The thing that really confuses me about this is that it has very real negative consequences. I cannot have a conversation about Copilot!
If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
And if I ask them (which I always do) they still have trouble describing the product, because Microsoft give them no help at all. How DO you explain that something was the Copilot thing that's a feature on GitHub.com that shows up in the web interface there, as opposed to whatever the heck other forms of GitHub Copilot.
(Amusingly there are 15 "GitHub Copilot..." products listed on the linked website and I can't tell which if any of those 15 corresponds to the chat UI on the logged in GitHub.com homepage, or that's available in the "Agents" tab in a repository.)
Surely Microsoft feel this pain all the time? Bug reports in "Copilot" must be almost impossible to interpret.
> If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
I think this is basically a rephrasing of the reason for the shared name. This appears to be an attempt at brand unification.
Microsoft wants user's experiences with their products to blend together into an undifferentiated (in more positive terms, "seamless") set of interactions. Not a set of discrete pieces of software, just interacting with Microsoft via Copilot to... ask it to do their work for them, mostly. This is the AI-native future they're building towards. You complain that users can't talk about what tool they're using. Microsoft doesn't want people knowing or caring what tool they're using. Just pay your subscription and have Copilot read and respond to your email for you.
The problem for Microsoft is that branding only works if it's built off a solid, widespread product with a good repuation. Github Copilot might be solid but it's a niche product that most people have never heard of. So people wind up associating the entire Copilot brand with the mediocre to bad Copilot experiences they are exposed to on a daily basis, such as the useless Copilot button on Copilot+ PC keyboards.
I'm sure it happened in a meeting where the word SYNERGY was said a lot but it clearly doesn't work and it's not the first time Microsoft makes this blunder everything was .net then everything was live then everything was xbox then everything was 365 now everything is copilot and if someone tell me they use copilot 365 I still have no idea if they use web apps or desktop apps or anything because they confuse a brand with an actual product.
Thanks for the whistle stop tour of Microsoft branding! I remember when Microsoft Passport was first rebranded to be a “.net Passport”! And all the later ones.
If Satya predicted someone would map their frustration with his company['s naming] out like this, is there anything he could have done to prevent the embarrassment?
I see how excited the executives would get about one single interface for computing all locked behind the subscription. The article makes Microsoft look stupid. It's tough to believe they're doing it the best way. Was this really a necessary intermediate step? And haven't they burned the brand a good bit…
And apparently when the writing was on the wall however many months ago after they had 20 or 30 different copilots, they believed the best decision to be doubling down.
Among many other issues, the experience doesn't come anywhere close to seamless, right? Because each of these things is distinct and can't interface with the others? They could have tried to build a unified assistant, but they prioritized the rush job instead.
It's a feature, not a bug. If nobody can pinpoint which instance is crashing, you can't confidently figure out if you need to cancel the $19/mo, the $30/mo, or the $39/mo SKU. Obfuscation as a service.
Quick cry for help, please someone help me cancel a stupid Office 365 subscription on an old credit card where the number changed and no longer have access to the email - their website possibly intentionally sucks considering the hours I’ve spent on this
What are being called GitHub Copilot Products seems to confuse products with licensing plan and features.
I always think of GitHub Copilot as the product.
I can purchase the Business or Enterprise plan.
That enables features like Reviews, Chat and so on.
IMO this chart (at least for GitHub Copilot) is confusing products, features and licensing.
That's not to say it isn't confusing understanding what features are available when you get a GitHub Copilot license, but calling them all Products feels wrong. I can't purchase GitHub Copilot Reviews separately as far as I'm aware.
If people ever wonder how this happens... let me tell you this is the organic evolution for giant multinational corporations. You have thousands of teams doing some computer stuff. And never, ever will it happen that responsibilities and product design get clearly cut for the hot ai stuff. At least hundreds of teams will fight to own a part of this "copilot" thing which leads to over a hundred new products named copilot. It's not just Microsoft, every single one of the big boys does this. You can't escape it. You know why? Because they all know the alternatives are even worse.
at my workplace some of the devs are using github copilot (their own private account). Boss said that our company already has copilot and everyone can use it instead of private accounts.. it is enabled in our microsoft account. Of course, this is not what the devs need. Now I understand why this is so confusing, because there are many copilot products.
