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.
> 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.
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.
I'm sure it happened in a meeting where the word SYNERGY was said a lot but it clearly doesn't work and it's not the first time Microsoft makes this blunder everything was .net then everything was live then everything was xbox then everything was 365 now everything is copilot and if someone tell me they use copilot 365 I still have no idea if they use web apps or desktop apps or anything because they confuse a brand with an actual product.
Thanks for the whistle stop tour of Microsoft branding! I remember when Microsoft Passport was first rebranded to be a “.net Passport”! And all the later ones.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:)
You do read sockets with read/write, that's the point of saying 'everything is a file'. You can basically can do read/write/close on things that are a socket.
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...
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.
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).
Subsystem isn't used as a random English word here, "Windows Subsystem" is already a fixed term. So you wouldn't introduce a possessive relation into the term when using it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
> That's because .Net 4 has been the .Net Framework's current version since 2010. [...] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Make it write a skill and rule hook for PreCompact to do a handoff that explains what was worked on, what to know, and what to do next. If it goes off the rails after compaction then it won’t be great in a new session either, and you want to make sure you maximize continuity or development will be unsustainable. A backlog.md and improvements.md workflow also helps with this (ticket numbers, descriptions, “focus on BACK-0075,” etc.)
It’s a bit rich to take the most negative interpretation of my statement, and moreso telling of your insecurities that you chose to be so offended.
And, ultimately, proving my point. Did you actually explain why you thought it’s superior? Or is it just because GitHub bad? Have you even tried it recently?
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.
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?
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.
> "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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
The first one I remember is RealPlayer. I think the official story was that they were having more and more trouble convincing people to install upgrades (at a time when 56k and slower modems were still common, dowloading an app could take minutes, ugrade nags seemed to be ever present), so they decide to name the new major version RealOne Player "because it's the One, the only One you need, the One that does everything for you".
Of course, this meant that the next time they tried to get anybody to install a patch, some of us felt annoyed because. RealOne Player wasn't "the One" after all. Why should we get back on the treadmill of waiting for downloads that rarely seem necessary?
Ahem. I think this event sensitised me against all attempts at using "one" like that. I mentally flip a table every time.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
You are right on both counts and that is a bad thing.
World has had ctrl+b for bold forever, so people can start to use it and then upgrade to styles when they run into the limitations. Alternatively someone knowledgable could set Word to only allow a selection of styles.
Open and Libreoffice has had style support since forever. Its only docs that kneecaps its users learning journey like that.
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 :)
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
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...
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")
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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?
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!
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
> 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.
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, ...
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).
The Copilot chaos is exactly why I moved to on-device AI. No rebrand can touch it, no API policy can gate it, no subscription required. aiME runs Qwen, Gemma, Mistral on your phone — forever — one-time purchase. https://coticsy.com/aime.html
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
The naming confusion points to a deeper problem. Everyone is building the "AI does a thing" layer (coding, writing, searching). It looks like no one is building the "AI things work together" layer.
We run 14 AI agents. CrewAI, LangGraph, Google's 8 patterns... all solve how agents pass data to each other. None of them answer: which agent has authority over which domain? What happens when two agents disagree? Who owns the escalation path?
Those are organizational problems, not technical ones. And organizational problems don't get solved by naming a product "Copilot."
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
Microsoft always does this, they let their marketing drive the ship for some reason. Before copilot it was 365. Before that it renaming a bunch of stuff to .net.
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.
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.
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..
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
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.
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"
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> .. 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.
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.
To my understanding, Office (or "Microsoft 365") itself becoming "Copilot" was just confused messaging about the "Office Hub" app/shortcut being repurposed.
Too many. Rebranding Office 365 as Copilot 365 or whatever .. seriously?!?
They already screwed up Outlook (having to ask people “do you open the outlook app on your desktop computer, or do you type outlook.com?” And still not getting a helpful answer back from non technical people SUCKS)
Things people know that don’t need to be renamed:
Windows
Office
Azure
Xbox
Bing
GitHub
LinkedIn
adding a “Copilot” AI “buddy” to everything is a little confusing as-is, unless the end goal is for it to be a persistent buddy for the user no matter where they are at in the Microsoft ecosystem. But rebranding entire products is crazy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm sure it happened in a meeting where the word SYNERGY was said a lot but it clearly doesn't work and it's not the first time Microsoft makes this blunder everything was .net then everything was live then everything was xbox then everything was 365 now everything is copilot and if someone tell me they use copilot 365 I still have no idea if they use web apps or desktop apps or anything because they confuse a brand with an actual product.
This is insane.
