The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

> So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol.

The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.

>I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do"

My biggest gripe about Win11 is they stole from us the ability to move the task bar. It can ONLY be pinned to the bottom of the screen now. For the longest time, I was a top of the screen taskbar user. From what I've read, they have no plans to implement or change this "feature".

Well, it is not software developers that won't be needed anymore. It is large corporations. If a small team of developers can make huge projects. There is no reason for them to work for a large business.

> why such a rush?

OpenAI alone spent $20G plus some unknown value to make the first version of it we have now. They and all the others need to justify the investment.

My thought has been they are forcing it knowing nobody, as in 98% of people, would give a crap about most of the AI features. People have been using these tools for decades now to solve their problems and there's a lot of muscle memory to overcome even if the 'new way' were in fact better. I myself have found I only adopt new software, and techniques (including things like using/learning keyboard shortcuts, etc), that's a minimum of 2X better/faster than my de facto personal preference or legacy approach of tackling the problem. And, even if >10X, if it's something I do infrequent I still won't be interested in changing my ways. I have a lot of muscle memory that goes into how I build something like a new spreadsheet, even complicated ones. I'm not interested in putting AI into that process.

I have a grandfather that actually took an early retirement package, age 55, specifically because company gave him an ultimatum regarding switching from typewriter to a PC in the 80s. I feel like AI is pushing me towards making that same choice, I don't really care for using it in my work specifically (have no ultimatum at present).

I use it sparsely and it's more of a toy/novelty to me. Although, I do see how it helps other fields more/less and could replace humans in some professions - I'm not a SWE.

> why such a rush

First mover / Fear of missing out.

Frankly, inclusion of "AI" in a tool is a great way to ensure I don't use it.

> you get pissed off as a software engineer lol

I think this part depends on the person. I've personally been programming since I was a kid making games for my TI-83+, and in all that time and fatigue have been the limiting factors in how much of what I wanted to build that I actually could build.

So something able to write code rigorously enough to replace SWEs would be an absolute dream! I love programming with all my heart, and it's the thing I've spent most of my life doing... but I feel in love with it because it could make things.

A way to make even more things at a greater scale I'm individually capable off is such a joyous idea that if anything, I get annoyed at the idea they'd tease that without knowing it's possible (of course, they're trying to raise so...)

The aspect of wanting to replace SWEs is completely ok with me and I think there should be a rush to see it through. Imagine if every researcher could have an army of top tier SWEs at their beck and call for example. Or even imagine learning to program alongside a personal world-class expert from day 1, after all the fact AI could do it wouldn't mean we couldn't still do it ourselves if we wanted to.

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Unlike the "AGI in 3 years crowd" I don't actually know that it's possible, but where I agree with them is that the route there is probably not going to be a slow burn. Most companies need to demonstrate some external value along the way or they won't be able to continue, hence the chasing down of usecases that they can ship today.

Unfortunately not all of us can raise $1B on a txt file and a promise not to release our product :)

Well, Copilot is an anagram of "Clip too", which is sort of like Clippy 2.0, or Clippy Too. Microsoft's really missing a trick here!

Ah yes, the real paperclip doomsday scenario. As was foretold.

I heard a description of Copilot as "What Microsoft thought Clippy should be". Thanks, but no thanks.

“It looks like you’re trying to build AGI! Need help taking over the world responsibly?”

At least it would generate all kinds of memes and conspiracy. Much more entertaining and productive then Copilot.

Because _everyone hated it_. Now, it seems that everyone also hates copilot, but there is no point pre-dooming it by bringing the dread paperclip back from hell.

Would not put it pass them but truly the macOS office suite is in such disarray that I suspect it’s more mundane that they don’t have any real PMs. Surprising because you would think it would be worth at least some effort.

To this day Excel still does not have ribbon shortcuts so for any excel pros, it’s garbage. I have to run excel in a windows emulated environment.

> Who is writing these super long emails?

Other LLMs.

The apple one to summarize texts is even odder. It is a medium almost entirely defined by extreme brevity.

Have you never seen how AI makes texts super long? That needs to be summarized again by the receiver!

Like a reverse compression.

People who need to convey complex ideas?

I've written some super long emails; but I also include a TL;DR summary at the top when I do. Sometimes, the "how to get to the summary from the current, commonly known info" (long) part is useful; but not for everyone. And certainly not right out of the gate.

That being said, I'd almost never trust an AI to generate the summary part.

the point is obviously for the AI thing to read your emails -- they are not asking you

sometimes, super long email threads in corps

Allow me to introduce you to WordStar, in the "modern" context of Joe's Own Editor.

https://gizmodo.com/sci-fi-writer-releases-free-archive-of-l...

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor

Edit: I once used WordStar 4 with a daisywheel printer.

> I write books and print them out to edit with red pen. Need all of Word's print features.

The latter really doesn't follow from the former. All? Sounds like you need basic printing..

You can still proof it. Op is just saying they don't need spellcheck (perhaps because they do have an editor).

No, it needn't be.

I still don't understand why Ctrl plus shift plus C starts a call on teams when V pastes text unformatted and it is right next to it. At least let me reassign this shortcut...

