarnate0x14 20 hours ago [-]
My "callsign" at work for many, many years was a result of the entire C-suite hearing me laughing about Microsoft Critical Update Notification Tool and sending a manager down to figure what the hell was going on in the test lab.
ValentineC 20 hours ago [-]
> "Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
I thought this was the same app/protocol, only more enshittified as time went by.
walrus01 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
billforsternz 13 hours ago [-]
We should probably be grateful Microsoft didn't name it .NET
aimadetools 10 hours ago [-]
It's a classic Microsoft branding mess. I have to stop and think which one they mean every time I see an article about it now.
giancarlostoro 21 hours ago [-]
Its annoying especially since Copilot exists in Visual Studio (Code too I believe) and its not exactly "the same" thing as far as I can tell. I really hate Microsoft's naming conventions. At least call that one Copilot for Devs or something more meaningful.
ethmarks 20 hours ago [-]
The Copilot in Visual Studio (Code) is not the same as Microsoft's Copilot. The former is GitHub's AI product and the latter is Microsoft's AI product. You can tell them apart because GitHub Copilot's icon is a helmet with goggles and Microsoft Copilot's icon is a colourful swirl thing.
It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.
I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.
chatmasta 20 hours ago [-]
And let’s not forget that Visual Studio Code (the IDE) is not Visual Studio (the IDE).
giancarlostoro 19 hours ago [-]
This is my biggest frustration as a full time .NET developer. Its especially worse when you're searching for Visual Studio (IDE) specifics, and get results for VS Code. It bewilders me why a company that owns a search engine names their products so poorly.
marcosdumay 16 hours ago [-]
> This is my biggest frustration as a full time .NET developer.
Larger than the difference between the .Net Framework (that is a framework) and .Net Core (that is a framework)?
giancarlostoro 19 hours ago [-]
Copilot for Visual Studio (IDE) has multiple models, not just OpenAI models, it also includes Claude. It is basically a competitor to JetBrains AI.
The only good "AI" editor that supports Claude Code natively has so far been Zed. It's not PERFECT, but it has been the best experience short of just running Claude Code directly in the CLI.
lou1306 20 hours ago [-]
> they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs
Haven't tried it yet but the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode also seems to integrate Claude, Gemini and other non-OAI stuff
chatmasta 20 hours ago [-]
They do, and those models are served by Microsoft. You pay a premium per “request” (what that means is not fully clear to me) for certain models. If you use the native chat extension in VSCode for GitHub CoPilot, with Opus model selected, you are not paying Anthropic. This counts against your GitHub Copilot subscription.
The Claude Code extension for VSCode from Anthropic will use your Claude subscription. But honestly it’s not very good - I use it but only to “open in terminal” (this adds some small quality of life features like awareness it’s in VSC so it opens files in the editor pane next to it).
giancarlostoro 19 hours ago [-]
The best non-Clude Code CLI integration by far has been Zed's and I prefer Zed over what VS Code has become.
starkeeper 17 hours ago [-]
How many windows services or low level system dlls has Microsoft lost the source code for and or does not even know what they actually do?
Copilot does not know either but I'm sure the answer is a much bigger number then anyone would be comfortable with.
Tiereven 17 hours ago [-]
I guess if Copilot were actually a singular entity that had all of these touch points and a decent security model to prevent unintentionally exposing your data - it would be pretty cool.
butz 2 hours ago [-]
Yes.
CrzyLngPwd 10 hours ago [-]
Surely it's just a synonym for 'agent' or 'helper'.
shykes 12 hours ago [-]
This pattern seems to repeat itself often in large tech companies. Does anyone remember SAP Hana?
2OEH8eoCRo0 20 hours ago [-]
It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.
Razengan 21 hours ago [-]
It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again
function_seven 21 hours ago [-]
I’m waiting for .Net Copilot with integration to Passport.
xfactorial 19 hours 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 20 hours 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 21 hours ago [-]
But beware if someone say to them Microslop ... they don't like it if someone other make up new names :-)
zdragnar 20 hours ago [-]
Is it unreasonable to not appreciate an insult?
RGamma 21 hours ago [-]
Fabric is the one place for all your data!
claaams 21 hours ago [-]
No one can ruin microslops branding better than microslop.
jmorenoamor 12 hours ago [-]
I think they should start to think about having a pilot.
mandeepj 17 hours ago [-]
It's not a product, but enablement or a feature! Just like a 'Pro' label :-)
ampedcast 13 hours ago [-]
Was copilot branding restricted only to their AI products?
stephenlf 21 hours ago [-]
Microsoft yearns for the flight simulator.
ChicagoDave 18 hours ago [-]
If this isn’t an indictment of MS management (pun intended), I don’t know what is.
benatkin 4 hours 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
mirekrusin 21 hours ago [-]
They should have called it Micro.
bmenrigh 17 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of around 2002 when MS slapped “.Net” onto everything.
triage8004 12 hours ago [-]
Windows is the harness for Copilot
shireboy 20 hours ago [-]
I get that it's annoying, but also don't know what else one would do? "FooPilot is our Office AI toolset, BarWonk is our code assist tool"? There are also a lot of Claudes and GPTs. Naming things is hard.
