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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled.

There's the AI code assistant thing that github actually started, there's the horrible chatbot maker GUI demoware, there's AI stuff you might be able to do with your sharepoint (if only you could get hold of the right ms sales rep to take your money), there's an app that does genai things on your personal MS account... And now there's a Surface rebrand?

That org chart meme about Microsoft being little fiefdoms pointing guns at eachother never stops being relevant.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/microsoft-...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/05/0...

[3] https://copilot.microsoft.com/

And [4] the meme itself, as you really can't convince me the above is the result of a coherent company-wide strategy https://i.insider.com/51dfec8469bedd5e19000017

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It made sense when I named GitHub Copilot, since that product was a passive addition to your regular workflow.

The name was sticky enough that they've run with it, misunderstanding or ignoring that fundamental metaphor.

This is what happens when engineers borrow the concepts previously created by dedicated teams. Happens a lot with UX/UI, too.

I can almost guarantee you that this was a sales exec decision rather than an engineering decision.

In my perception, Github Copilot is the OG. The first one, amd the only product in that list that is actually making my life better.

See the hellish naming and branding they've done with the .NET ecosystem... It is so convoluted, even people actively developing on their stacks would have and issue figuring out if they are downloading the right stuff.

Not really. It was a little confusing when they renamed .net core to .net, but most people have moved past it

You see, that just doesn't lend itself as nicely to tribal parroting of worse than mediocre developers here in the comments (if such people are able to code at all).

I mean you literally work on Dotnet, don't you? That's probably why you don't have issues with the naming. I agree that it's currently fine now that it stabilized on the core naming scheme, but I don't see how it was very confusing when there's stuff like ASP.NET Core on framework, and ASP.NET Core on Dotnet core... that's just confusing, especially since other ecosystems don't usually have such a weird naming scheme.

It’s only problem in the eyes of HN because it is low-effort complaint from people who never used .NET and simply repeat what they read elsewhere. It’s just a popular thing to do, to make negative comments like this.

Otherwise, this problem is completely made up in terms of anything that happened in last there-four years.

And no, I don’t work on .NET save for a few simple contributions.

So the asp.net thing I highlighted isn't true? I'm sure the issue isn't that bad, but it sure is weird to claim that the naming wasn't horrible. Like, surely you could agree that the naming was much worse than it should've been?

Which languages do you program in? (asp.net core name is fine, because - who cares? it's not like js does any better, it's something you don't think about twice and is irrelevant to the experience)

Well no said that it was a huge deal. The point was that msft is horrible at naming things. Do you have any example of something like this happening in any other ecosystem?

In summary:

ASP.NET MVC 5: ASP.NET MVC 5 was a short-lived successor to ASP.NET MVC 4. It was released alongside ASP.NET Web API 2 in 2014. It actually ran on top of ASP.NET 4 (i.e. .NET 4.x version of System.Web.dll). Note that the entire

ASP.NET MVC library is now obsolete.

ASP.NET 5 was EOL'd and rebranded as ASP.NET Core and it includes the functionality of "ASP.NET MVC 5" built-in.

ASP.NET Core 1 and ASP.NET Core 2 can run on either .NET Core (cross-platform) or .NET Framework (Windows) because it targets .NET Standard.

ASP.NET Core 3 now only runs on .NET Core 3.0.

ASP.NET Core 4 does not exist and never has.

ASP.NET Core 5 exists (as of August 2020) however its official name seems to be "ASP.NET Core for .NET 5" and it only runs on .NET 5."

https://stackoverflow.com/a/51391202

Again, not a big deal in retrospect now that it has stabilized. But it was a huge deal. Because you couldn't easily figure out if you needed to use Asp.net MVC, or if that version is now deprecated, and if the core you're using means dotnetcore or aspnet core on framework... again, it's the type of stuff that matters when it happens and leaves a mark afterwards.

It seems they identify so closely with dotnet that any perceived criticism is taken as a personal slight. It's the only thing that explains such a rabid response to a reasonable observation.

I don't identify with something that is just a tool (although one of the best ones). What does piss me off however is when people perpetuate false facts, straight up lie about arbitrary matters, are incapable of changing their mind when facts change and when disagreed with, resort to personal attacks.

This can be seen through other issues in the industry but is particularly felt in bad teams - social cohesion resides on a set of commonly agreed upon beliefs within a group and the worse the team is the more such beliefs are at odds with reality, and all I've been seeing in the past year is HN slipping more and more into this when it comes to programming.

