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Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

> During Microsoft's July 30, 2025 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub Copilot continued to exhibit strong momentum and had reached 20 million users.

Considering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric.

I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users.

I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.

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I agree. For years we had to read HN posts about why we should not use vanity metrics but now that the corporate tech bros are making money with AI head over fist the user count is the most important metric again.

GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

Ah, one of my all-time favorite Shakespeare quotes. Another is:

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!“

My father used it frequently when we were kids. I found out decades later it was a quote from King Lear.

> I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month.

I don't; any ideas what's different?

Probably their situation is similar to mine.

It's mandatory, on the orders of a senior manager who has no background in software development, for all developers in my department to have a Copilot subscription. I've never used it for anything, and I imagine it's the same for most of my colleagues(we do highly specialised embedded development with in-house custom everything - compiler, standard library, operating system, hardware), and it seems no-one is interested in whether it's used or not.

Consequently Microsoft is being paid $240 a year per person to do nothing whatsoever, which is surely a great business for them.

I don't think they tell the guy it's forced. They are at Soviet army levels of reporting, that's why you got people adding telemetry and copilot to Editor.

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