Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems
wsj.com
wsj.com
Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.
Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.
Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.
Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/
If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?
It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output.
...
On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content or the description meta tag, the Bing API now gives you utter slop[0] for website descriptions!
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1pomrdg/aigener...
Image generator meets editor meets page design.
Used to be one could upload an unlimited number of files (20 at a time) and process them directly at the initial window --- now one has to get into "Pages Mode", and once there, there's a limit on the number of files which can be uploaded in a given 24-hour period.
That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:
The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.
The same kind of logic that led companies to migrate from Slack to Teams. Metrics that don't actually look at actual, positive impact, as nobody picks a risky KPI, and will instead pick a useless one that can't miss.
But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this product for any reason if it doesnt work squarely inside your own stack
Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to...". Great, so it doesn't even know what program it's runnning in, let alone having any ability to do stuff in there! Sigh.
We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.
I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html
We raised a high priority ticket with MS and turns out that Copilot Agent lied about the entire thing because the website was blocked. It completely made it up.
The fact that we are supposed to use Copilot Agent for open-ended "research" is mind-boggling.
I wonder if the site you mentioned was earlier harvested through some firewall hole during Copilot's training.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/mana...
Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.
There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.
Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.
But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.
AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.
Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.
Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026
This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...
> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.
> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology
> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked
> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died
("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
It's happened before.
Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.
Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.
source?
Taking money off the table - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763769 - October 2025 (108 comments)
(not investing advice)
(also not investing advice :)
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/
I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.
I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.
I have quite a few doubts that it'll be a net positive for society though. The internet (for all of its flaws) is still a good thing generally for the public. Users didn't have to be convinced of that, they just needed to be shown what was possible. Nobody had to shove internet access into everything against customer's wishes. "AI" on the other hand isn't something most users want. Users are constantly complaining about it being pushed on them and it's already forced MS to scale back the AI in windows 11.
The mouse didn't become some huge profit center and the economy didn't realign around mouse manufacturers. People sure made a lot of money off it indirectly though. The profits accrued from sales of software that supported it well and delivered productivity improvements. Some of the companies who wrote that software also manufactured mice, some didn't.
I think it'll be the same now. It's far from clear that developing and hosting LLMs will be a great business. They'll transform computing anyway. The actual profits will accrue to whoever delivers software which integrates them in a way that delivers more productivity. On some level I feel like it's already happening, Gemini's well integrated into Google Drive, changes how I use it, and saves me time. ChatGPT is just a thing off on the side that I chat randomly with about my hangover. Github Copilot claims it's going to deliver productivity and sometimes kinda does but man it often sucks. Easy to infer from this info who my money will end up going to in the long run.
On diversification, I think anyone who's not a professional investor should steer away from picking individual stocks and already be diversified... I wouldn't advise anyone to get out of the market or to try and time the market. But a correction will come eventually and being invested in very broad index funds smooths out these bumps. To those of us who invest in the whole market, it's notable that a few big AI/tech companies have become a far larger share of the indices than they used to be, and a fairly sure bet that one day, they won't be anymore.
The revolution already happened. I can't imagine life without AI today. Not just for coding (which I actually lament) but just in general day to day use. Sure it's not perfect but I think it's quite difficult to ignore how the world changed in just 3-4 years.
One of the reasons I told myself I "couldn't" diversify was because if I sold any of the stock to buy different stock I'd pay a lot of capital gains tax and the IRS would take half and now I'd only be half as wealthy.
Another reason was my management telling me I couldn't sell my stock during "quiet" periods (even though they seemed too) and so sometimes when I felt like selling it I "couldn't."
These days, especially with companies that do not have publicly traded stock, that is harder than ever to diversify. The cynic in me says they are structured that way so that employees are always the last to get paid. It can still work though. You just have to find a way to option the stock you are owed on a secondary market. Not surprisingly there are MBA types who really want to have a piece of an AI company and will help you do that.
So now I make sure that not everything I own is in one area. One can do that with mutual funds, and to some extent with index funds.
But the message is if you're feeling "wealthy" and maybe paying your mortgage payments by selling some stock every month, you are much more at risk than you might realize. One friend who worked at JDS Uniphase back in the day just sold their stock and bought their house, another kept their stock so that it could "keep growing" while selling it off in bits to pay their mortgage. When JDSU died they had to sell their house and move because they couldn't afford the mortgage payments on just their salary. But we have a new generation that is getting to make these choices, I encourage people in this situation to be open to the learning.
Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.
0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/
Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.
It seems to me that CEOs have a different opinion than anyone who cares instead about actual people.
What is on stake in the long term? Their legacy? Both in term of feel-good and getting the next job if they are not in the end of their career.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...
by that logic financial crashes wouldn't happen
There's another post on the front page about the 2008 financial crisis, which was almost exactly that. Investors are vulnerable to herd mentality. Especially as it's hard to be "right but early" and watch everyone else making money hand over fist while you stand back.
Rank,Company 1,Exxon Mobil 2,General Electric (GE) 3,Microsoft 4,Procter & Gamble 5,Chevron 6,Johnson & Johnson 7,AT&T 8,Walmart 9,JPMorgan Chase 10,Berkshire Hathaway
1 financial institution.
8 of the top 10 currently are tech companies. its completely different
I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.
It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
Dell reveals people don't care about AI in PCs (https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows-laptops/dell-rev...)
I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no different from crypobros who put their kids' entire college fund into some failed and useless project and now they need that project to succeed or else it's all over.
My guess is that it’s more of a recency bias sort of thing: it’s quite easy to assume that a newer way of solving a problem is superior to existing ways simply because it’s new. And also, of course, newfangled things naturally attract investment capital because everyone implicitly knows it’s hard to sell someone a thing they already have and don’t need more of.
It’s not just tech. For example, many people in the USA believe that the ease of getting new drugs approved by the FDA is a reason why the US’s health care system is superior to others, and want to make it even easier to get drugs approved. But research indicates the opposite: within a drug class, newer drugs tend to be less effective and have worse side effects than older ones. But new drugs are definitely much more expensive because their period of government-granted monopoly hasn’t expired yet. And so, contrary to what recency bias leads us to believe, this more conservative approach to drug approval is actually one of the reasons why other countries have better health care outcomes at lower cost.
I would guess it’s more just consumer fatigue. For two reasons. First, AI’s still at the “all bark and no bite” phase of the hype cycle, and most people don’t enjoy trying a bunch of things just to figure out if they work as advertised. Where early adopters think of that as play time, typical consumers see it as wasted time. Second, and perhaps even worse, they have learned that they can’t trust that à product will still be doing that useful thing in the future because the tech enthusiasts who make these products can’t resist the urge to keep fucking with it.
I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.
Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.
That would move the cost of running the model to the end user but it would also mean giving up all the data they can from running prompts remotely.
It would probably also make Office users more productive rather than replacing them completely and that's not the vision that Microsoft's actual customers are sold on.
They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.
And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.
The only potential upside for businesses it that it can crawl onedrive/sharepoint, and acts as a glorious search machine in your mailbox and files.
That's the only thing really valuable to me, everything else is not working as it should. The outlook integration sucks, the powerpoint integration is laughably bad to being worthless, and the excel integration is less useful than Clippy.
I actually prefer using the "ask" function of github copilot through visual studio code over using the company provided microsoft copilot portal
I'm surprised that they haven't changed the boot screen to say "Windows 11: Copilot Edition".
My guess is every team's metric is probably reduced to tokens consumed through the products owned.
you either hail mary AI or you watch your margins dwindle; captialism does not allow for no-growth.
In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.
For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.
So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.
It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.
Microsoft Azure was launched in 2010. They've been a "cloud" company for a while. AI just represents a sharp acceleration in that course. Unfortunately this means the software products have been rather neglected and subject to annoying product marketing whims.
ChatGPT says that "productivity and business processes" is still the largest division in Microsoft with 43% of revenues and 54% of operating income (from their FY2025 10K). The "intelligent cloud" division is second with 38% revenue and 35% operating income. Which helps to support my point -- their legacy enterprise software (and OS) is still their main product line and makes more relative profits than the capital heavy cloud division.
Spell checking is also good, grammar better then me lol
And pumping out fake news and propaganda, way worth it when you do it
Musk could learn from this to boost his FSD subscription numbers for his bonus payouts.