Whereas I do use dotnet daily, have done so for years, and I like the C# language and a lot of the ecosystem, certainly over Java .. and I still hate the naming scheme. I know the difference between all the confusingly named things, it's just that Microsoft branding insists on flattening them all together.

The internal codenames were better. If I say "Roslyn" it's a lot clearer what I'm referring to.

Is it not currently asp.net core?

.NET is kind of like JVM but also usually includes an SDK, a build system and a package manager (NuGet), when people use the term.

It is then targeted by various languages: C#, F#, VB.NET and smaller projects - anything that emits "canonical" .NET assemblies (that use IL) works.

ASP.NET Core is a web framework for .NET, it's distributed with SDK so "comes out of box".

EF Core is an ORM framework, it does not come out of box and can be added as nuget packages (the dependency itself and then specific DB driver).

> ASP.NET Core is a web framework for .NET

ASP.NET Core is not a web framework for .NET; it's at least four different web frameworks you can choose between. It's more like the overarching branding for anything web-related in the dotnet ecosystem.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo...

Kind of?

All these, effectively, plug into ASP.NET Core, on top of WebApplicationBuilder and WebApplication. They are then, usually, hosted with Kestrel (web server) and operate with the same set of abstractions. Razor Pages and Blazor are distinct names and I have never seen anyone confuse them with the ASP.NET Core itself.

ASP is an odd name to an old hat like me. Active Server Pages haven't been a thing in a while.

You see, this is where it gets confusing. ASP refers to a specific technology, active server pages, but it's also the overarching term used for anything to do with dotnet and the web. So you get this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo... - you can have an entirely frontend SPA, in at least two ways, and still be called "ASP.NET"

I have an application which only serves over GRPC. It has to pull in "Asp.Net" nuget packages, because that's the branding under which the Kestrel HTTP2 server lives.

Yes, it's still called "ASP.NET Core", even though ".NET Core" was renamed ".NET" from version 5 -- not to be confused with ".NET Framework 5", which was renamed ".NET Core 1.0" before launch.

Don't forget ".NET Standard" that could be used from both .NET Core and .NET Framework, until version 2.1.

It was very confusing, and for a while there every team inside Microsoft started adding .NET to their name for some internal visibility points regardless of any connection with the common language runtime.

That's how you ended up with names like Windows .NET Server 2003.

These events have little to do with .NET* of today, 21 years later.

*the one that is hosted here: https://github.com/dotnet

Huh, I always wondered about that. So what's the mechanism, was there an executive with a .NET mandate or something?

Microsoft appearingly random naming conventions make me want to actively avoid using their products because I know the web searches will be heavily polluted.

I thought big companies like this would have some sort of internal committee that decides if a new products branding makes it easier for customers to understand what the product is and where it fits in their offerings.

Having had to come up with a name for a corporate product and deal with things like trademarking, I can understand why they seem to repurpose names frequently. It is enormously time consuming to generate, vet, and apply for a trademark. There are so many other products and names and trademarks out there that it’s no wonder drug companies end up with unpronounceable gibberish for new product names.

This makes sense. I guess I didn't take namespace or government bureaucracy into consideration.

Come to think of it open source software has this issue too where two projects exist with the same name.

Yep, I have to do it occasionally.

The same with Visual Studio. It is referred to by a year, eg Visual Studio 2019, but then you need to look in the make files for the actual version number of the project, and then look on Wikipedia for a table matching versions to years.

Wikipedia at least has decent docs on versions.

That was insane, e.g. ".NET Messenger" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Messenger_service which was just MSN messenger, had nothing to do with .NET as in C#.

Then there was the "Skype" and "Skype for Business" naming debacle.

Do you expect anything else from the company that introduced "Plays For Sure" branding over a wide ecosystem, only to kill the ENTIRE thing (not just the branding) less than 5 years later? (as in, all purchased content became unplayable)

Still one of the funniest pieces of corporate stupudity ever.

And not just because they killed it. Even when they introduced it, the "plays for sure" brand meant music that couldn't be played on the ipod or most mobile phones. That it quickly came to mean music that couldn't be played anywhere was just the icing on the cake.

I was peripherally involved around that time. Trying to go through in my head what caused a lot of that, it feels like meetings were MBA heavy and light on engineering and design; whereas other startups have had more balanced meetings where the grunts could push back against the totally out-of-touch ideas of the pointy-hairs.

