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jorl17yesterday at 9:12 PM4 repliesview on HN

Microsoft's decision to name this product Copilot has to be the result of some form of internal sabotage, I refuse to believe otherwise.

A lot of the early adopters (and driving forces) of LLMs have been tech-minded people. This means it's quite a good idea NOT to confuse them.

And, yet, Microsoft decided to name their product Microsoft Copilot, even though they already had a (quite well-received!!) Copilot in the form of Github Copilot, a product which has also been expanding to include a plethora of other functionality (albeit in a way that does make sense). How is this not incredibly confusing?

So what actually _is_ Copilot? Is there a bing copilot? A copilot in windows machines? Is it an online service? (I saw someone post a link to an office 365)?

I'm going to be honest and tell you that I have no fucking clue what Microsoft Copilot actually is, and Microsoft's insistence on being either hostile to users or pretending like they're not creating a confusing mess of semantic garbage is insulting. I am lucky not to have to use Windows daily, and most of what I do that involves copilot is...Github Copilot.

I am knee-deep into LLMs. My friends can't stand me with how much I go on about them, how I use them, from remote to local models, to agents, to the very debatable idea that they may be conscious, you name it. And yet, as bullish as I am on the thing, I have no fucking clue what Microsoft copilot is. Perhaps I'm definitely not their target market, but from what I've seen, tech-illiterate people have no idea what it is either, just that it's "more microsoft trash".

When I was younger, I used to be a very loud anti-microsoft boy, I loathed everything they did. Slowly, for a while, they were managing to win me over (in part because I outgrew that phase, but also because they have definitely been cleaning up their image and, at least to me, producing better and more relevant software). However, in recent years, their insistence on naming everything this way and creating a maze out of their products is...baffling. I feel myself not being able to stand MS again.

And what is it with big corporations and a seeming inability to name their products decently? This is appalling. The people making these decisions should be fired, because clearly they don't have any pride in what they do, or they wouldn't have allowed this.

Get your shit together, microsoft!


Replies

jjcmyesterday at 10:22 PM

> Microsoft's decision to name this product Copilot has to be the result of some form of internal sabotage

If you look at this in isolation, yes. If you look at this historically, it's totally on-brand for Microsoft. Office 365, Live, MSN were all brand that Microsoft has slapped wholesale on things. Microsoft has always been reactive when it comes to branding, rather than proactive.

show 1 reply
jdsullyyesterday at 10:32 PM

I'm reminded of when .NET was released suddenly everything was .NET, even an office release was named after it. Then it finally narrowed down into the programming languages we know and love or hate depending on your vibe. I assume this will happen here too eventually.

karel-3dtoday at 8:56 AM

Copilot is a vibe.

You don't "use Copilot". You Copilot. Everything is Copilot. Windows, Office, PCs, Bing. All Copilot.

Unless you mean Copilot (Classic).

airstrikeyesterday at 9:20 PM

Everything is Copilot, but they're all different products, and one of them is just a launcher to Office apps, each with their own assistant called Copilot