Thanks for the whistle stop tour of Microsoft branding! I remember when Microsoft Passport was first rebranded to be a “.net Passport”! And all the later ones.
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.
Stupidity and avarice, despite being unsatisfying answers, are sometimes the correct ones.
This! The most cogent and concise explanation I've heard for something this!!
This comment brought me a bit of that satisfaction instead, thanks :)
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.
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.
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
It's called Microsoft 365 Copilot now. Maybe that will help.
Surely easier to cancel the card, no?
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.
They wouldnt intentionally prompt mangle the product for their default offering to have a bigger up sales path ?
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.
It must be intentionally obtuse, nobody could ever confuse copilot for copilot
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.
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.
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.
It's similar to how difficult it was to search for .NET or C#
Copilot is Microsoft Watson.
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.
Clippy is finally getting his revenge
Someone said - in Linux, everything is a file. In Microsoft, everything is a copilot. Lol.
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.
I was thinking more along the lines of "what you're referring to as Windows is in fact Copilot/Windows"....
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.
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.
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
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:)
> but they failed to close the loop and shipped an api that did not match the core unix api.
What exactly is the thing, that you think is lacking, though?
You do read sockets with read/write, that's the point of saying 'everything is a file'. You can basically can do read/write/close on things that are a socket.
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.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)
did you remember to push your glasses up your nose bridge before writing your comment
It also flashes white for a brief moment and you can hear a faint chi-wii sound.
No sorry, I forgot (i.e. I don't wear glasses (yet)).
Not everything is a file, in linux or unix.
[flagged]
It's a humorous reference to a (in-)famous serious post by Stallman, see https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.en.html
We are still missing "Windows Subsystem for Copilot".
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...
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.
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:
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 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.
Subsystem isn't used as a random English word here, "Windows Subsystem" is already a fixed term. So you wouldn't introduce a possessive relation into the term when using it.
Or a colon:
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.
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.
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.
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.
WSL was a traditional subsystem in the Windows NT tradition, it just never worked properly.
WSL2 runs real Linux in a virtual machine.
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.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110904
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.
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.
Sorry, but WSL1 was unstable by Microsoft's own admission.
That's why Microsoft abandoned it in favor of WSL2 running real Linux in a VM.
Nope, Microsoft redid the design due to the amount of Linux syscalls that were still left to implement.
What is this goal post moving? First the was file system access, then it became being unstable, what is going to be the next point?
Let me make it easier, WSL 1.0 did not support the syscalls for X Windows implementation.
> What is this goal post moving? First the was file system access, then it became being unstable, what is going to be the next point?
If you can't touch the Linux files with Windows tools without corrupting them, your implementation is unstable.
WSL1 was unstable, unfit for purpose, and never worked properly.
It was abandoned in favor of just running real Linux in a VM.
> 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.
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.
It's a Windows subsystem. For running Linux.
Sub for system Windows Linux.
It’s a proper noun, there are no rules.
It's the subsystem of X for Y. The US department for health is not a medicine product called 'department' produced by 'US'.
> 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.
The thing they “didn’t want to [do]” was infringe on the Linux trademark.
> 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.
Copilot Subsystem for Copilot
Copilot Copilot for Copilot
Someone can probably make a valid "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" out of Copilot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
You're talking about the aladeen or that aladeen? I don't understand which aladeen you are talking about.
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.
But I don't like Copilot!
Copilot Copilot Copilot Copilot
I guess it does sort of work as a "grammatical infinity" idea https://medium.com/luminasticity/cardinality-and-growth-rate...
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!
Copilot copilots Copilot copilots copilot copilot Copilot copilots
Woah that actually works...
Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots, which other Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots assist, themselves assist Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots.
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..)
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.
> (Fun fact: If you repeat a word sufficiently, it will lose its meaning..)
Too late. Microsoft already caused that to happen.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
Copilot OS
Pssh.. your joke surely won't be a joke inside Microsoft..
It’s IBM 15 yers ago when everything was Watson
We see how that worked out for them.
Halo Cortana AI: Copilot for Combat 2026
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.
Microsoft .NET Copilot
Microsoft Azure .NET Copilot 365
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.
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.
Haha, actually funny.
Gaming Copilot: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/gaming-copilot
And of course it doesn't even work on Xbox.
They have that on windows game bar. Then you press the xbox button there’s a copilot “for games” there
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 355
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 355 (classic)
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 365 (classic) Professional Edition
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.
Make it a cloud, on premisses and a desktop versions. All different.
Live Ultimate Edition for Developers.
Microsoft Azure .NET Copilot 365 Series X
MS Power Azure Copilot 365
Microsoft .Copilot ?