(I think where I was working we pushed back hard enough on this name that it never got launched... www.webaudionet.com was a really, really bad name: https://web.archive.org/web/20020401235841/http://www.webaud... )

Windows Surface Copilot for Workgroups 360.Net

It's kind of like those cryptographic keys they use a dictionary for: a nonsense noun phrase representing a number. Perhaps they're just encoding a SKU?

I think you meant Azure Windows Surface Copilot for Workgroups 360.Net. Everything at Microsoft is Azure now.

Apparently Azure is now going out fashion, as they’ve renamed Azure AD to Entra ID.

That was the one rebranding they ever did that made actual sense. AAD was confusing.

> Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled.

Microsoft can't brand anything cleanly and unambiguously.

"MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" / "Microsoft Lync"

"Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"

Windows 95 email client "Exchange" / email server platform "Exchange"

"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows"

"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams"

"Office Communicator" / "Microsoft Lync" / "Skype for Business" / "Skype" / "Skype for Business Online" / "Skype for Business for Microsoft 365"

The most guffaw-inducing branding, to me, was the recently-announced remote desktop client called "Windows App". That's going to be an easy one for users to search for.

(For guffaw-inducing I suppose there's also the Windows 98-era "Critical Update Notification Tool"[0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Update...

(Edit: Yikes. I didn't even consider .NET. Windows.NET server. .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Ugh...)

More editing because I can't stop myself:

"Great Plains" / "Navision" / "Solomon" / "Axapta" / "Dynamics AX" / "Dynamics GP" / "Dynamics SL" / "Dynamics NAV" / "Dynamics 365" / "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations" / "Dynamics 365 Business Central"

More editing because I was egged-on... >smile<

"Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"

Oh, ugh... then there's the whole "Microsoft Proxy" / "Forefront" / "Federated Identity Manager" nightmare.

Then there's "System Management Server" / "System Center" and that whole train of products.

Edit: Forgot SharePoint

"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"

Let's not forget Azure AD is now Microsoft Entra.

"Office 365" / "Microsoft 365", too... >sigh<

They're actually still separate products. They don't want to sell office 365 but it still exists.

M365 = office 365 plus windows as a service licensing. If you buy your licenses as lifetime with your laptops it is much cheaper to simply subscribe to O365. Thus Microsoft is gating more and more things behind M365 to get companies to pay for the expensive windows subscription.

From Wikipedia: [1]

> Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps (formerly Windows Store apps, Metro-style apps and Modern apps)...

Ironically, that list misses another former name, "Windows App" (different from the "Windows App" you guffawed at). That name was used around 2017 and used extensively in the 7th edition of Windows Internals.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_a...

To add to this, I have always found the Xbox naming conventions to be confusing, personally. "Xbox One" is the third one, not the original "Xbox" and the two newest models are named almost identically; "Xbox Series X" vs "Xbox Series S".

I always thought calling it Xbox One was the most bizarre choice in the history of branding and marketing. Given how common it is to retroactively refer to the first item in a series as "One" (Rambo 1, Rocky 1, Playstation 1, etc), it seems intentionally designed to cause confusion.

I find that name even more baffling when the reason they apparently branded the previous one Xbox 360 was so that they wouldn't go against the PS3 with an Xbox 2. Somehow it was now fine for an Xbox One to go against a PS4.

This is beyond being bizarre. I have never owned an Xbox, and always thought that Xbox One was a re-release of the original Xbox, similar to the Original PlayStation -> PS One. I am hearing it for the first time here that it was a third generation device.

For the latest ones it's fair because the S is a lower tier to the X

Sure, but the problem is S and X sound very similar when spoken, causing more confusion. Try clarifying which one you are talking about in a loud room at a conference.

All that is missing is the "Xbox E", hopefully the next one will be called that. Let's pray we get a special Tesla edition on launch day.

I see you haven't heard of the Xbox 360 E: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_retail_config...

It really makes no sense. S is often used to mean the best in context of gaming, think tier lists or items/abilities in some games.

To make it even more confusing, the Xbox One had the mid-generation updates called Xbox One S (slimmer, a few additional features) and the Xbox One X (more powerful.)

So from oldest to newest it's

- Xbox

- Xbox 360

- Xbox One

  - Xbox One S  

  - Xbox One X

- Xbox Series X and Series S (released simultaneously: S is smaller, X is more powerful)

So for a period of time in stores you might see a One S, a One X, a Series S, and a Series X. If you aren't a gamer, it's a complete mystery which is the newest and most powerful. I'm sure some kids got the wrong console for Christmas, as the One X was at times more expensive than a Series S, despite being an older console that would later not support many games that the Series S supports. This would be even more likely to happen if the Series X was out of stock (so the most expensive Xbox console at the store might be a discontinued model that won't support all the new games.)

