Microsoft makes Copilot less useful on new Copilot Plus PCs
theverge.com
theverge.com
I suspect they think their customers are so dumb that they'll be wowed by the same Malibu Stacy doll with a new hat (!!!).
I really hate dealing with Microsoft.
Now with the CoPilot 365 stuff they're selling us something like it's the best thing in the world when really it's only a barely beta quality product that really shouldn't have made it to market yet.
I understand the major selling point is it’s ability to search through your emails, team messages, meeting notes/transcripts, and SharePoint/OneDrive documents for information is not as useful as it could be because I can’t get it to find me information in my OneNote doc without giving it the documents and even then it usually just tells me to ask the person who last edited the file.
Buck stops at the CEO.
Balmer seemed to at least care a bit about (windows) developers and how products were received by the consumers which is why he spent 1,5 Billion on fixing the red ring of death issue to save the Xbox, only for Microsoft to run it into the ground today under Nadella. How many people do you know who would want to buy Xbox today?
The way I see it, Balmer was better for the products, Nadella was better at increasing the share price, but the way Boeing proved it, you can have stock increases even if your products are going to shit once you nearly monopolize a market.
Just two? It feels like one of the most silo'd, incohesive software engineering firms on the planet!
Can't help but see this as anything other than "The team working on it doesn't know how to code native applications on our OS"
I'd get it if they were meant to be cross platform apps, but they're not. Crazy they couldn't have bothered to write native windows apps in .NET/C# for something that's obviously meant to be Windows exclusive. The community writes way better Windows apps (Sumatra, Notepad++, etc) than Microsoft does internally.
Microsoft has no cohesive product vision for the OS and just seems to let various groups slap random low quality shit to the OS, based on some internal power struggles their managers win in the org I assume. It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS, but the truly useful and high quality utilities they write like PowerToys, do not.
They lost the plot on their core audience after Windows 7 and sloppy implementations of "AI" like Copilot+ and Recall won't bring them back, on the contrary, it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP.
Even their OneDrive uses just QT.
I find it funny that, unlike OneDrive, iCloud desktop client uses WinUI.
But I'm not holding my breath and think that whoever could make this reality was pushed out of the relevant teams or the org as a whole by the time W11 shipped - just look how they killed great OneNote UWP variant. Salvaging the situation would be an improbable miracle.
If one of them was at the steering wheel of Longhorn, it would most likely been shipped with its .NET based architecture, improved in later releases, and everyone that wasn't into it, could have looked for a job elsewhere.
from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/
> At this time, there are two generations of WinUI: WinUI 2 for UWP and WinUI in the Windows App SDK (WinUI 3). While both can be used in production-ready apps on Windows 10 and later, each have different development targets.
In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/... (not very pretty)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne... (better)
In either case, my comment did not concern regular users but MSFT themselves.
They also don't tell designer isn't around, like on Forms/WPF/UWP, or how bad the C++ development story is.
Forms, WPF and ironically MFC, are the only ones with good tooling, and feature coverage.
Not it isn't. What you're pointing out is the PRO of Windows, not a CON. It's why backwards compatibility works so well. If you have a super old app you're still developing, you can keep using that old UI stack, no need to rewrite it on a newer one just for ti to be compatible with the latest Windows release.
I feel like most people complainant about the different UI stacks supported by Windows, are not Windows developers but just enjoy pointing it out as if it bothers them somehow through sheer existence even though they never wrote any Windows apps.
There is seldom anyone of us that went through that, and will advise anyone to use WinUI 3.0, unless they themselves have a sunken cost into UWP, and need a way out.
Quite easy to find out in the endless discussions on the related Github repos.
>Quite easy to find out in the endless discussions on the related Github repos.
People on the internet complain about anything. How many discussions are there about Gnome's file picker?
And worse of all, in the end, those of us doing WinRT advocacy, were the ones answering for Microsoft's missteps in customer meetings.
Too many hard feelings to let it go just like that.
It certainly convinced me. Steam Proton runs pretty much all the games I enjoy (mainly indies), and I can quarantine Windows in a VM for MS Office, as well as keep a full Windows installation on a separate disk if I really need it (rarely).
The crap that's made its way into mainline Windows makes me feel like my computer isn't serving me anymore.
It's a drag, though, because as everyone will immediately see, having a shortcut on your keyboard to open glorified GPT-4 isn't really a killer feature.
That seems extremely far-fetched to me. If it's for economic reasons, I think it's more likely related to availability of developers with webapp experience vs native experience.
I'd accept the "difficulty" excuse from a company like Walmart. But we're talking about a (relatively) small number of built-in mini applications here, inside a tech-specialised company that created, maintains and presumably promotes this native framework.