That almost seems like a deliberate strategy by some "genius" PM... a lot less bug reports for specific products with actionable items for their teams, in favor of more insufficient reports to blame the one creating the report instead.
I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap?
This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea which GitHub MCP server I setup in Claude Code, but the domain has “githubcopilot” in it. Am I burning copilot tokens (or “requests” or whatever is their billing unit) when I use this from Claude?
Microsoft has always seemed to be a little chaotic and buggy in everything it did, but it was always dominant and assertive. Recently it seems like they might be about to do the impossible and throw away that market position - their cloud is imploding, they all but gave up on their AI goals, apparently the Windows UI is designed now by employees who use Macs so never use their own dog food, and while I don't believe all the people saying they'll move the Linux, I'm wondering what it takes for a few large businesses to make to the macbook Neo. At this point it's mostly 365 holding people in, and that's cross compatible
The only Microsoft products I’ve actively heard people desire within the last 5 years are VSCode and Excel. Microsoft have so severely damaged their brand that they’ve finally shed the image of oddly gray Dell midtowers running XP on Pentium 4.
Microsoft is not alone in this. Apple does the same thing!
There is Siri on iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, Apple TV, and CarPlay and are all different different incarnation of Siri (with different capabilities). Then there is everything else like the Siri Remote, Siri Suggestions (and all their types: Siri apps suggestions, Maps, keyboard, Share Sheet, etc), Siri Shortcuts, and Siri Knowledge (WolframAlpha + Wikipedia + other databases?).
I'm sure 75% of these will be rebranded "Apple Intelligence" by the end of the year...
It's a corporate practice they find hard to shake, and sadly enough, it seems to work.
The idea is about platform solutions vs. best of breed, and they keep betting on the platform. In big organizations with lengthy and complex contracting procedures, platform solutions will always win.
The actual solution for the economy is Interoperability, if we fight for governments to require it, we can get platform providers that allow best of breed bundles. We will gain open market platforms, where you choose the market platform that works for you with the combination of solutions that work for you with one or just few contracts. Markets that close themselves or fight their vendors will lose both vendors and customers.
Just this last week, I wrote about the confusion this creates in the workplace[0]. My coworker said "copilot" literally referring to any code assistant, the same way we say bandaid or kleenex. I thought he was talking about Copilot, the one I see nagging me on Microsoft teams. We had a full discussion about completely different tools without realizing it.
I actually was just thinking about doing something very similar for this but for "agent," specifically in the Microsoft ecosystem. There are a zillion different proper nouns (products, services, frameworks, toolkits and tools, SDKs etc.) containing "agent" now, plus a bunch of other things that are now "agentic".
Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product (2022-2023 code autocomplete) but they completely ensloppified it
I remember Joel of Joel on Software publicly working through the process of creating a remote desktop for normals type product called Copilot back in the day. If I remember correctly he had to pay quite a pretty penny to acquire copilot.com.
I wonder if MS Copilot meant he made money on that investment?
That's the point: If you receive a bug report about "Copilot" and it will take you forever to triage what's actually broken, then the ticket gets closed because it becomes stale eventually. Therefore you don't have a complaint anymore!
To be fair, Google does it too. I just had the product I work on renamed to Gemini Enterprise. Sure we use Gemini but it’s confusing because it’s not really an “enterprise” version of Gemini. It’s just a way to name drop what it uses under the hood. This was our third rename in 4 years so probably will change again soon
The real question is how many products could AWS call the same thing
two extremes at play here. A single brand name masquarading as the same product, versus a hundred brand names that don’t tell you a thing about what the product is
Kind of why I’m fond of GCP now. Just name it what it is
The naming confusion points to a deeper problem. Everyone is building the "AI does a thing" layer (coding, writing, searching). It looks like no one is building the "AI things work together" layer.