In contrast, it's pretty obvious that a PlayStation 5 is going to be better than a PlayStation 4. Yes, a quick search will show which is the newest and most powerful Xbox, but if people have to do research to find out which is your best console and they don't have to do that for your competitor, then you have a confusing naming scheme.

I owned an XBox One something. I believed "Series X" was short-hand for "Xbox One X", as I believed that there were maybe other kinds of "Xbox X". I even bought a game that didn't run on my console because it was for a "series" something, which was not actually what I had. "Series" is often used as an english word to identify a product line. Like "Is that the 'premium' series?"

Sometimes I joke about how confusing the xbox names are. I probably couldn't come up with a more confusing set of names if I tried.

Rumour has it (not sure if this was ever confirmed) that one of the big reasons the second Xbox was called the Xbox 360 was to avoid unfavourable number comparisons with Sony. The Xbox launched vs the PS2, which meant the "Xbox 2" would compete against the PS3. As 3 is bigger than 2, it would make the second Xbox look bad. Hence, Xbox 360. Both have a 3, no number issues. For what it's worth, Robbie Bach (former Chief Xbox Officer) is on the record as saying one of the potential names for the second Xbox was just "Xbox 3" to catch up the PS3.

While officially the meaning of the "Xbox One" name was something about it being an all-in-one entertainment system, I would put money on it being chosen as some kind of subliminal naming scheme as it sounds like "Xbox Won".

Steve Ballmer was hoping people would call it "the one". This was also around the time that SkyDrive had to be renamed to OneDrive due to trademark issues with Sky.

I always judge corporations whenever they resort to "One" as a brand because it signals a total lack of creativity and is likely the result of executives fighting each other and settling on the most mundane and inoffensive concept to represent "it does everything".

And then they painted themselves in the corner because 2x 360 is 720 and 720p was just becoming uncool when the xbone came out.

"Azure Active Directory" (now "Entra ID") and "Active Directory" caused me a great deal of confusion.

"Active Directory" / "Active Directory Domain Service" / "Active Directory Application Mode" / "Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services" / "Azure Active Directory" / "Entra Id" / "Active Directory Federation Services" / "Active Directory Certificate Services" / "Active Directory Rights Management Services"

Ugh... and don't even get my started about the pronunciation of "Azure" (or the fact that, somehow, they took a project code-named "Red Dog" and named it after the color blue. Then there's the JEt Red and Jet Blue database engines, one of which was used by Active Directory...)

Don't forget "Azure Active Directory B2C".

You're forgetting Azure Active Directory Domain Services, which is presumably now named Entra AD Domain Services which is different from Azure AD/Entra AD because it's a managed domain controller in Azure...

You've missed Defender there

Edit: you updated defender, but you missed the depth of the rabbit hole. There's defender for office 365, there's defender for IoT, for Containers, for cloud, for cloud apps, for identity. There's one for gramma too

Team Foundation Server -> Visual Studio Team Services -> Azure DevOps

One team I was on had a bug where the product name was so long that it was being truncated in the about dialog. It was something like:

Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2011 for Microsoft® Office Outlook® with Offline Access

In 2013, "Team Foundation Services" was renamed to "Visual Studio Online".

In 2015, "Visual Studio Online" was renamed to "Visual Studio Team Services".

In 2018, "Visual Studio Team Services" was renamed to "Azure DevOps Services".

Don’t forget “Windows Live Mesh/Windows Live FolderShare/Live Mesh/Windows Live Sync/Windows Live Folders/Windows Live SkyDrive/SkyDrive/OneDrive”

To be fair, they have mostly settled on OneDrive after the lawsuit that forced the name change.

It’s called “Intune” / sorry, “Microsoft Endpoint Manager” is a way better name / just kidding, it’s “Intune” again! We had you there for a second though!

dotnet for me is the most obvious example of how terrible they are at branding. First there was .NET framework which was windows only (note I'm ignoring Xamarian because it was originally not owned by MS).

Then they decided to do a reboot with cross platform support and named that Dotnet Core. This was honestly fine. But then we reach late in the 3.x timeframe and they declare for real and for true that Framework is a dead end, and Dotnet Core will be the one true Dotnet moving forward. And to indicate this, the next version will remove Core from the name, skip 4 because it would be too confusing with Framework, and just call it Dotnet 5.