If you know what you are doing, not at all. That being said the technologies are quite different and not all skills are transferrable. If you're an experienced web developer, then transferring to writing Windows apps takes a bit of getting used to. Once you've wrapped your head around C#, Visual Studio and WPF or WinUI3, and embraced the Window Way, it's actually a quite productive environment.
What I suspect we might be seeing is that Windows has so thoroughly lost the developer mindshare battle, that not even Microsoft can find experienced Windows devs to hire, and most of their new developers have a web first programming background and have never used any of the Windows GUI frameworks.
In the world which 99% of software teams live in though, the former skillset is far, far rarer than the React/node/Vue etc. toolkit which is a dime a dozen these days. If a fresh team wants to from 0 to functioning product, I still stand by that they'll get it out the door _much_ faster using some agreed upon webstack than they would doing it the Windows Way. Hence the "orders of magnitude" phrasing which others are having trouble with.
After evaluating a bunch of them I was somewhat astonished to conclude that Flutter was the best option, at least for my purposes.
Like, I honestly hate web apps. But there is some that is really good, like the new Threads.net app...
Meanwhile, MSFT web apps are horrible. They kill native apps, like Mail and classic Outlook, and are replacing with the horrible new Web Outlook.
Copilot on Android is also horrible, Bing, etc. They don't know how to build web apps either.
Maybe M$ should fix their horrible windows settings UX which is a mesh of windows XP/7/10/11/whatever instead.
4 years later, still no designer, C++/WinRT will never have a VS tooling experience like C++/CX (and is actually in maintenaince), plenty of UWP features that are still missing from WinUI 3.0, Native AOT on .NET 9 might finally catch up to .NET Native, map component is now backed by a Webview2 and Bing maps,...
This is my biggest gripe with the MS Edge chatbot - it's cool I can just use Bing Chat with just a click, but holy hell I do not want it to have the ability to change my browser settings. The only time it has ever changed my settings has been when it misinterpreted what I was prompting
https://gabrielsieben.tech/2022/07/25/the-power-of-microsoft...
Pluton should be absolutely TERRIFYING to anyone informed on Microsoft's security story.
this product on some levels, when looked at in isolation, feels as useless as did Rabbit's R1. However, Microsoft is a ginormous corporation, and hence can keep on throwing releases like these at the wall hoping something stick. The leaders will never learn, and I am sure, despite all the good points raised in this article, this release will be or is already being celebrated as a success within the internal circles.
Additionally, I think Microsoft "Developer, Developer, Developer" culture on Windows side, is kind of gone, as many key people went elsewhere, and got replaced by a newer generation without Windows development culture.
So now we get UNIX conventions all over the place, and teams that rather ship React Native and Webviews, instead of proper native frameworks.
On Windows 10 everything MSFT developed was UWP. They were basically banned to use anything else. The only thing that used old frameworks, were... old "legacy" components.And the old legacy components barely had updates because they avoid to touch.
WinUI (in part) was even born because of this. They already had internal XAML controls (DEPControls) for all their apps, and they decided to open-source and named WinUI. And then later they also wanted to open-source the UWP XAML stack and decouple from Windows updates, and that became WinUI 3.0.
Even on 11 launch, there was an attempt to continue with this effort, but well, it's Microsoft... they rewrote taskbar to be UWP (not WInUI 3!), because well, WinUI 3 was (and is) worse than UWP. On other apps, they didn't wanted to rewrite from scratch, because then you would break compat (File Explorer Shell extensions, context menu... etc), so they had a great idea to just mix old UI with WinUI!
So you have WinUI on Notepad, File Explorer, Paint, etc, but not in the entire of it. So they were trying to make things more consistent (and WinUI), and it only got worse because mixing the two added too much complexity, WinUI 3 is slower than UWP, etc.
So they started going web. Also because of budget reasons.
As for the rest, I was there for the ride since Windows 8, as I quite enjoyed .NET Native, C++/CX, and the idea WinRT being what .NET 1.0 should have been, as per Ext-VOS background.
Nicely covered on this Ars article,
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
Instead, they managed to turn many of their advocates, into critics.
However many in the Windows developer community never thought the same way as we did, and WinRT adoption among the community never took off.
They killed a few years later.
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-office-mobile-apps-ge...
Telemetry mainly is used to identify the applications users have fled to and still use and target them from the next round of crapping things up.
Satya inherited Azure, lost opportunity in mobile, crapped windows, so he held on to AI bandwagon.
Not related, AI feature would be accepted if M$ would not upload the data to their cloud and implement the stuff safely (the stuff was super unsafe)
My assumption is that id did not work as they imagined, maybe you coudl use it by saying "Open Resolution Settings" but it would fail when you change "Resolution" with "Network" os soemthing else because of the giant mess in Windows. Though from my experience the Assistant in Android is also useless to open the correct Setting screen and I still have to hunt the setting I need manually.