alt Hacker NewsWell, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average, which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them.
Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.
I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to make that button actually do something, ending the conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"...
Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.
So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??
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The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".
This is what move fast and break things looks like in a enterprise the size of microsoft.
It's mostly break things and little moving fast.
But the idea is that it's AI or death, so some broken buttons seems of less importances than the buttons itself being there, because the button working is a problem involving several teams, so no one is actually responsible, but the button being there is some team problem, and hell yeah they solved in the first sprint.
> Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.
How did you manage this? Probably some company-wide group policy saves you. It keeps starting copilot for me, drives me crazy.
I've always suspected Microsoft is a front for an ineffable cosmic evil that is trying to crush the human spirit into bewildered, abject despair.
How else do you explain Teams and the Hotmail UI?
> So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling?
Satya Nadella insists that Bing365Pilot has supercharged his productivity, but determining if he's high on his own supply or lying through his teeth is an exercise for the reader.
> Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...
The only good feature about copilot in Microsoft 365 is that if you ask it to delete itself enough times eventually some other app will eventually be promoted to the most prominent when you first login.
There's AI in Teams to. I wanted to use it to recolect info from my chats but apparently it's unable to do so.
On new-outlook-on-Windows there’s an option to disable the copilot button. Wanna take a guess what that does?
> Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.
I guess that's worse than the Gemini button in Google Sheets that asks me to subscribe to AI services. I have multiple times been in a sheet and thought "asking an LLM how to do this thing I want to do right here in this product would actually be great if it works", remembered there was an AI-looking button in the top right, clicked it, and nope'd out of the subscription.
I just want to know if it works or not before I buy it.
The other thing is that they're FORCING it on the users. Its invasive and creepy and assaulty and it has multiplied my loathing of Microsoft infinitely.
Someone in Microsoft needs to watch a lecture on affirmative consent.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing with AI, both local and online. If you tell me its available if I want it, I might come dabble a bit.
But cram AI into every facet of my machine? That's a 1 way ticket to never being installed on any system I ever own in the future ever again.
Companies should treat AI like a madam treats the workers in a whorehouse. You don't make them go door to door. You let the johns come to you.
> So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??
They all use Macs lol.
At what point does Charlie Brown not kick at the ball Lucy offers?
It's been 19 years since "Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging". [0] Is the disconnect displayed in this message thread that there's always 10,000 new people discovering a fact? [1]
What do you mean 0 items? When you expand it gives you options to write a message or interact with search. Seems like its a you problem.