We run 14 AI agents. CrewAI, LangGraph, Google's 8 patterns... all solve how agents pass data to each other. None of them answer: which agent has authority over which domain? What happens when two agents disagree? Who owns the escalation path?
Those are organizational problems, not technical ones. And organizational problems don't get solved by naming a product "Copilot."
While Microsoft in general is a mess, this article is like saying: what even is “save”? Microsoft has 1286 save products! Save in Word, Save in Paint, Save in Notepad…
Copilot means there’s a button/menu/command in the Microsoft app/site/tool that allows the user to pass whatever text/file/site/context/prompt is on the screen to the Copilot AI backend so it can summarize/transform/expand/explain it, and then have the user wait an inordinate amount of time for a mediocre response.
I have personally nullified one of those, namely the Copilot Key. It took a low level keyboard hook, and blocking a specific sequence of keys, then injecting the right ctrl key back.
Microsoft is uniquely unable to name / brand anything sensibly:
"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"
.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)
The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"
Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"
"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"
"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"
Before any of these Copilots, there was Project Aardvark. It was a summer project by Joel Spolsky's company Fog Creek Software in which they created a remote desktop product called Copilot. They made a documentary about it: https://youtu.be/YbrkZ07LKbk?si=LAYznsR6Zd1YdGkb
Its annoying especially since Copilot exists in Visual Studio (Code too I believe) and its not exactly "the same" thing as far as I can tell. I really hate Microsoft's naming conventions. At least call that one Copilot for Devs or something more meaningful.
I think it's fair enough that 'the assistant in the GUI/cloud program X, like Clippy++' has the same name for all X.
But it's absolutely bonkers that that's the same name as the IDE auto-complete integration, and the GitHub agentic worker, and the GitHub chat, and the GitHub reviewer.
Microsoft always does this, they let their marketing drive the ship for some reason. Before copilot it was 365. Before that it renaming a bunch of stuff to .net.
This is what happens when you have some sort of top-down directive from the C-level people to put "AI" in everything, and dozens of department/project managers who all have their own fiefdoms
I guess if Copilot were actually a singular entity that had all of these touch points and a decent security model to prevent unintentionally exposing your data - it would be pretty cool.
386 comments
If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
And if I ask them (which I always do) they still have trouble describing the product, because Microsoft give them no help at all. How DO you explain that something was the Copilot thing that's a feature on GitHub.com that shows up in the web interface there, as opposed to whatever the heck other forms of GitHub Copilot.
(Amusingly there are 15 "GitHub Copilot..." products listed on the linked website and I can't tell which if any of those 15 corresponds to the chat UI on the logged in GitHub.com homepage, or that's available in the "Agents" tab in a repository.)
Surely Microsoft feel this pain all the time? Bug reports in "Copilot" must be almost impossible to interpret.
> I cannot have a conversation about Copilot!
> If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.
I think this is basically a rephrasing of the reason for the shared name. This appears to be an attempt at brand unification.
Microsoft wants user's experiences with their products to blend together into an undifferentiated (in more positive terms, "seamless") set of interactions. Not a set of discrete pieces of software, just interacting with Microsoft via Copilot to... ask it to do their work for them, mostly. This is the AI-native future they're building towards. You complain that users can't talk about what tool they're using. Microsoft doesn't want people knowing or caring what tool they're using. Just pay your subscription and have Copilot read and respond to your email for you.
This is insane.
I see how excited the executives would get about one single interface for computing all locked behind the subscription. The article makes Microsoft look stupid. It's tough to believe they're doing it the best way. Was this really a necessary intermediate step? And haven't they burned the brand a good bit…
And apparently when the writing was on the wall however many months ago after they had 20 or 30 different copilots, they believed the best decision to be doubling down.