LLM workflow:
Describing to Claude that I need an edit made in the second paragraph of the third section feels easy, comfortable, and straightforward. I’m using my speech centers, speech to text, and then I wait for a generation during which I hit my phone or Reddit. Poof, the text flies out like magic, taking 20+ seconds, then I re-re-re-read it to make sure the edit was good and nothing was lost in that edit. Oops, the edit inverted the logic of the paragraph, lemme repeat the above… and again… time flies! 2 hours gone in a flash.
Old and boring workflow:
I gruellingly move my mouse to open a file, then take a coffee break. I come back and left-click into the sentence that sucks. I hit Reddit to deal with the anxiety… I think, boo, and then type out the edit I needed. It’s bad, I fix. Coffee break. Squiggly red line from a misspelling? I fix. I google and find a better turn of phrase, copy and paste it in manually with a little edit. Ugh. This sucks. I suck, work sucks. Time sucks. 35 entire minutes of my life has been wasted… time to get another coffee and check Reddit.
———
Working with an LLM is kinda like working under stage hypnosis. The moment to moment feelings are deceptive and we humans are unreliable recorders of time-usage. Particularly when engaged in unwanted effort.
Google has had all this tech for a minute. Their restrained application and lack of 10x-vibe-chad talk make me think their output measurements are aligned with my measurements.
1 rabbit hole hallucination wrong-turn can eat up a lot, lot, lot of magic one-shotting.
Another post on HN likened it to gambling, in the way that slot machines work. Each time you prompt, you could hit the jackpot! But usually you end up with some mediocre or wrong, so you tweak that prompt and pull the lever again. It's and endless cycle.
MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.
It's time to accept the new way of working, just change your reality to match the copilot version and boom, you save time fixing its mistakes!
In fact, why have the meeting at all? Just prompt copilot to create notes based on a fictional conception of the meeting and you just saved everyone a whole hour!
The copilot product is obviously borked, and is outshone by ‘free’ competitors (Gemini, ChatGPT). But since the attributes and uses are so fuzzy, they have a minimum viable product to abort meaningful talk about competition while securing big contracts from governments and delivering dog water.
My anecdotal observations of copilot are people using competing products soon after trialling. Reports say Anthropics solution is in widespread use at Microsoft… a bunch of devs on MacBooks and iPhones using Claude to build and sell … not what they themselves use (since they are smart and have taste?).
It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.
Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?
Anyone who would try to say "let's not do AI" would be a white crow, will be eaten by other managers in reviews and discussions.
Bad leadership, bad management.
So it's FOMO, formalism and conformism.
Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.
Incentives almost always drive the outcome.
That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.
Sure I get gemini for free now for a year since I have bought a pixel, but I have no intention to renew, I'll likely just leech of the ones my employer pays for
YouTube, while Google nerfed and downgraded it, still works to some extent, though AI generated "content" is such a waste of time.
> Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
Well for tech users it is at around 12% or so, give or take. More curiously Google chrome share dropped a little. I have no data about this, e. g. one website is too little info anyway but I suspect that Google killing ublock origin was a reason; right now I am using firefox and though it has tons of issues too, being able to lock away pointless "content" is so vital for how I browser and access information online.
I wish they'd've kept the parts people used the most.
If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.
CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
Edit: Wikipedia sums up the "failed branding campaign" quite scathingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
I think that campaign followed on from everything being named "Enterprise" something. I still miss the days when SQL Server Management Studio was called "Enterprise Manager"...
Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.
MSFT not being good at naming things is not new.
False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers.
I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go
Firefox & Safari: E2E encrypted, you hold keys, not possible for Mozilla/Apple to access it.
Chrome: Encrypted, Google holds keys meaning it is useless, they can read and give away the data. One can enable sync passphrase which would enable E2E however.
Edge: Nothing is encrypted and no way to change this.
Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".
This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.
The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.
I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.
Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.
Sure, you find disagreements and arguments, but you don't get the 'ur mum gae', the reductio ad Hitlerum, the dongers, and the outright insane takes and paragraphs of all caps that I would expect from Youtube comments. Meanwhile, every time I open Facebook because of some event I need to press 'going' on, I get a glimpse of some inane take or someone writing in all caps because reasons.
There have been a few waves of comment spam, but maybe Youtube actually managed to curb that now? Only took them two or so years.