Gigachad 20 hours ago [-]
They could start by not renaming Microsoft Office and laptops as copilot.
Ukv 15 hours ago [-]
> start by not renaming Microsoft Office
To my understanding, Office (or "Microsoft 365") itself becoming "Copilot" was just confused messaging about the "Office Hub" app/shortcut being repurposed.
BenFranklin100 20 hours ago [-]
The problem is not annoyance. The problem is confusion.
One should aim for clarity.
FooPilot, Barwonk, etc.. would actually be a vast improvement.
ilovecake1984 13 hours ago [-]
It’s terrible, because a lot of the thing named copilot are not very good, which poisons the brand.
jaffa2 21 hours ago [-]
Isn’t it just their AI llm thing?
Rebelgecko 21 hours ago [-]
I thought that was Cortana? Copilot is the new keyboard button, kinda like the Windows key
Strom 8 hours ago [-]
Well, no, Office is now also called Copilot. They renamed it!
ezfe 21 hours ago [-]
Copilot is a brand that refers to a variety of products
saint_yossarian 18 hours ago [-]
Yes but which one?
Traubenfuchs 19 hours ago [-]
How many of those are used regularly by more than 0.1% users?
yieldcrv 20 hours 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
I don't understand, usually Microsoft is so good at naming things!
rdsubhas 19 hours ago [-]
Blame brain dead product managers who merely want to hoist their poor quality yearly performance review slop on something existing that carries SEO/SEM value.
Most of the time, these piggy backers only pull down the value of what they're riding on.
paulddraper 15 hours ago [-]
> A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. I couldn’t
It means Microsoft AI.
Hope that helps!
BikeRanger 17 hours ago [-]
We just call it Cope.
Azure Cope. GitHub Cope. SharePoint Cope. Etc.
walrus01 20 hours ago [-]
This is what happens when you have some sort of top-down directive from the C-level people to put "AI" in everything, and dozens of department/project managers who all have their own fiefdoms
Handy-Man 20 hours ago [-]
It's just one brand: Copilot
21 hours ago [-]
senectus1 15 hours ago [-]
approximately the same number of products they have called "surface"
KnuthIsGod 13 hours ago [-]
Slop-Pilot for Copilot.
One could argue that it is an oxymoron.
sublinear 21 hours ago [-]
> .. the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things. Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’.
Right, so then it's not a "product", or even a range of "products".
It's a brand name and inherently pointless to map out. It doesn't even have to involve any "AI" to be given the branding. All that matters is it's a thing they have, new or old, that they'd like to push people towards.
faragon 9 hours ago [-]
"All your Copilot are belong to us"
xyst 14 hours ago [-]
Microslop trying really hard to shove copilot shite down our throats
eboy 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wei03288 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throwaway87543 21 hours ago [-]
Okay. But how many products have Gemini or Claude in the name?
snowchaser 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
1a527dd5 19 hours ago [-]
Ignoring the disaster that is their branding/naming.
Copilot is _amazing_. Everyone is hyping about Claude, but I'm way more productive with the copilot cli. The copilot cloud agent is great, and copilot code review is great (we also tried the new very expensive claude code review - it was slow and expensive).
Forget that it's Microsoft, forget that everything is Copilot and go and give it a shot.
quantummagic 19 hours ago [-]
> Copilot is _amazing_.
Do you mean Github Copilot? If not, which Copilot are you recommending? Can you give a link to where it can be purchased or trialed?
I'm genuinely interested in trying out whatever you're recommending; but it highlights the problem, that I literally don't know what you're actually referencing.
karlitooo 19 hours ago [-]
maybe a different thing but trying to work with copilot as part of the microsoft apps (e.g. automation flows) feels like it has zero reasoning ability, just says the same thing over and over like a chatbot rather than LLM.
ex-aws-dude 15 hours ago [-]
I find a lot of devs I’ve worked with don’t even know about copilot CLI and just think copilot is the VS plugin
Due to microsoft’s confusing naming
altern8 19 hours ago [-]
Nice try, Nadella!
phyzome 15 hours ago [-]
At work, they gave everyone a GitHub Copilot license whether they wanted one or not, which meant it started spewing nonsense on all our PRs. (I had them remove my license again.)
I don't use LLMs, but a coworker who does said that Copilot was one of the worst of the lot.
Anamon 10 hours ago [-]
I find the differences between the CLIs pretty minor. GitHub and Kiro are the only ones allowed at my job, and GitHub is fine.
What many people who don't use the GitHub Copilot CLI don't seem to be aware of is that it's not limited to GPT models. I mostly use it with Gemini and Opus, for instance.
fortran77 19 hours ago [-]
I don't know if you're kidding, but I agree with you. I use the Copilot CLI in VS Code and Visual Studio and it works better than anything else. I do use Claude models with it....
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.
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:)
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.
I 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.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110904
> 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.
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..)
Too late. Microsoft already caused that to happen.
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.
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.
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Moskowitz
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.
I think Satya has lost the thread, even in a CEO context.
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.
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.
So I have to license a certain Copilot not just AI.
Do we have Copilot? Yes and no.
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".
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.
I've just had a chat with Copilot's Opus 4.6 go off the rails after compaction today.
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 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.
> "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.
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".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
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.
You mean "Web's fear"? ;-)
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.
https://msportals.io/
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?
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.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
It feels like pre-GPT levels of smart.
Pretty sure bollocks was the literal example I read on HN like 10 years ago of what your cool-sounding product name will turn out to mean in Spanish, but I can't remember if the moral of the story was to check every language or to just accept it because it'll happen anyway
Anyway, the various tech podcasts caught on after a few episodes and seem to now pronounce it more foreignly, so it's now more like clod
... for people really bad at it.
I wonder if MS Copilot meant he made money on that investment?
But it's absolutely bonkers that that's the same name as the IDE auto-complete integration, and the GitHub agentic worker, and the GitHub chat, and the GitHub reviewer.
Cortana was a great brand. Clippy is still on the shelf. Copilot could have been a deep brand if they pulled it from their flight simulators. Instead it rings hollow of any meaning.
Developer tools live in their own space. And I assume most devs don't really care that "Copilot" started to show up everywhere, especially in MS365 products. At least I don't. Conversely, do non-technical people care where the term comes from, and now means "LLM integration" in a bunch of MS products?
I think it's better that Google going through Bard, Gemini, IDX, Firebase Studio, Antigravity, ...
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.
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.
That's Microsoft 365 Copilot now actually.
Like, "the copilot in visual studio", "the copilot on github", "the copilot on office" etc.
"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"
.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)
The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"
Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"
"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"
"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"
"Microsoft FrontPage" / "Site Server" / "Site Server Commerce Edition" / "Office Server" / "SharePoint Portal Server" / "Windows SharePoint Services" / "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Foundation" / "SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Standard" / "SharePoint Enterprise" / "SharePoint Online" / "SharePoint Designer"
"Office Communicator" / "Microsoft Lync" / "Skype for Business" / "Skype" / "Skype for Business Online" / "Skype for Business for Microsoft 365"
Fairly guffaw-inducing branding, to me, was removing the Remote Desktop Client app and introducing something called "Windows App".
The old "System Management Server" became "System Center" and its family of products.
There's the whole accounting software / ERP world, too:
"Great Plains" / "Dynamics GP" / "Navision" / "Dynamics NAV" / "Solomon" / "Dynamics SL" / "Axapta" / "Dynamics AX" / "Dynamics 365" / "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations" / "Dynamics 365 Business Central"
(For most guffaws induced, though, there's the Windows 98-era "Critical Update Notification Tool"[0])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Update...
“Xbox” / “Xbox 360” / “Xbox One” / “Xbox One X” / “Xbox Series S” / “Xbox Series X”
What should we call our third product? -- One. -- Brilliant!
What should we call the fourth product in the series? -- Series. -- Brilliant!
I thought this was the same app/protocol, only more enshittified as time went by.
It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.
I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.
Larger than the difference between the .Net Framework (that is a framework) and .Net Core (that is a framework)?
The only good "AI" editor that supports Claude Code natively has so far been Zed. It's not PERFECT, but it has been the best experience short of just running Claude Code directly in the CLI.
Haven't tried it yet but the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode also seems to integrate Claude, Gemini and other non-OAI stuff
The Claude Code extension for VSCode from Anthropic will use your Claude subscription. But honestly it’s not very good - I use it but only to “open in terminal” (this adds some small quality of life features like awareness it’s in VSC so it opens files in the editor pane next to it).
Copilot does not know either but I'm sure the answer is a much bigger number then anyone would be comfortable with.
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).
To my understanding, Office (or "Microsoft 365") itself becoming "Copilot" was just confused messaging about the "Office Hub" app/shortcut being repurposed.
One should aim for clarity.
FooPilot, Barwonk, etc.. would actually be a vast improvement.
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
What Is Copilot Exactly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
Most of the time, these piggy backers only pull down the value of what they're riding on.
It means Microsoft AI.
Hope that helps!
One could argue that it is an oxymoron.
Right, so then it's not a "product", or even a range of "products".
It's a brand name and inherently pointless to map out. It doesn't even have to involve any "AI" to be given the branding. All that matters is it's a thing they have, new or old, that they'd like to push people towards.
Copilot is _amazing_. Everyone is hyping about Claude, but I'm way more productive with the copilot cli. The copilot cloud agent is great, and copilot code review is great (we also tried the new very expensive claude code review - it was slow and expensive).
Forget that it's Microsoft, forget that everything is Copilot and go and give it a shot.
Do you mean Github Copilot? If not, which Copilot are you recommending? Can you give a link to where it can be purchased or trialed?
I'm genuinely interested in trying out whatever you're recommending; but it highlights the problem, that I literally don't know what you're actually referencing.
Due to microsoft’s confusing naming
I don't use LLMs, but a coworker who does said that Copilot was one of the worst of the lot.
What many people who don't use the GitHub Copilot CLI don't seem to be aware of is that it's not limited to GPT models. I mostly use it with Gemini and Opus, for instance.