I always think of GitHub Copilot as the product.
I can purchase the Business or Enterprise plan.
That enables features like Reviews, Chat and so on.
IMO this chart (at least for GitHub Copilot) is confusing products, features and licensing.
That's not to say it isn't confusing understanding what features are available when you get a GitHub Copilot license, but calling them all Products feels wrong. I can't purchase GitHub Copilot Reviews separately as far as I'm aware.
Github CoPilot is decent but the rest of the copilot ecosystem is a hot mess. It’s not surprising MSFT is struggling to monetize AI.
This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea which GitHub MCP server I setup in Claude Code, but the domain has “githubcopilot” in it. Am I burning copilot tokens (or “requests” or whatever is their billing unit) when I use this from Claude?
https://msportals.io/
There is Siri on iPhone, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, Apple TV, and CarPlay and are all different different incarnation of Siri (with different capabilities). Then there is everything else like the Siri Remote, Siri Suggestions (and all their types: Siri apps suggestions, Maps, keyboard, Share Sheet, etc), Siri Shortcuts, and Siri Knowledge (WolframAlpha + Wikipedia + other databases?).
I'm sure 75% of these will be rebranded "Apple Intelligence" by the end of the year...
The idea is about platform solutions vs. best of breed, and they keep betting on the platform. In big organizations with lengthy and complex contracting procedures, platform solutions will always win.
The actual solution for the economy is Interoperability, if we fight for governments to require it, we can get platform providers that allow best of breed bundles. We will gain open market platforms, where you choose the market platform that works for you with the combination of solutions that work for you with one or just few contracts. Markets that close themselves or fight their vendors will lose both vendors and customers.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
I wonder if MS Copilot meant he made money on that investment?
two extremes at play here. A single brand name masquarading as the same product, versus a hundred brand names that don’t tell you a thing about what the product is
Kind of why I’m fond of GCP now. Just name it what it is
We run 14 AI agents. CrewAI, LangGraph, Google's 8 patterns... all solve how agents pass data to each other. None of them answer: which agent has authority over which domain? What happens when two agents disagree? Who owns the escalation path?
Those are organizational problems, not technical ones. And organizational problems don't get solved by naming a product "Copilot."
Copilot means there’s a button/menu/command in the Microsoft app/site/tool that allows the user to pass whatever text/file/site/context/prompt is on the screen to the Copilot AI backend so it can summarize/transform/expand/explain it, and then have the user wait an inordinate amount of time for a mediocre response.
"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"
.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)
The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"
Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"
"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"
"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"
"Microsoft FrontPage" / "Site Server" / "Site Server Commerce Edition" / "Office Server" / "SharePoint Portal Server" / "Windows SharePoint Services" / "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Foundation" / "SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Standard" / "SharePoint Enterprise" / "SharePoint Online" / "SharePoint Designer"
"Office Communicator" / "Microsoft Lync" / "Skype for Business" / "Skype" / "Skype for Business Online" / "Skype for Business for Microsoft 365"
Fairly guffaw-inducing branding, to me, was removing the Remote Desktop Client app and introducing something called "Windows App".
The old "System Management Server" became "System Center" and its family of products.
There's the whole accounting software / ERP world, too:
"Great Plains" / "Dynamics GP" / "Navision" / "Dynamics NAV" / "Solomon" / "Dynamics SL" / "Axapta" / "Dynamics AX" / "Dynamics 365" / "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations" / "Dynamics 365 Business Central"
(For most guffaws induced, though, there's the Windows 98-era "Critical Update Notification Tool"[0])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Update...
What Is Copilot Exactly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
But it's absolutely bonkers that that's the same name as the IDE auto-complete integration, and the GitHub agentic worker, and the GitHub chat, and the GitHub reviewer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
Copilot does not know either but I'm sure the answer is a much bigger number then anyone would be comfortable with.
Like, "the copilot in visual studio", "the copilot on github", "the copilot on office" etc.