What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.
And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?
That's when I started losing trust in Google as a company.
Make a Disqus-like comment section that shows the comments in RSS articles from Reader.
Also Reddit, by empowering the GReader Groups capabilities.
But no, let's copy Facebook and force everybody on it. And kill Google Talk while at it.
I'll never forgive Google for that.
Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time.
They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have carved out some of this search space with web-search being native to the tools now.
But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
One scenario is the product is good (OneNote) but they put three icons on the taskbar for it and spam the rest of Windows for ads for it that just make people scream "take it away!"
Another scenario is that the product is bad (OneDrive) and they push you into having a traumatic experience (Microsoft Office uses it as the default save location and when it is down you can't save your work!) that makes sure you'll never use it again -- even though now OneDrive seems to be basically reliable.
Today is it the dominant playbook for marketing of AI experiences. Mostly people are sick and tired of hearing about it, the master Unique Selling Point of 2026 is products that don't interrupt you when you are trying to get work done.
I knew it would be bad but I couldn't believe the state of it, just utter garbage
if ironic is the right word; the (google) search product itself still is. if not even worse.
the 'new' ai mode routinely creates these silly categories that are not what i was looking for and my screen is filled with repetitive ai summaries of articles. it will ingest a source as fact, and then use that fact to create confirmation bias across other articles. it will even use words like "confirm" when it finds a source saying something, even if the source is junk or seo spam. it becomes somewhat impossible to escape the assumptions the model has made, and i have to resort to traditional web search to get diversity in my results.
and while deep research works, its so overly verbose, with no easy way to tone down the wordiness.
In other words they still got rewarded by the market despite all the missteps. I don’t agree with this reality but here we are.
this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.
For me, the user, it didn’t work. I got that from my own experience with it. You can point it at me and say it was my imagination, or i wasn’t “doing it right,” but that experience was absolutely true for me. If you care to you can even go back to my oldest posting history to see me complaining about it, and similarly people rushing in to defend it (very aggressively)
The iPhone is a much stronger contender for that title. It has probably surpassed $1 Trillion in profit for Apple since 2007.
It was amazing.
Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.
But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.
And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.
Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.
Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.
They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.
And it's easy to imagine a situation where the other options are still mediocre most of the time, so switching has an advantage but it's not a big compelling thing you shout to the rooftops, so it doesn't get a big popularity wave.
Google search business is not the most successful in history. It's their ad business and monopolization of online advertising that's the most successful in history and the only way to break their ad monopoly is to stop using their junk.
Google Search hasn't been designed for users in like 10 years
"2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. [...] We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion. We are beginning to distinguish between “spectacle” and “substance”."
Customers are not buying the spectacle and investors are wondering why there is no substance.
PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.
There certainly other examples that I failed to address.
This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
Also VS 2026 was released with a hard milestone, thus while there is a new settings experience, many options show a dialog from VS 2022, because the new UI is still not implemented for the new experience.
Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality.
Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.
From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.
Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place.
I might be wrong, this is more my perception than anything else.
So, in other words, the kids grow up learning and using Linux, right?
You don't see Apple and Google doing the same Webviews all over the place on their OSes, with exception of ChromeOS, which appears to be on the death row to be replaced with Android anyway.
In fact, at WWDC 2025 Apple executives even spoke publicly on the matter against that approach.
* no hard feelings
I'm sure you can find good analysis of why specific products failed.
And both Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta have a bunch of side projects that are reasonably successful.
meta $164b revenue in 2024: 98% advertising
google $350b revenue in 2024: 76% advertising, 12% google cloud, 12% other
apple $391b revenue in 2024: 66% hardware (iphone, ipad, mac), 25% services (app store etc), 9% other
amazon $638b revenue in 2024: 64% amazon store+associated services, 17% AWS, 9% ads, 11% other
microsoft $245b revenue in 2024: 40% azure/server products, 22% office, 10% windows, 9% gaming, 7% linkedin, 5% search+ads, 8% other
I'm not particularly a microsoft fan, just making this point because I think MS is poorly understood by the HN crowd
Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft...
It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.
I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.
In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.
I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.
Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.
What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.
But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.
So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.
> pointlessly going against expectations
If you're referring to the ribbon, I'm not sold on its superiority. The vast majority of other software still uses the familiar menu structure, which is what LO uses too.