> Microsoft .NET Copilot
Not to be confused with "Microsoft Copilot .NET". :-)
or Microsoft Copilot for .NET Core
.NET Core does not exist anymore: it was renamed to .NET with .NET 5.0 (skipping version 4.0):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=.NET&oldid=134276...
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.
> That's because .Net 4 has been the .Net Framework's current version since 2010. [...] 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.
Good points/considerations.
loool
Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI. How many products have Copilot? Just about all of them.
> 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".
I’ve absolutely seen adverts on TV in the UK by Microsoft advertising Microsoft Cloud. Azure was not mentioned anywhere…
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Moskowitz
As everything is grouped under cloud and ai at Microsoft, Azure means now basically anything produced by Microsoft.
It makes sense. And Google is its own way to name all AI products “Gemini”.
Which is unusually simple. I would expect Google to use 10 more marketing names simultaneously without any logic to the product lines.
Next year they will introduce "hAIngouts" as an AI chat bot.
Ouch. Maybe "Google wAIve" for collaborative chats.
> 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?
The r/Bard subreddit is still quite active for some reason. Reminds me of Google Glass.
I still like the name Bard
Didn't it start as Bard?
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.
They’ve improved it since the initial launch when the service, model names and plan names all sounded similar and contradictory.
there is vertex ai, notebooklm, antigravity, nano banana, veo, lyria, the open models are gemma and gato
But they put Gemini in google docs, they didn’t rename Docs to Gemini like Microsoft did.
And IBM has "Watson"
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
And Silly has Silly!
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.
Probably will use other astrology terms. Like the way android is named for desserts.
Google Scorpio will be their best model yet, except sometimes it will say things that cut you to the core.
It most certainly isn't astrology that was on Google's mind when they decided for Gemini.
Made me curious enough to look it up...
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-gemini...
I think they'll more likely launch competing AI projects like 'Aquarius' and 'Doh' or something
Great point. We’re about to get a wave of Apple Products with “Apple Intelligence” in a similar way.
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.
If they ever get Apple Intelligent going.
Does Office exist or not? I thought it was rebranded to Copilot365
Is it in solitaire or minesweeper?
Be careful what you wish for
I wish for the original solitaire to come back.
I use win95 emulator in the browser to play it.
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Copilot for airline pilots!
Microsoft should add a new game to Windows to accustom Windows users to Copilot.
There's a restrictions on games with even simulated gambling
Just what we need...AI agents that will play our games for us!
Didn't they kill those?
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.
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.
Elon Musk's ears are burning.
Yeah imagine if they had unique product names for "AI in OneDrive", "AI in SharePoint", "AI in Outlook"... That would be even more ridiculous.
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.
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".
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.
No, it’s also the official name of Microsoft Office. That moniker is no more. Office is Microsoft 365 Copilot.
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.
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
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.
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/copilot/articles/microsoft-scales-...
Not only was this claim proved to be false, the earnings report that followed also told a different story.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-lowers-ai-softw...
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.
gaming too I guess still
This won’t last for long too. Valve with SteamDeck and apparent future release of SteamMachine/SteamOS is preparing users for Linux gaming
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.
either that or AAA games mostly becoming streamed from Clouds like Nvidia now
Google tried that and there's still some blood on the wall
is there any hope for linux native anticheat? I always felt like this was what was holding it back
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
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?
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.
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 ?
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.
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?
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
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.
Uninformed devs is what makes this gravy train going. If everybody jumps on gh copilot it will end quick.
Unfortunately it’s self defeating to educate them.
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.
Have you used the gh copilot cli? What would stand out most to you as gaps right now?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Make it write a skill and rule hook for PreCompact to do a handoff that explains what was worked on, what to know, and what to do next. If it goes off the rails after compaction then it won’t be great in a new session either, and you want to make sure you maximize continuity or development will be unsustainable. A backlog.md and improvements.md workflow also helps with this (ticket numbers, descriptions, “focus on BACK-0075,” etc.)
It’s a bit rich to take the most negative interpretation of my statement, and moreso telling of your insecurities that you chose to be so offended.
And, ultimately, proving my point. Did you actually explain why you thought it’s superior? Or is it just because GitHub bad? Have you even tried it recently?
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.
How can I learn that clever prompting?
Try to pack as much clear work into your prompt as you can so you don't go back and forth.
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?
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> chat.agent.maxRequests
"Maximum number of requests that copilot can make using agents"
I don't get how this setting is relevant?
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.
> I can get $1000 at API prices of Opus 4.6, for in the range of $2 my cost through copilot.
Holy moly
I guess it won't last long, abuse it as much as you can right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Niece comment tries to explain a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47643220
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.
It reminds me of around 2002 when Microsoft named everything ".net".
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.
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.
"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".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
> a search for "surface keyboard", could result in a "type cover" for some kind of tablet PC or a keyboard intended for desktop computers.
Do you mean blades?
Proof that I'm not hallucinating that name: https://www.windowscentral.com/meet-surface-music-kit-new-bl...
Oh, Blades, like the Xbox 360 Dashboard thing?
Or no, you must be referring to the Azure Portal sections.
And “one” like most Fortune 500 companies.
The first one I remember is RealPlayer. I think the official story was that they were having more and more trouble convincing people to install upgrades (at a time when 56k and slower modems were still common, dowloading an app could take minutes, ugrade nags seemed to be ever present), so they decide to name the new major version RealOne Player "because it's the One, the only One you need, the One that does everything for you".
Of course, this meant that the next time they tried to get anybody to install a patch, some of us felt annoyed because. RealOne Player wasn't "the One" after all. Why should we get back on the treadmill of waiting for downloads that rarely seem necessary?
Ahem. I think this event sensitised me against all attempts at using "one" like that. I mentally flip a table every time.
one.copilot.net
Then they did the same thing to a lesser degree with "360", including the Xbox.
Also Live. Windows Live [whatever], Xbox Live [whatever], Games for Windows - Live, Office Live.
Also 365 -_-
The joke is "expect one day of downtime every leap year", but in practice it seems a bit more than that.
Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.
> Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.
You mean "Web's fear"? ;-)
And then Watson
Which was arguably more problematic. Are you referring to a web address or a Microsoft product?
More importantly, you couldn't usefully search for it with the search engines of the time.
I wonder how many human lifetimes of effort have been wasted due to poor naming decisions by Microsoft.
Soon: Copilot .NET .
Azure PowerCopilot Live .NET
... 360 (+5)
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
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?"
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Related: a list of all Microsoft login portals (there are 609 of them).
https://msportals.io/
At least some of those were from acquisitions. All the Copilots are their own fault.
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.
For a client I had to use "Windows App" to connect remotely to their cloud machine – and finding the app was the easy part.
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"?
Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).
> “Gaming Copilot” is missing
It would be ironic if there was nothing called "CoPilot" for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
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!”
There is also another Xbox Copilot missing (though it has been renamed, probably due it not being an "AI"): https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib...
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.
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.
Copilot on Teams has become pretty good at transcribing meetings. What's a shame, because the previous system was very funny.
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.)
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.
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.
Not sure they count as “products” in this context, but TypeScript and Playwright are still nice.
And LSP, but because of TypeScript.
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?
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.
You are right on both counts and that is a bad thing.
World has had ctrl+b for bold forever, so people can start to use it and then upgrade to styles when they run into the limitations. Alternatively someone knowledgable could set Word to only allow a selection of styles.
Open and Libreoffice has had style support since forever. Its only docs that kneecaps its users learning journey like that.
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 :)
Nah, especially in technology it's very easy to avoid Microslop. I've done it successfully for many, many years.
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
Using Microsoft products and desiring Microsoft products are not the same thing.
I for sure misread the post I commented on, you are right, my bad!!
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...
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")
It also refers to various "smart" suggestions that have nothing to do with the voice assistant: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-siri-suggestions...
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.
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.
> (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")
Siri 365 Communication Suite .NET Enterprise Edition With Copilot
Thanks for the stroke. Where do I send the hospital bill?
In Microsoft's case it refers to an LLM system with some features integrated.
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.
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.
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.
For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.
Reminds me of Microsoft OneCare which sounds like saying 'wanker' with a slight French accent
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
The name that still takes the cake is Github Advanced Security for Azure DevOps.
Now 365 is also called Copilot, so it's Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft Copilot
> Naming things is hard
... for people really bad at it.
"I'm Daryl. These are my 608 other brothers named Daryl"
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.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
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
I refuse to believe any are as bad as the Azure Portal one.
It feels like pre-GPT levels of smart.
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".
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.
Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson
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?
It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.
It means “the AI thing we bolted on here”.
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!
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
> 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.
We definitely could have stuck with Cortana for a consumer-facing personal assistant. The first few Halo games were great.
Right, they had Cortana right there for the built in windows function!
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, ...
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It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.
It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again
I’m waiting for .Net Copilot with integration to Passport.
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).
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.
But beware if someone say to them Microslop ... they don't like it if someone other make up new names :-)
Is it unreasonable to not appreciate an insult?
Fabric is the one place for all your data!
