Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

If Copilot was so great, surely I would have been asked to opt-in to a better Office 365 family plan with Copilot enabled, rather than trying to dark-pattern me into paying for a more expensive Copilot-enabled plan against my will (forcing me to attempt to cancel in order to be offered my old plan).

It probably doesn't help that Microsoft is using 'Copilot' to mean so many different things - their Office AI integration, Github's Copilot thing, some laptops now apparently - so that users who know what's going on get irritated and ones that don't get confused.

What's this "Office 365" you're mentioning? Microsoft has, I kid you not, actually renamed Office 365 to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Of which Copilot is one part, like Word and Excel. Yes, a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription gives you access to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Copilot. Please don't confuse it with GitHub Copilot, a completely different product. Or with Copilot Search in Bing.

Oh my good gravy you weren’t joking.

How long until the brand piñata .NET gets renamed?

I mean looking at it..

.NET as a brand name was obviously chosen because the Internet was hot, and also because Microsoft has no taste. The Internet is no longer so hot, and now they have a name that has no hot implication to it. So maybe rebrand, which after all is the general tactic of people who have no taste.

Maybe Copilot will get wrapped into a Sky.NET meta-platform.

Waiting for a rebranding to .AI Core Copilot 12 Fall Creators Update Service Pack 3.

What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes? There was Xbox One X/Xbox One S/Xbox Series S/Xbox Series X. Or .NET (previously .NET Core) vs. .NET Framework (which everyone used to just call “.NET”).

I'm still hoping for "Xbox One Series X" next

"Microsoft Copilot X" would be more on-brand for 2025.

I mean… they made that. The Xbox Series X is a faster Xbox Series S which is a faster XBox One…

Years ago, I used to use a program called FolderShare, which was later purchased by Microsoft and renamed umpteen times to match the branding strategy of the moment.

I’ve always been amused by how the Wikipedia article starts off: “Windows Live Mesh (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare, Live Mesh, and Windows Live Sync) is a discontinued free-to-use Internet-based file synchronization application by Microsoft …”

I can't tell you how many times I've had customers buy the wrong MS product because the naming schemes are so confusing. Honestly for how often this happens and how long it's been part of their company it feels like us the consumer are on the butt end of some inside joke.

A little over a decade ago MS used to offer a full multi day course with certification simply to understand their licensing. If you were a reseller you needed at least some of your people to go through it if not all of them.

The funniest part was by the time they had got their certification, their information would often be outdated, so even their licensing experts would often be wrong about their licensing.

The tragedy is that Copilot actually was a brilliant name, back in the beginning when it was just a coding assistant. It was both evocative and descriptive: it's meant to help, but you are still in control. It was probably the best product name Microsoft had come up with years, so naturally there was no choice but to fuck it up.

>> What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes?

You can use Windows App [1] to connect to Windows to run your Windows apps.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/overview

I also use Windows App to connect to my Fedora box from my Mac :-P

Microsoft marketing execs all rename their human children too, once they reach age 2.

>> What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes

Old but still relevant, Microsoft redesigns the iPod packaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k.

I present to you, the page of Copilots: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/whic...

(Note that they recently simplified their enterprise SKUs - there used to be one more I believe.)

There are many enterprise SKUs.

365 Copilot Chat - free SKU

365 Copilot - paid SKU

Copilot Studio lite - comes with above paid SKU

Copilot Studio full - comes with above paid SKU plus a user entitlement (free), though agents are charged based on credits (1 cent USD/message) if the agent user doesn't have a paid SKU

Then there are the other SKUs, i.e. Security SKU, SharePoint SKU, etc.

This is hilarious.

> If you're an end user, have a Copilot installed, and not sure what Copilot you have

lol so they’re basically admitting their products are so confusing users need to read this document to understand which product they’re using.

So they would like you to believe they renamed Office 365 so you overpurchase: Office 365, which is just the office suite and email, is a separate set of SKUs from Microsoft 365, which also includes Windows Enterprise, Entra, etc.

There really is nothing officially called "Office 365" anymore, or "Office" in general. You're right that they have some (confusing) distinctions between Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot. For example, indeed you can purchase a "Microsoft 365" subscription that doesn't give you the enterprise AI features - but the app your employees will install to get access to Excel and Word is still called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" even if your org only has a Microsoft 365 subscription - at least on mobile.

Please don't try to correct people if you do not know what you are talking about. I have quoted the different SKUs recently.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/com...

Office 365 E3 is sold for $20.75 a month, Microsoft 365 E3 is sold for $33.75 a month.

And yes, confusingly, Microsoft also sells Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, which you'd think would be closer to the Microsoft 365 bundle... but it's not, it's a stripped down version of the Office 365 one. None of it makes sense, but "Office 365" is still very much, as I said previously, a whole set of subscription packages sold today, separate from Microsoft 365 ones.

I also recommend this spreadsheet if you need to truly break your brain: https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcor...

Oh, interesting that they're still using it for subscription bundles, thank you for the correction. It's certainly gone from all of their B2C marketing that I could find - and it's also gone from the official app names. They're such a strange marketing department.

I cancelled my 365 subscription last night and was surprised to see that I was scheduled to pay $100 next month for an annual subscription tier that adds AI features that I would never use. The most valuable plan they offer is the one they charge the least for.

Yes they recently raised the price by merging copilot into it. No version of office is offered without copilot.

> No version of copilot 365 is offered without copilot.

FTFY.

And I believed that they actually begrudgingly provide that option in the EU?

In April, I switched to Microsoft 365 Personal Classic which doesn't contain Copilot.

Has this been discontinued?

Microsoft will clarify the situation by offering “CoPilot One”.

CoPilot One XS Series X? You really don't want the CoPilot One Series X, it's really a neutered version, and the CoPilot One XS Series S is decent but really doesn't cost any different, unlike the CoPilot XS Series S, which is obsolete.

Microsoft is master of confusing programs, confusing naming and plans. Pretty much everything they produce is royally unclear in its naming.

They previously renamed Remote Desktop to Windows App.

That's how you get your lunch eaten by Chrome Remote Desktop.

Oh, shit. I could have gotten my old plan? Yay. >sigh< I assumed I was just stuck paying more and didn't research it.

Almost. After battling with support for several months, a friend of mine recently learned that versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour. Makes me wonder what other features they're leaving out.

> versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour

What other advantages are there?

I found it disappointing, that the same time MS gets a fine for bundling Teams with Office, they bundle another tool with it. As far I can tell it is an effective maneuver, previous company I worked for gave up selfhosted Mattermost instance, because "there is no point in maintaining it when we get Teams for free".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com