Granted, well meaning educational programs expose students to MS Office and its paradigm, from an early age. For their sake, I eagerly await a coding assistant AI powerful enough to reskin LibreOffice to look just MS Office, ribbon and all.
Also, the productivity suite formerly known as Office is these days called "365 Copilot".
I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.
As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.
I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.
Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to? What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system?
It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of users that will continue to find ways to use their computer the way they want to.
This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough. MS should be happy to retain any end user they can at this point and not continue to piss of some nerds that still use your operating system under the one condition that they get to do so the way they see fit.
If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.
Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.
So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane
Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.
> “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote.
This is true in almost every large organization, and will affect every enterprise AI product out there. There was a relevant subthread just a couple of days ago recounting this exact, same dynamic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209
In fact, Palantir's secret sauce may not be their tech, but their "Forward Deployed Engineers" model (i.e. a rebranding of "partner engineers embedded within their customers' organizations"). Because it turns out that's a lot of what they do is navigating these bureaucratic and political hurdles to unlock access to the data: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir
It gets even worse if you consider this data is going to be extremely messy, with multiple bespoke, partially-duplicate / overlapping, potentially conflicting versions of the data with varying levels of out-of-datedness, scattered across these silos. (I would know, in a past life, I worked on a months-long project called, self-explanatorily enough, "Stale Docs".)
Yeah, untangling these bureaucratic webs and data horrors is not a quarter-long or year-long project, so investors are gonna be waiting a long time for the impact of AI to be visible. On the bright side, as TFA also hints at, AI providers themselves have been severely capacity-constrained. So hopefully by the time these issues get sorted out enough new capacity would be coming online to actually serve that traffic.
In the meantime, I expect a prolonged period of AI companies feverishly splurging on AI CapEx spend even as Wall Street punishes them repeatedly for the lack of impact of AI being reflected anywhere.
It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and this also surprised me, more than one billion devices run on Win11. That's also strange - AI is not a big reason for most of these folks then, right? Probably neither positive or negative (or they may not even know about it).
Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.
> Mobile gaming generated USD 140.53 billion in 2025, accounting for 48.50% of the video game market share. Console revenue followed at USD 56.2 billion, slightly ahead of PC’s USD 46.3 billion. Cloud-gaming services are the fastest-rising category; the segment’s video game market size is projected to reach USD 24.68 billion by 2029 on a 26.25% CAGR. Wider 5G rollout and aggressive platform bundling are converting non-traditional gamers who do not own dedicated hardware. Source: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/video-ga...
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/video-ga...
But mostly it’s cost. It’s simply far cheaper to buy a Windows computer than a Mac if you just want a computer. There are no sub-$300 Macs brand new.
In so many ways, for so many reasons, people “must” use Windows.
Chromebooks I forgot about. But every time I’ve seen them at a store they’re not mixed in with the “computers“, they’re “othered” into their own little section of the computer area. A bit like Macs in the late ‘90s or early 2000s.
irm https://get.activated.win | iexthey see that the future is AI, but AI doesnt need Microsoft.
Yeah. Right now the <title> of office.com is:
> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI
Microsoft 365 Copilot... what a product name.
That's some insight into Microsoft's brain rot, isn't it? "Imagine spending every day for the next year dealing with robot office software."
People using Copilot 365 are on both ends, both producing and being inundated with generated content. Sure, they can crank out 10x as many emails and slides, but they also have to deal with 10x as many incoming from their coworkers. They can of course use a bot for that, but then they're back where they started, but with errors.
Multiple times I've disabled the cortana taskbar search widget, only to have a windows update turn it back on and proudly gives me a popup telling me they noticed it was disabled and turned it back on for me.
Microsoft will forcibly re-enable AI features eventually. Again, this is an established pattern for them.
One time they replaced my "show desktop" button in the bottom right with a Copilot button.
AI demand goes though. AI investments numbers good. Numbers up. Not because people choose, because corporations are fomo-ing it and we don't have a choise.
People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)
I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.
It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.
Confusion and fear are much better for stock prices than clarity
I know Gemini has more advanced features in Docs and they rolled something out for Sheets. I would bet GWorkspace keeps gaining ground on the functionality battle.