I wish they'd stuck with the Core name, if no other reason so if they decide in another 15 years to do a major rebuild again they can just come up with another new descriptor the way Core described the transition away from Framework and towards real cross platform support from MS itself.

Watch how they change it again next year to dotnet (all lower case) AI core.

I await Copilot+ .NET Plus! 365 Home Professonal Plus.

The original [4]: https://goomics.net/62/ (and its sequel: https://goomics.net/329/).

That sequel is (also) just wonderfully accurate!

100% accurate. Impressive

Never heard of this comic before... thank you for sharing!

Their first co-pilot (which still exists) was about pairing a second Xbox controller to your console.

Ah but is that the Xbox 1, the Xbox One, the Xbox One X or the Xbox Series X?

This is the naming convention you get when you hire engineers based off of “edit distance” Leetcode problems.

No, it is the branding you get when you recycle your marketing team every product iteration.

The two seem to go hand-in-hand

Engineers named the Xbox One X "Scorpio", which is a much cooler name.

It was a joke about the nature of these names and the nature of that particular problem (and nothing about engineers, really) -- but I guess the downvoters didn't get it.

I thought it was a reference to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The thing about Copilot is that outside of the developer niche, nobody knows the term. The vast majority of Microsoft's customer base will recognise neither the Xbox feature nor the Github product.

In the same way, their .NET naming has never bothered anyone they actually care about selling stuff to. It's a tad annoying for developers, but nothing more than that.

I find the way they renamed their Office products every five years much more baffling. Consumers probably don't care beyond "office" but I'd expect them to protect their business clients from their ever changing names for office products at least.

It's not a terrible name either. Assistant would be better, but they can't use that name[1] of course... I'm having a hard time thinking of something else that instantly communicates this idea of an intelligent subordinate aide that doesn't have negative associations.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

It’s not just negative associations. I believe GitHub had a blog post where they went into why they chose copilot.

The answer was more of subtly conveying its output needed to be checked

Personally, I think Microsoft wastes the name "Cortana" on their mediocre Google Assistant competitor. I haven't really seen Copilot do much copiloting, it mostly seems to answer questions and follow instructions. Maybe Windows 12 will be different, but I kind of doubt it.

A Microsoft employee did once joke to me that if Microsoft had invented the holy grail it would be called the Microsoft life preserver 3.4 Pro+ or something like that

Not much has changed in 18 years...

Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

I don't find it all that confusing, most of them work similarly and I don't see how you could call them different things. I just hate that their logos aren't uniform. The Windows & Bing logo is a rainbow color (looks awful), and the Edge version is blue and green (looks way better). It's not remotely comparable to their other branding flubs (Teams, .NET, etc). I wish they would have kept the Cortana and Continuum brands. Recall is basically what Continuum should have been, why not just keep the name? Co-pilot works for naming in some cases, but when you look at the GPT 4o voice demo that seems like the Microsoft white labelled version should be Cortana.

Cortana's biggest fault was mostly that it wasn't very good, and the things it was good at required the Cloud...but with the new AI chips, some of that can be offloaded and work much faster. It's like when they added Cortana to Xbox and killed the other voice commands. Then it just became a very slow process when the old on-board model was way faster. Even the voice commands became longer "Xbox on" to "Hey Cortana, turn on my Xbox" then having to wait for it to ping a server and come back to your device.

> Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled.

Again the .NET effect, unsearcheable for decades. The COM[1] could be just bad luck.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

> Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled.

It’s Watson.

Ha ha, only serious. You’re right. It feels like an umbrella brand they’re just tossing around, because AI — and Copilot in particular — is hot in Redmond.

I find the new Copilot key funny, because it feels like a pantomime of the Windows 95 keys[0], but with Logitech characteristics.

[*] Okay, it’s been 30 years. I haven’t used a Windows computer in almost as long, and so I ask. Do people who use Windows actually use any of those keys? It always seemed weird that you’d need the start menu at a single button press, and the right click menu at a keyboard press felt even weirder. I think I only used the Windows key as a meta under Linux, and I don’t think I ever hit the context menu key out of anything but curiosity.

I use the "Windows" key pretty extensively, including to open the start menu (and then type in a search term, i.e. a program on my computer to launch).

I also use it extensively for "Windows" (operating system) level shortcuts: Win-R to open a run dialog, Win-E to open Explorer, Win-<left arrow|right arrow> to move/resize windows, etc.)

That being said...I use it in basically the same way on Linux, and use the Command (Apple) key on Macs for essentially the same purposes.

