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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand Microsoft's AI strategy. It seems to be built around automating the writing process. If you ask MS 365 Copilot (as opposed to the many other Copilots) what it can do, it's deeply disappointing:

"Can you edit the Word document so the format is in line with these requirements?"

"No, but I can help you draft an implementation consistent with the requirements."

"Can you add this section to the 35 individual copies of this document in this OneDrive folder?"

"No, but I can help you draft [something]."

This is NOT the AI revolution anyone was waiting for.

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This is decidedly the result of a lack of strategy. Microsoft isn’t a single unified borg.

Instead, all the little individual teams got their hands on these capabilities and they figured out where to shove it. At “best” there would have been the head of Windows or Office or whatever saying to all their reports “go do AI!”

Atleast someone at some level need to think about how the user is going to use copilot right?

Its shocking how they didnt. Imagine how shit the culture must be when employees arent bothering to consider how the user will use the feature, just focussing on getting it through

Need? No. Should? Probably!

You can run all the Office apps in a browser, and update documents that are on SharePoint live in collaboration with someone else. Maybe that's not earth-shattering, but it's quite a big change from huge separate Office legacy apps. It must have been a big effort decreed from the top. Given Microsoft leadership is obsessed with AI, you'd think they'd be pushing hard.

It looks like you're trying to write something! Click here to have me fuck it up for you!

Here is a fun one. I had a column with around 200 entries and there were some duplicates in it. I just wanted to see which were duplicates and remove some of them.

I selected the cells and asked copilot to tell me which ones were duplicated. Copilot had to ask me to copy and paste the cell contents in its chat box. It couldn't even detect which cells were selected and read them

Why even have copilot inside excel when it can't even read a cell? This is what happens when all you care is about KPI metrics or what not

When implementing an AI feature in a product recently, I noticed a tendency of management to steer towards a limited, well-behaved feature set that straight jackets the underlying model. This resulted in similar experience to what you describe. Maybe this is control and accountability thing? If I were to do this, I'd just slap a bunch of product specific tools (MCP, CLIs, HTTP API wrappers, etc) and skills (how to use those, best practices) with an agent and call it a day - if it can do more but also can fail, that's fine by me. That's why I like the idea of WebMCP more than custom built, limited AI chat interfaces that pop up everywhere nowadays. Just let Claude access everything and dump knowledge into it.

> This is NOT the AI revolution anyone was waiting for.

It's Clippy. All over again.

Don't let Louis Rossmann hear you say that, though.

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