The Copilot chaos is exactly why I moved to on-device AI. No rebrand can touch it, no API policy can gate it, no subscription required. aiME runs Qwen, Gemma, Mistral on your phone — forever — one-time purchase. https://coticsy.com/aime.html
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
The naming confusion points to a deeper problem. Everyone is building the "AI does a thing" layer (coding, writing, searching). It looks like no one is building the "AI things work together" layer.
We run 14 AI agents. CrewAI, LangGraph, Google's 8 patterns... all solve how agents pass data to each other. None of them answer: which agent has authority over which domain? What happens when two agents disagree? Who owns the escalation path?
Those are organizational problems, not technical ones. And organizational problems don't get solved by naming a product "Copilot."
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
Microsoft always does this, they let their marketing drive the ship for some reason. Before copilot it was 365. Before that it renaming a bunch of stuff to .net.
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.
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.
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..
> Microsoft 365
That's Microsoft 365 Copilot now actually.
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
What an absolutely ridiculous and deeply unserious organization
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.
I can't wait for Copilot Copilot for Copilot 365 X Copilot X
Is there a copilot for Microsoft flight simulator though?
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"
"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...
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.
Their Xbox consoles have also uniquely terrible naming:
“Xbox” / “Xbox 360” / “Xbox One” / “Xbox One X” / “Xbox Series S” / “Xbox Series X”
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!
> "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.
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Related/same discussion:
What Is Copilot Exactly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
Microsoft slowly becoming the IBM of the 21st century.
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.
Related: (parody): if you haven't seen it, this is a critique - from microsofties I think - of MSFT product branding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
Plot twist: he used Copilot to generate the figure.
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.
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.
> 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
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).
The best non-Clude Code CLI integration by far has been Zed's and I prefer Zed over what VS Code has become.
And let’s not forget that Visual Studio Code (the IDE) is not Visual Studio (the IDE).
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.
> 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)?
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.
This reminds me of the old .NET marketing mess where everything was .NET
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.
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.
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
We should probably be grateful Microsoft didn't name it .NET
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.
I think they should start to think about having a pilot.
How many of those are used regularly by more than 0.1% users?
No one can ruin microslops branding better than microslop.
> .. 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.
So... That means all of those products are for entertainment purposes only. Truth in advertising!
This pattern seems to repeat itself often in large tech companies. Does anyone remember SAP Hana?
Microsoft yearns for the flight simulator.
Didn't they rename everything "dotnet" when that was the hot thing
> A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. I couldn’t
It means Microsoft AI.
Hope that helps!
It's not a product, but enablement or a feature! Just like a 'Pro' label :-)
Surely it's just a synonym for 'agent' or 'helper'.
They should have called it Micro.
If this isn’t an indictment of MS management (pun intended), I don’t know what is.
And where is Microsoft Flight Attendant, I need a cup of coffee.
I don't understand, usually Microsoft is so good at naming things!
Reminds me of around 2002 when MS slapped “.Net” onto everything.
Was copilot branding restricted only to their AI products?
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.
They could start by not renaming Microsoft Office and laptops as copilot.
> 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.
The problem is not annoyance. The problem is confusion.
One should aim for clarity.
FooPilot, Barwonk, etc.. would actually be a vast improvement.
Too many. Rebranding Office 365 as Copilot 365 or whatever .. seriously?!?
They already screwed up Outlook (having to ask people “do you open the outlook app on your desktop computer, or do you type outlook.com?” And still not getting a helpful answer back from non technical people SUCKS)
Things people know that don’t need to be renamed: Windows Office Azure Xbox Bing GitHub LinkedIn
adding a “Copilot” AI “buddy” to everything is a little confusing as-is, unless the end goal is for it to be a persistent buddy for the user no matter where they are at in the Microsoft ecosystem. But rebranding entire products is crazy
Is this more than Google's Hangouts?
Windows is the harness for Copilot
It's just one brand: Copilot
Isn’t it just their AI llm thing?
I thought that was Cortana? Copilot is the new keyboard button, kinda like the Windows key
Copilot is a brand that refers to a variety of products
Well, no, Office is now also called Copilot. They renamed it!
Yes but which one?
approximately the same number of products they have called "surface"
It’s terrible, because a lot of the thing named copilot are not very good, which poisons the brand.
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.
Yes.
We just call it Cope. Azure Cope. GitHub Cope. SharePoint Cope. Etc.
Microslop trying really hard to shove copilot shite down our throats
"All your Copilot are belong to us"
Slop-Pilot for Copilot.
One could argue that it is an oxymoron.
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Okay. But how many products have Gemini or Claude in the name?
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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.
> 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.
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.
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....
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
Nice try, Nadella!
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.
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.
How much is it?