I don't like Teams, but personal preference aside, I hate how in most companies I've worked at, there's multiple communications channels. 365 should be a one stop solution for this, emails, calendars, meetings, files, and chat, but in practice a lot of IT organizations also use Slack alongside it. Where I work now there's a split between IT and the rest because the rest uses Teams while IT uses Slack, causing the barrier between the two to increase, especially since designers - who should work closely with development - are on the Teams side of the fence.

And if you're a consultant and need to move between the multiple Teams instances that your clients use... it is so very painful.

You're not wrong.

In our org, at least, it's also the latest example of MSFT winning partly by being everpresent and partly by stumbles from competitors.

We are 100% work from home -- the company has no offices anywhere. Consequently, we do a lot of online meetings, with an emphasis on screensharing. (I don't think we've ever turned on cameras.) Our standard for a LONG time was GoToMeeting, because while it was more expensive, it WORKED every time, including and especially when we used it with customers.

But GTM got sloppy, and Teams was suddenly everywhere, and then GTM messed up their easy Outlook integration, and all of a sudden we were using Teams.

It's not a Slack competitor if it comes free with your current Microsoft licence. It's just a takeover. If it were any good it would've steamrollered Slack, not competed with it.

Fun fact if you want to change your office hours timezone to something other than the US default in Teams, you can't do it from Teams, you can't do it from Outlook, you can ONLY do it from the settings in the Outlook web app. Absolutely bizarre and broken situation

This one? https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...

Yep. I've been an Xbox player since 2002. Huge Halo fan. Thousands of hours on 3 different generations of Xbox. I still have my Halo 3 special edition helmet. I keep up with gaming news and listen to multiple gaming podcasts every week.

But even I can't reliably name the last two generations of Xbox without a pause. I always have to stop for a second and think it thru because the naming scheme is so abysmal.

Well, Visual Basic .net is based on the .net framework, can't deny that. It's a very different language from the previous non-.net Visual Basic versions, so much that some people rather argue that "Visual Basic" is the problematic part of the name, not the ".net".

I was confused to discover (while deleting OneDrive), that it had changed my Desktop folder from User/Desktop to User/OneDrive/Desktop.

Microsoft 365 = Word documents without absolute positioning.

I tried it once to make a lost cat poster and ended up just using Krita.

They either forgot they are in fact the evil overlord or they never read the list.

> 12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation

Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?

But seriously, I do think it's still one of the most hilariously stupid product names EVER in the history of products, to name the third thing in a series "xbox one". They'll have that idiocy forever bahahahahahah!!!!

Because Microsoft just pissed away their biggest brand after Windows and maybe Microsoft. Brand recognition holds value, a lot of value.

Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max, arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because pretty much everyone who needs it already have their subscription.

I'm a shareholder and I have a problem with it. It's a bad focus and product strategy over-dosing on AI hype which I think will hurt them in the future.

I mean, long-term shareholders might raise an eyebrow; presumably the bubble will, at some point, burst.

I only started using MS cloud stuff last year. This whole Onedrive/SharePoint split confuses the hell out of me.

I don't really know what SharePoint is. It seems like kind of an online site builder/file sharing platform? I'm not sure why those would go together. In any case, I get the impression it's kind of deprecated and Onedrive seems much easier to understand.

Those are all technical implementation details, not product features that everyday users can develop an emotional attachment.

Excel has interesting new features. It’s the only reason I'm contemplating upgrading.

What about the super exciting new Teams and Outlook!

I tend to think of any substantial writing we do at work as an essay. Proposal, summary, RFC, employee evaluation, whatever. You can tell who writes well, and who is copy/pasting plausibly relevant text into an unedited draft that they then pass off as the final result. Not AI, just sloppy writing. I don't have numbers to back it, but I think that the good writing gets more done in less time. So, people care if you're good at writing essays.

Then there's the whole "clear writing is clear thinking" angle, but I suspect that people who write poorly do so out of laziness rather than any deficiency.

The human ran out of tokens writing this response

Blue books are back baby!

Honestly the most impactful writings I ever had to write in my education were required to fit within a standard bluebook.

https://uvamagazine.org/articles/blue_books

> maybe just had it less accessible

Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the work was:

- find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or search the internet

- read the summary

- write your paper

It would still take you hours.

Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too.

You don't need to take my word for it that things have changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that kids are doing less of their own reading and homework because of AI.

> If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway

This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept of education. There are lots of things that people end up being interested in, but they someone has to force them to try it.

You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals to them, and we know that isn't true.

> Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.

You're underselling how much easier the access is.

> If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.

Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a nonsensical concept.

A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system.

Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.

Yeah, I think the existence of Reader's Digest makes your point for you. I remember the first time my dad explained that it was misnamed because it wasn't really for the readers. It was for the people who didn't want to read.

I see you are not familiar with Microsoft.

Maybe they want to collect data on people using copilot in order to train copilot to be better?

Good question, 360 would have been better, full circle coverage of all your (office) productivity needs.

You only pay fro 365 days a year. The leap day is free.

The Zune didn't ;p

In 2020 I was disappointed they didn't rename it to Microsoft 366.