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Comments (92)

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  thedelanyo
  Someone said - in Linux, everything is a file. In Microsoft, everything is a copilot. Lol.
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  lateforwork
  Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI. How many products have Copilot? Just about all of them.
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  quag
  It reminds me of around 2002 when Microsoft named everything ".net".
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  chatmasta
  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?
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  chatmasta
  Related: a list of all Microsoft login portals (there are 609 of them).https://msportals.io/
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  guidedlight
  Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).
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  1a527dd5
  Ignoring the disaster that is their branding/naming.Copilot is _amazing_. Everyone is hyping about Claude, but I'm way more productive with the copilot cli. The copilot cloud agent is great, and copilot code review is great (we also tried the new very expensive claude code review - it was slow and expensive).Forget that it's Microsoft, forget that everything is Copilot and go and give it a shot.
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  BirAdam
  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.
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  ieie3366
  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
• georgeburdell
  Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson
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  TradingPlaces
  For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.
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  gwf
  It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.
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  shireboy
  I get that it's annoying, but also don't know what else one would do? "FooPilot is our Office AI toolset, BarWonk is our code assist tool"? There are also a lot of Claudes and GPTs. Naming things is hard.
• r0m4n0
  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
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  nlawalker
  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".
• rdsubhas
  Blame brain dead product managers who merely want to hoist their poor quality yearly performance review slop on something existing that carries SEO/SEM value.Most of the time, these piggy backers only pull down the value of what they're riding on.
• claaams
  No one can ruin microslops branding better than microslop.
• yunnpp
  Plot twist: he used Copilot to generate the figure.
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  giancarlostoro
  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.
• mirekrusin
  They should have called it Micro.
• yieldcrv
  The real question is how many products could AWS call the same thingtwo 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 isKind of why I’m fond of GCP now. Just name it what it is
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  Razengan
  It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again
• stephenlf
  Microsoft yearns for the flight simulator.
• walrus01
  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
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  jaffa2
  Isn’t it just their AI llm thing?
• ChrisArchitect
  Related/same discussion:What Is Copilot Exactly?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
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  EvanAnderson
  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""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...
• 2OEH8eoCRo0
  It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.
• Handy-Man
  It's just one brand: Copilot
• anon
  undefined
• sublinear
  > .. the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things. Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’.Right, so then it's not a "product", or even a range of "products".It's a brand name and inherently pointless to map out. It doesn't even have to involve any "AI" to be given the branding. All that matters is it's a thing they have, new or old, that they'd like to push people towards.
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  throwaway87543
  Okay. But how many products have Gemini or Claude in the name?