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.
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.
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.