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Title is fantastic, had me laughing at my own ignorance to copilot's offerings before I even started the article.
I do feel like if any of the major companies could do with a rebranding it would be copilot. They are tossing that name on all of their stuff, and it just doesn't carry the weight of any of the big names even though its chatgpt models under the hood.
Personally i associate it with annoying bloatware, and silently judge windows users based on if that icon is still on their tasbar.
It does a good job of when a VIP employee demands "copilot", you have to buy a bunch of different licenses for them because no one knows exactly what they want (they just want copilot, no not that one).
The opposite of what Oracle used to do (arguably successfully). Break up useful components of middleware or database servers so you have to add a litany of expensive features, similar to trying to pick a trim on the BMW website.
Sorry if this is a stupid question but shouldn't you try to clarify which product specifically they have in mind before you spend money on something that might not be the right thing?
The nice thing about being a Github shop but not really a Microsoft shop is the range of Copilot" might refer to narrows quite a bit. "Github Copilot" is a relatively coherent collection of products, and never have to be bothered with any of the other stuff.
That said I suspect this is in part an attempt at making the name so ubiquitous that people start using it the way they currently use ChatGPT. Like Kleenex or Bandaid or Google, where the name of the product is just the brand.
But would a rebrand actually fix anything? The confusion isn't really the name — it's that they have a dozen distinct products all wearing it. A cleaner name on the same mess is still a mess.
They should just go with the full aviation crew naming scheme. Rename some of them to FO (first officer), second officer, navigator, flight engineer, radio operator. The cheaper models for quick answers will be the "relief crew". Data filtering and loading would be "loadmaster". Instead of referring to the user as "user" call them "captain". Who doesn't like to feel important and in charge!? Embrace the ridiculousness, at least they will all have some distinctive labels to go by.
I genuinely don't understand how one company can be so bad at naming products for multiple decades. It makes Sony's names for its headphones seem downright catchy.
We had a good laugh when our IT informed us that Remote Desktop was being renamed Windows App. I really wonder what is going on over there because from where I'm sitting it makes no effin' sense at all.
This is dumb enough that it can’t be accidental. I genuinely believe the strategy is to create vague but recognizable brands but avoid labeling _products_ with recognizable names.
Microsoft seem to think that it’s better to have some names we all know like 365, Azure, Copilot snd then the products are just floating around under those brands.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw but I have no idea why they would want this.
Big companies don't have naming strategies, they have fiefdoms. Different teams name things, nobody coordinates, and what looks like intentional brand architecture from outside is just accumulated internal politics. Occam's razor: incompetence before conspiracy.
This is weird to me because I don't think I talk to anyone regularly who even uses Cursor anymore, let alone Copilot. It's Claude and Codex now, and then people with more interesting/oddball TUI agents or async web agents.
Many people working the front-end space seem to really like Cursor. It seems to have a dedicated audience. Myself, I have never liked VS Code so I don't have a pull towards it.
I think the costing there is the problem and with (GitHub) Copilot. Not owning their own model and not able to take advantage of the (probably brutally subsidized) fixed monthly packages that have relatively generous limits means Cursor and Copilot can't compete cost wise on a per-token basis.
JetBrains has similar problems with its "Junie" product.
Maybe some of these will have second chances once Anthropic and OpenAI run out of $$ runway and are forced to charge something closer to actual cost. Or if the Chinese open weight models do some more catching up.
I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins. The rest is autocomplete in the IDE.
I actually find it to be a great deal, especially because they charge by request rather than token. So if you provide detailed prompts a lot of work can get done for very little cost.
> I use Github Copilot because it's what my job provides to me. But 95% of my usage is via OpenCode (which is officially supported [0]), not copilot-cli or their IDE plugins.
Does the bug where premium requests get consumed for spinning up subagents still exist?
I've stuck to Visual Studio Code's GitHub Copilot integration because of this, because I'm on a tight budget and didn't fancy burning through my premium requests.
That per-request pricing point is underrated. We noticed the same thing — teams that write tight, detailed prompts get way more leverage than teams that iterate 10 times on vague ones. The pricing model basically rewards the people who already know what they want.
I use Copilot pretty much exclusively because it's our "approved AI solution" at the office and they block access to Claude. Since I'm so used to Copilot at work, I just end up using it all the time.
Do you regularly talk to anyone in a Microsoft shop (like most enterprises)? If you work in a ms ”partner” company there’s rarely a choice between the Microsoft product and something else. Azure over AWS is a given etc.
Same thing happened with Eclipse plugins in the mid-2000s. Everyone had their favorite until IntelliJ just won. Cursor's probably fine but the ecosystem is still shaking out. Give it two years.
Everything MS does can be summed up in one word: "Clippy"
I've been using their data reporting product for ever. It's not fancy but you'll be amazed at how many data people use it. Back then it used to be called "SQL Server Reporting Services" or "SSRS". It is now called Power BI Paginated Reports. Over the years, the product has gradually become worse. Publishing, subscriptions, several features are now hard to use. All in the service of Clippy and the Cloud.
MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.
Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.
I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.
DotNet fits better - .NET My Services, .NET Passport, .NET Alerts. All real shipped products, all quietly killed. The brand carried a promise of coherence that never materialized. Copilot's doing the same thing: ship it everywhere, let the name do the heavy lifting.
And shows up even when you are trying to use one specific Copilot. I want to try Copilot CLI, but it only seems half documented. A lot of things point back to Copilot in VS Code (or Jetbrains and Eclipse).
IDK how anyone makes anything of Copilot 365. My wife knows I use models all the time to build things, so she asked me to help her use this "Copilot" thing. I flailed around on her work laptop for a few hours and I'll be damned if I came up with anything more useful than things I could already do with some hotkeys. I'd ask it to do things like I would a coding model and it would just come back with instructions on how to do it myself or find things in the application menus.
I have no clue what to do with that, I can't see any value in it at all, so I'm guessing I just couldn't wrap my head around the gestalt it uses. There has to be something there, right, or why would all the muckity-mucks be so excited about it?
It feels like a long time ago but around late 2022 or early 2023 ish, I used Copilot very extensively. I thought it was a superpower.
I even went in and edited the text area size iirc from 8k to 32k or something just so I could paste longer context into it.
I really felt like an elite haxor.
However, times have changed. What was "state of the art" in 2023 is pedestrian now. Copilot really had an early lead, in my opinion when Bard felt somewhat off. Now? I don't even think about Copilot. I feel very comfortable putting my thoughts in Claude or even Gemini.
The weird thing is some of the capabilities of these different Copilots are completely different, even though presented in the same way. The real pain begins when you assume consistent handling of links to objects in M365. It’s far less intuitive than even this article suggests. Two different prompts even in the same browser tab, different Copilots, different capabilities interacting with the rest of M365.
The author calls it an ecosystem at one point. That’s overselling it.
I suspect “Copilot” is cargo culted naming across disparate parts of an org that’s home to upwards of 100,000 engineers who must all justify their latest bump in your subscription cost.
It’s amazing how much product Microsoft ships - that’s 95% of the thing.. unfortunately the last 5% is the product polish that’d make their stuff actually good. :(
I’ve been saying the same thing to people I work with for the past few months. When everything is labelled as copilot it creates such confused ideas when someone says they have created something with copilot… or created a copilot agent. It always invoked 20 questions to interrogate what actually was created, and with what ‘version’ of copilot.
Copilot cli isn’t as good as Claude but it’s not just fancy autocomplete either. Copilot cli seems to be converging with the rest and you can use mcp servers, skills, launch fleets of agents that use tools etc.
> So I asked him. "What is your developer workflow using Copilot?" I was not prepared for the answer he gave me:
I don’t know why I get annoyed when LLM’s and their output are casually referred to as “he/she”, particularly by non-techies, but I do. There’s something about personifying an LLM that seems incorrect. Perhaps it’s a fear being stoked that increasingly, people might actually be thinking of LLM’s as living beings.
I do feel like if any of the major companies could do with a rebranding it would be copilot. They are tossing that name on all of their stuff, and it just doesn't carry the weight of any of the big names even though its chatgpt models under the hood. Personally i associate it with annoying bloatware, and silently judge windows users based on if that icon is still on their tasbar.