I don't think I've ever used the "right click menu" key for anything, though. Most modern Windows keyboards don't include it, or have it hidden behind a manufacturer-specific function key.

Huh. You’re right. Some keyboard have both windows and the menu key, and others have only one menu key. I don’t know if this means Microsoft relaxed their “Made for Windows” standards, or higher profile manufacturers don’t care.

The menu key was always useless anyway, because shift+F10 does the same thing.

I believe the windows key is just ctrl-esc

Doesn't work for the shortcut combinations.

> I use the "Windows" key pretty extensively,

I use it to put focus somewhere safe when mouse action is misbehaving.

Also to show me which one of my 10 RDP windows has focus.

> Do people who use Windows actually use any of those keys?

I only use Windows at work, and there, I use the Windows key to lock my screen on demand, and to make cropped screenshots. That's about it.

At home, I never use that key for anything.

I use it a lot. Win and start typing to launch just about any app or open any document is really handy. Win and a number key launches or switches to that app pinned at that position on the taskbar. Win+L locks the screen whenever I get up from my desk. Win+Shift+S starts the screen clipper. Win+Left/Right snaps an app from one side to the other, win+shift+left/right switches between desktops, Win+Tab lets me drag apps from one desktop to another and see what's open where if needed, Win+E opens a new explorer window, Win+. opens the emoji keyboard. Those are just the ones I use almost every day, I probably use a few others a lot as well.

Win+. opens an emoji keyboard??? How the hell have I not heard about this

Win+V is the one I use the most: it brings up the clipboard history.

> Do people who use Windows actually use any of those keys?

Context menu key. XP VMs (for Navision) have no mouse in Hyper-V until Integrated Services are installed.

The windows key is pretty handy. Lots of good shortcuts, and they add new useful ones often. I don't tend to hit it by itself much anymore, because the start menu is so terrible and inconsistent, and anyway, we only run three programs anymore.

I don't think I've used the menu key... If I want to right click, there's the mouse, or mousekeys... But maybe I just missed out on learning to use it. Mostly everything in the context menu is in other places too that you might get to with the keyboard.

Copilot is the new Watson

> you really can't convince me the above is the result of a coherent company-wide strategy

Well that was an ignorant thing to say given how widely famously Microsoft implemented it's stack ranking system and the toxic culture it produced (as intended). This is exactly the result of that strategy. People who thought it had gone away are mostly parroting Microsoft propaganda. I live here in town with these people. You don't get hired without having "Microsoft morals". It's all a desperate gold rush to find out who is going to get promoted.

Yes, and additionally the Copilot 360 user interface is a mess, processing time is slow, and the quality of results is poor. Using the Chat GPT or Claude interface produces much quicker/better results.

Copilot is also the name of a windows (and presumably xbox console) feature that allows you to combine multiple controllers and have them show up as one device.

It's a real shame as well since the Surface line of PCs started as such a clean break and has devolved into a confusing mess.

That name was cursed from the start, too. The original "Microsoft Surface 1.0" was tabletop platform that got renamed "PixelSense"[0] years before there was a "Surface" tablet computer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense

I recall it was renamed to PixelSense right when the Surface tablets arrived.

Then they named an entire input device line "Surface" as well. When you search for "surface keyboard" you will get results for desktop keyboards and type-covers for tablets.

I agree, and it's strange to see 'Copilot' everywhere. By the way, does anyone know how the development/update of GitHub Copilot is going? I tried to look for a blog from the engineering team or something similar, but I can't find anything.

(posted before) Microsoft on Microsoft marketing (from 2006ish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

They could have learned something from Apple. iBrain, iBrain Pro, iBrain Pro Plus, iBrain Ultra, iBrain Ultra Max.

Microsoft is a "student body left groupthink" company. We once named EVERYTHING "Active" something, then EVERYTHING ".NET" something. This is just the latest in a long line of tradition of groupthink.

microsoft is KING of doing this sort of thing.

The great king of klusterfuck, I agree

Yeah, but they're definitely gonna fix it by sponsoring a multi-headliner pop punk tour!

(Real: https://www.summerschooltour.com/)

Perhaps borrowing from IBM's Watson strategy of flooding the zone with marketing shit.

Copilot is a game-changer in coding, helping developers with real-time suggestions and code snippets. However, it's controversial because it relies on large datasets scraped from public code repositories. This raises intellectual property issues and concerns about algorithmic bias, as Copilot's suggestions are influenced by that data. Despite that, it's super useful, but Microsoft needs to address the legal and ethical issues around data usage and bias to keep it on the right track.

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