But the thing is, for gemini to be magic, they need api for each operation, they don't have it! So that's why it can only do sum.
When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.
For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.
I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.
People who paid are leaving.
That's a churn problem.
The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and Gemini at higher rates.
Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but won't share the numbers.
That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.
This is the Ballmer story all over again.
- Massive distribution advantage
- Captive enterprise base
Windows Phone had carrier deals too.
The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight.
This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked:
> "About a year ago, Nadella sent a frustrated email to Rajesh Jha,
> executive vice president of experiences and devices, detailing an incident in which
> Nadella had asked the enterprise version of Copilot on the Edge browser
> to help with a public webpage he was on,
> but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"
Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.
I audibly winced
They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…
This says nothing about where the growth is going
> but it couldn't fulfill his prompt"
Another reason to use ChatGPT.
The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
Contrast that to the Linux desktop which "just doesn't work" and my M4 Mac Mini that amazed me with how fast it was when I bought it and a year later it is beachball... beachball... beachball... reboot. beachball... beachball... beachball... Doesn't help that they vandalized the UI by adding meaningless transparency effects which don't actually look cool but rather look like they added anti-antialiasing to the edges of everything for now reason.
> which "just doesn't work"
step 1. visit https://endeavouros.com/
step 2. download iso
step 3. flash iso on medium
step 4. boot medium, installation window shows
step 5. you choose KDE, yes: KDE. Do more mouse clicks.
step 6. system tells you it's done, and offers you to reboot.
almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course
theres probably less than 10 people in my entire company that know half of the words you wrote there. whats an "iso"? what is "flashing" the "iso"? how do i "boot medium"? what is "KDE" and why do i want to say yes?
(i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the vast majority of people do not)
and it’s definitely got some bad edges right now.
Literally.
github copilot? bing copilot? office365 copilot? office365 copilot chat? windows copilot? or one of those clippy like copilots in dev environments that can't do anything but point you to the wrong documentation?
For a long while "Settings" had 2 interfaces, 1 that looks like it's from the iPhone, and the other which is from "Control Panel"...
Also for display settings windows 11 has two different areas where pieces of display settings can be changed.
But yeah, Microsoft competency means it's also fine to show some search results in the language which isn't the user's preferred UI language.
This explains perfectly the annoying behavior when you search for ChatGPT using Edge. The top thing that appear to you is, well, Copilot and not ChatGPT! Tagged as "Promoted by Microsoft" and labeled as "Your Copilot is here", is clearly a weak move from MS to push Copilot as possible as it can despite its limitations in what it can do compared to its competitors.
At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.
When I open a meeting invote from someone else the first 1/3rd of the screen is occupied with "Prepare for your meeting" nonsense. The "insights" button just provides general knowledge akin to "read the documentation".
Solution: Add MCP to MS applications, then isolate Copilot to its own app.
These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.
It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.
The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.
When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash.
I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.
In what concerns EEE in open source, there are plenty of candidates, expecially everyone that has contributed for the detriment of GPL based licenses in favour of business friendly licenses.
Given how unstable stock prices typically are over the short term, and given that we're currently something like thirty-five days into the year, I don't consider that fact to mean much.
Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.
Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.
However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.
Copilot should not have been released. A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.
For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.
People hate it, and for hood reason.
It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.
Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams
Bah
It checks all the correct checkboxes on a feature list in comparison to the competition but it just sucks to use.
It's like Sharepoint - the deathpit of all collaborative software
I can't imagine a description more likely to give corporate workers the ick.
Similarly Copilot is everywhere, but why I would want it there or use it there is unknown.
However.
No-one I know, literally not a single soul, is delighted by using any of the copilot-branded tools. What's more, almost everyone seems to resent these tools due to their hamfisted design, poor performance and seedy marketing.
The copilot suite of... things is, in other words, shit.
Yet somehow Nadella seems blind for the fact that they're trying to push a turd sandwich onto their client base?
I can't believe a MSFT ceo would be THIS incompetent, but here we are.
The mind truly boggles.
Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems
...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems
x=AA1VBKdf
{ echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x' HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \
|busybox ssl_client assets.msn.com \
|grep -o "<p>.\*</p>"|tr -d '\134'; } > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm