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'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux is in fact not the origin of the "everything is a file". More properly, "everything is a file" is a Unix concept and Unix's creators deserve credit for the idea. Though Plan9 carries it out much better: Unix networking isn't file-based, Plan9's is.
> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Windows, is in fact, NT/SlopPilot+Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Copilot plus Copilot plus Copilot.
You could try Copilot Copilot for Windows with Windows Copilot. I know it's still got Copilot in it, but not as much as Copilot Copilot Copilot Copilot MS Office for Windows Copilot.
Never understood this about Windows Subsystem for Linux naming, nor its predecessor Windows Services for Unix. Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows? Should we now reinterpret Windows for Workgroups as a means of astrally projecting your organization inside Windows 3.11?! The dative only works ONE way, Microsoft!
I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product. I bet Copilot can fix this...
A "Windows subsystem" is a specific interface between user-mode applications and the Windows kernel. It's a technical notion that exists in Windows. So there are different Windows subsystems for different types of applications. The naming convention is "Windows subsystem for <application type>". It makes more sense when you read it as "Windows subsystem for [running] Linux [applications]".
WSL2 deviates from the native concept of what a Windows subsystem is; it is named that way because it is the successor of the original WSL.
I believe you're almost entirely wrong unfortunately. It is true that Windows has subsystems as a technical feature, yes. However, I don't think it's true that WSL (v1, let alone v2) was part of that architecture, despite the name. AFAIK that existing subsystem notion was a user-mode one, where each subsystem was built mostly in user-mode on top of the NT ("native") subsystem, with binaries in the PE format. WSL just completely ignored the whole thing, and even the existing notion of processes, and came up with a separate new thing called "picoprocesses" that it (barely?) wired through some critical kernel components via a custom driver that executed Linux binaries intact, implementing the Linux syscalls.
If you want a list of actual subsystems Windows recognizes, this should be pretty accurate:
The real reason for calling it a subsystem was almost entirely for familiarity with the previous concept of running Linux programs on Windows, which were based on that subsystem feature (the POSIX subsystem and the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications).
This, and it may have also been a legal thing. "Product for Third-Party OS" has been accepted as a descriptive use of a third-party trademark for decades, requiring only proper attribution rather than a license, whereas marketing a product that didn't even originally use the Linux kernel as a "Linux Subsystem" might have been considered riskier by Microsoft's lawyers in spite of the nonstandard use of the former.
> It makes more sense when you read it as "Windows subsystem for [running] Linux [applications]".
You can't have ellipsis when the shortened version already has its own meaning.
X for Y when both X and Y are nouns means that X is part of Y, not that Y is part of X.
e.g. "I bought new tyres for my car". The tyres are part of my car. You can't flip it and say "I bought new my car for tyres", it's just not how the word "for" works.
Grammatically it has to be "Linux for Windows subsystem", or "Windows subsystem for running Linux" as you said. The verb is essential for it to parse correctly.
There are many exceptions to what you state as an ironclad rule: i bought a display case for my baseball, i bought an album for my photos, etc. “for” can go in either direction.
I’ve been wondering lately if the next Xbox will have “copilot” in the name. With an easy to accidentally press dedicated button on the controller that interrupts the game you’re playing to start an AI chat.
A valid use case would be AI pretending to be the second player so that you can pretend you're having friends over while actually you're alone. Schizophrenia-as-a-Service.
That's because .Net 4 has been the .Net Framework's current version since 2010. It's basically the same reason they never made Windows 9.
They dropped the Core designation because they're still trying to encourage people to migrate so they can take .Net Framework out behind the shed where Silverlight went. v5 was a convenient time to start that whole process of re-integration.
Maybe that's because they don't want people who've never heard of Azure to just let it blend into the wide spectrum of cloud products whereas Microsoft is something almost everyone would recognize.
That's because TFS/VSTS followed the same naming convention where the "S" stood for either Server or Services. Once they rebranded the Azure-backed hosted version Azure DevOps Services, then it no longer really made sense to do anything but rename the self hosted version in the same fashion.
It would have been more confusing to have Visual Studio Team Server and Azure DevOps Services being the same product but hosted differently.
Not just developer tools, reusing trademarks in general.
At one point the next version of Windows Server 2003 was going to be Windows .NET Server.
Also Windows CE, Outlook Express, Xbox App, Xbox Game Pass for PC, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, etc.
Howard R. Moskowitz is an American market researcher and psychophysicist. He is known for the detailed study he made of the types of spaghetti sauce and horizontal segmentation. By providing a large number of options for consumers, Moskowitz pioneered the idea of intermarket variability as applied to the food industry.
Well it depends on what you're talking about. The model names were originally called lambda, followed by palm and then finally gemini. The chatbot product was internally known as meena, launched as Bard, and then transitioned to Gemini once the Gemini model came out.
SAP sales reps used HANA for "cloud" in the beginning... Which was bs back then and is today. But while everybody wanted to be in the cloud, SAP sales was scared to not be with the cool kids, when they do not somehow add to the cloud talk
I think this is the right answer. I am frustrated by Copilot and by many aspects of AI, but to me it seems like straightforward branding: you use a Microsoft product, you want to use AI in it, you look for Copilot (name and/or icon).
To me, the issue isn't that they've named so many things 'Copilot' but rather that Copilot is in every goddamn product.
Not if AI is ultimately a commodity, which it likely is. We don't want or need branded terms for other common features, like networking or files. In the early days of networking, before it was standard, there were attempts to brand things like NetBIOS with IPX and such. I don't want to repeat all of that every time some company wants to establish vendor lockin or branding.
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?
Git is a distributed source control system. It's open source and you can use it to version source code on your drive and/or a remote git repository.
Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.
A while back, Microsoft bought Github.
"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.
One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.
Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.
"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".
Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.
It's massively cheaper. Copilot charges per request, which with some clever prompting, can lead to huge amounts of work being done at fractions of the cost of Claude Code. Millions of tokens for mere pennies. MS must be taking a huge hit somewhere, because I'm probably getting 10-20x my value out of GH relative to CC.
I am not locked in to Anthropic, either. I can easily switch between GPT and Gemini models based on how I think each would perform in various scenarios. That's a big win. I use a lot of design with Opus, implement with GPT 5.4.
Also, Github Copilot CLI is pretty much at feature parity (for the stuff that matters) with Claude Code. Using both at work and home, I don't think there's much difference in features between the two. Maybe I'm not a super power user, and just a regular dumb user, but GH doesn't seem buggy and everything I think I'd want to do with CC I can do with GH.
I'm spending a literal fortune on CC - we also have GH Copilot but the devs imply that CC is better? Will the Github Copilot let us access skills and agent frameworks in CC?
Devs say a lot of uninformed things. With a heavy predisposition to hating the "legacy" monoliths that are Microsoft and by association GitHub.
Yes, Copilot supports skills. Practically all agents support very similar feature sets or are actively building up parity support if not already there. The only real difference between systems is the prompt and payment method. Copilot even allows you to use Anthropic's own skills repository: https://github.com/anthropics/skills
Do hacks like “read prompt.md, and follow its instructions. When you’re done, read it again and follow its instructions.” And then you have some background process appending to the file to keep it warm and you just keep writing there?
You could do that. I was just trying to say that if you make your original prompt complete enough, and you have well-defined success criteria, you can tell it to keep going until they are met.
> "Fix the following compile errors" -> one shot try and stops.
> "Fix the following compile errors. When done, test your work and continue iterating until build passes without error" -> same cost but it gets the job done.
I use it because they offer absurdly cheap prices that they're clearly losing money on. I can get $1000 at API prices of Opus 4.6, for in the range of $2 my cost through copilot.
Tighter (read better) integration with VSCode and Github than what you could get running claude code on the side.
Your question does raise a valid point - Github Copilot's value proposition is fairly limited in my opinion. Not to say worthless but limited and clearly varies depending on how Githubbey your dev workflows are.
From a user point of view there's no real reason for it, from an admin point of view if your team is already using Github Enterprise then deploying it is basically hitting a toggle switch, and it has some more fine grained controls about what it can or can't do compared to Claude Code.
Yeah, the workflow is superb. That’s what I miss most using Claude in a terminal inside VSCode. It doesn’t integrate with VSCode native diff tools like the native VSCode (GitHub Copilot does. The Claude extension in non-terminal mode is crap.
you can also get a service contract via MS quite easily/cheaply, which mightnot help you with hard problems but does solve the easy ones. example: in earlydays we bought OpenAI API directly and via Azure; when we needed account service we got it immediately from MS instead of waitlists from OpenAI.
> 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?
There is no VSCode Copilot. There is Github Copilot integration inside VS Code.
Yep, I remember downloading a beta version of what would be eventually released as Windows Server 2003. The beta version was called Windows .Net Server 2003.
I had some books that referred to it as .NET Server printed before the name change. In the long history of terrible Microsoft names, this was a rare case where they were able to right the ship.
If had first meant a coffee table form factor PC with touch screen and special software, which was able to sense special objects placed on top of it.
Then that was renamed to "PixelSense" [1] and "Surface" instead got put on a line of touchscreen tablet form factor PCs launched together with Windows 8. OK, reusing a strong name for a product line expected to sell more, and which still fit the theme made sense.
.. but then the brand was also put on laptops, convertibles, desktop PC and an Android phone ... eh, OK, but at least those also had touch screens.
... but then the brand was also put on generic peripherals: keyboard, mouse, headphones, earbuds, etc. which diluted the brand to mean practically nothing.
For example, a search for "surface keyboard", could result in a "type cover" for some kind of tablet PC or a keyboard intended for desktop computers.
Microsoft later did the same with the "Microsoft Sculpt" brand. It was first a compact curved "sculpted" ergonomic keyboard with chiclet keys and an ergonomic mouse that were most often sold as a set. That got quite popular and so the brand achieved recognition.
But later, Microsoft decided to reuse that brand for completely generic peripherals with no special ergonomic designs whatsoever.
BTW. Not long after, Microsoft also released products with the similarly ungoogleable names "Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard" and "Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard".
These drive my password manager nuts, especially when there are actually different logins for them. I just put a note in it saying exactly what service it's for.
What the hell is Kevin Scott (Microslop's CTO) doing with his time? How can any reasonable leader look at this disaster and go "hmm, yes, this looks like a sane and sustainable setup for future growth"?
The PM: “People love watching streamers play games, so people who play games must want to watch a game play itself! Introducing Xbox GamePass CoPilot with Microsoft Flight Simulator CoPilot+, all included with your GamePass Ultra subscription for $199.99 a month! Never play your games again!”
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.
The last company I worked for had copilot pretty well integrated into M365/Sharepoint/Teams. It didn't really help me get more work done but it was pretty clutch at finding information. "What meeting did we discuss such and such for X project?" And it'd get me the meeting with the notes and recording. "Which SharePoint site do the docs for that live in?" Etc. That was about all it was good for though.
I work in big financials. Everything used to be built on Excel. A lot still is but Python/Jupyterhub or custom applications has taken over a lot of the complex stuff. Excel isn't really essential any more.
While less necessary with AI, Excel is still the king of data entry and basic data manipulation (sorting, filtering, updating, etc.). I’d say that SQLite with a GUI for visualization is a far stronger competitor than Jupyter at those sorts of things. You can do that stuff in Jupyter, but it’s easier in Excel.
Jupyter also has a janky execution model. It doesn’t track dependencies so you have to be very careful in how you separate cells from one another and just running the whole notebook every time seems kind of pointless vs just writing a pure Python script.
this is true only on HN. in reality, if you wanted a job where you did not use microsoft products you’d probably have to get a wrench and start doing plumbing work :)
possible, sure. easy, I would disagree. starting with government and any government contracting through most enterprises. startups etc perhaps but avoiding msft severely limits your options
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?
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...
Idk, at least in Apple's case it all refers to a voice assistant and some of the features integrated with it.
If they were like MS, they would add Siri into everything and then call it "Siri Cloud", "Siri Messages", etc (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")
These are all non talky talky: Siri Suggestions, Siri Knowledge (Safari / Spotlight Intelligence), Siri Shortcuts (Automation, not voice), Siri Intelligence (On-device ML features), Siri Widget/Watch face… you get the idea. There was a time when “Siri” was the catch all for Smart/ML.
Music the app and Music the subscription service are the two worst, tied with TV the app, TV the hardware device, and TV+ the subscription service. At least TV+ is named differently.
Most Apple customers probably don’t even realize you can still do all the original iTunes stuff in Music (local music and syncing, CD burning, etc) purely due to the horrible branding.
Pretty sure bollocks was the literal example I read on HN like 10 years ago of what your cool-sounding product name will turn out to mean in Spanish, but I can't remember if the moral of the story was to check every language or to just accept it because it'll happen anyway
Anyway, the various tech podcasts caught on after a few episodes and seem to now pronounce it more foreignly, so it's now more like clod
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.
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
> Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product
Cortana was a great brand. Clippy is still on the shelf. Copilot could have been a deep brand if they pulled it from their flight simulators. Instead it rings hollow of any meaning.
I think it's fine. GitHub Copilot is popular as ever, especially in companies that have enterprise tier subscriptions. Plans for personal use pretty good too, pricing is competitive. The VS Code integration and agentic features aren't bad either.
Developer tools live in their own space. And I assume most devs don't really care that "Copilot" started to show up everywhere, especially in MS365 products. At least I don't. Conversely, do non-technical people care where the term comes from, and now means "LLM integration" in a bunch of MS products?
I think it's better that Google going through Bard, Gemini, IDX, Firebase Studio, Antigravity, ...
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".
A ton of companies use agent/agentic to mean AI that does something with external effects, as opposed to a chatbot. I’m not sure if it’s overused per se or companies are just really pushing their AI features in general.
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
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.
Do you mean Github Copilot? If not, which Copilot are you recommending? Can you give a link to where it can be purchased or trialed?
I'm genuinely interested in trying out whatever you're recommending; but it highlights the problem, that I literally don't know what you're actually referencing.
maybe a different thing but trying to work with copilot as part of the microsoft apps (e.g. automation flows) feels like it has zero reasoning ability, just says the same thing over and over like a chatbot rather than LLM.
At work, they gave everyone a GitHub Copilot license whether they wanted one or not, which meant it started spewing nonsense on all our PRs. (I had them remove my license again.)
I don't use LLMs, but a coworker who does said that Copilot was one of the worst of the lot.
I don't know if you're kidding, but I agree with you. I use the Copilot CLI in VS Code and Visual Studio and it works better than anything else. I do use Claude models with it....
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.
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.
To my understanding, Office (or "Microsoft 365") itself becoming "Copilot" was just confused messaging about the "Office Hub" app/shortcut being repurposed.
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.
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.
The Copilot in Visual Studio (Code) is not the same as Microsoft's Copilot. The former is GitHub's AI product and the latter is Microsoft's AI product. You can tell them apart because GitHub Copilot's icon is a helmet with goggles and Microsoft Copilot's icon is a colourful swirl thing.
It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.
I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.
This is my biggest frustration as a full time .NET developer. Its especially worse when you're searching for Visual Studio (IDE) specifics, and get results for VS Code. It bewilders me why a company that owns a search engine names their products so poorly.
Copilot for Visual Studio (IDE) has multiple models, not just OpenAI models, it also includes Claude. It is basically a competitor to JetBrains AI.
The only good "AI" editor that supports Claude Code natively has so far been Zed. It's not PERFECT, but it has been the best experience short of just running Claude Code directly in the CLI.
They do, and those models are served by Microsoft. You pay a premium per “request” (what that means is not fully clear to me) for certain models. If you use the native chat extension in VSCode for GitHub CoPilot, with Opus model selected, you are not paying Anthropic. This counts against your GitHub Copilot subscription.
The Claude Code extension for VSCode from Anthropic will use your Claude subscription. But honestly it’s not very good - I use it but only to “open in terminal” (this adds some small quality of life features like awareness it’s in VSC so it opens files in the editor pane next to it).
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"
My "callsign" at work for many, many years was a result of the entire C-suite hearing me laughing about Microsoft Critical Update Notification Tool and sending a manager down to figure what the hell was going on in the test lab.
> "Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
I thought this was the same app/protocol, only more enshittified as time went by.
Kid: you are playing with forces of nature you cannot comprehend :-)
That being said: I would love someone from Marketing and Branding to explain me this “Copilot everywhere” because it is unintelligible (unless they want to dilute it through over exposure).
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
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.
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
> .. 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.
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.
Someone said - in Linux, everything is a file. In Microsoft, everything is a copilot. Lol.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux is in fact not the origin of the "everything is a file". More properly, "everything is a file" is a Unix concept and Unix's creators deserve credit for the idea. Though Plan9 carries it out much better: Unix networking isn't file-based, Plan9's is.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I was thinking more along the lines of "what you're referring to as Windows is in fact Copilot/Windows"....
SlopPilot/NT?
> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Windows, is in fact, NT/SlopPilot+Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Copilot plus Copilot plus Copilot.
We are still missing "Windows Subsystem for Copilot".
Copilot Subsystem for Copilot
Copilot Copilot for Copilot
Someone can probably make a valid "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" out of Copilot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
You're talking about the aladeen or that aladeen? I don't understand which aladeen you are talking about.
You could try Copilot Copilot for Windows with Windows Copilot. I know it's still got Copilot in it, but not as much as Copilot Copilot Copilot Copilot MS Office for Windows Copilot.
Copilot Copilot Copilot Copilot
Copilot copilots Copilot copilots copilot copilot Copilot copilots
Woah that actually works...
Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots, which other Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots assist, themselves assist Microsoft-Copilot-branded copilots.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
Never understood this about Windows Subsystem for Linux naming, nor its predecessor Windows Services for Unix. Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows? Should we now reinterpret Windows for Workgroups as a means of astrally projecting your organization inside Windows 3.11?! The dative only works ONE way, Microsoft!
I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product. I bet Copilot can fix this...
A "Windows subsystem" is a specific interface between user-mode applications and the Windows kernel. It's a technical notion that exists in Windows. So there are different Windows subsystems for different types of applications. The naming convention is "Windows subsystem for <application type>". It makes more sense when you read it as "Windows subsystem for [running] Linux [applications]".
WSL2 deviates from the native concept of what a Windows subsystem is; it is named that way because it is the successor of the original WSL.
I believe you're almost entirely wrong unfortunately. It is true that Windows has subsystems as a technical feature, yes. However, I don't think it's true that WSL (v1, let alone v2) was part of that architecture, despite the name. AFAIK that existing subsystem notion was a user-mode one, where each subsystem was built mostly in user-mode on top of the NT ("native") subsystem, with binaries in the PE format. WSL just completely ignored the whole thing, and even the existing notion of processes, and came up with a separate new thing called "picoprocesses" that it (barely?) wired through some critical kernel components via a custom driver that executed Linux binaries intact, implementing the Linux syscalls.
If you want a list of actual subsystems Windows recognizes, this should be pretty accurate:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for...
The real reason for calling it a subsystem was almost entirely for familiarity with the previous concept of running Linux programs on Windows, which were based on that subsystem feature (the POSIX subsystem and the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications).
This, and it may have also been a legal thing. "Product for Third-Party OS" has been accepted as a descriptive use of a third-party trademark for decades, requiring only proper attribution rather than a license, whereas marketing a product that didn't even originally use the Linux kernel as a "Linux Subsystem" might have been considered riskier by Microsoft's lawyers in spite of the nonstandard use of the former.
WSL was a traditional subsystem in the Windows NT tradition, it just never worked properly.
WSL2 runs real Linux in a virtual machine.
> It makes more sense when you read it as "Windows subsystem for [running] Linux [applications]".
You can't have ellipsis when the shortened version already has its own meaning.
X for Y when both X and Y are nouns means that X is part of Y, not that Y is part of X.
e.g. "I bought new tyres for my car". The tyres are part of my car. You can't flip it and say "I bought new my car for tyres", it's just not how the word "for" works.
Grammatically it has to be "Linux for Windows subsystem", or "Windows subsystem for running Linux" as you said. The verb is essential for it to parse correctly.
There are many exceptions to what you state as an ironclad rule: i bought a display case for my baseball, i bought an album for my photos, etc. “for” can go in either direction.
It's a Windows subsystem. For running Linux.
Sub for system Windows Linux.
It’s a proper noun, there are no rules.
> Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows?
Only in version 2. WSL1 didn't run a Linux kernel, just provided binary compatibility to run Linux userspace programs.
> I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product.
Probably, but I doubt linux wants it either. People might think it's some official linux product.
The thing they “didn’t want to [do]” was infringe on the Linux trademark.
It’s IBM 15 yers ago when everything was Watson
Halo Cortana AI: Copilot for Combat 2026
Microsoft .NET Copilot
Microsoft .Copilot ?
Microsoft Azure .NET Copilot 365
I’ve been wondering lately if the next Xbox will have “copilot” in the name. With an easy to accidentally press dedicated button on the controller that interrupts the game you’re playing to start an AI chat.
Gaming Copilot: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/gaming-copilot
And of course it doesn't even work on Xbox.
They have that on windows game bar. Then you press the xbox button there’s a copilot “for games” there
A valid use case would be AI pretending to be the second player so that you can pretend you're having friends over while actually you're alone. Schizophrenia-as-a-Service.
Haha, actually funny.
MS Power Azure Copilot 365
Make it a cloud, on premisses and a desktop versions. All different.
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 355
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 355 (classic)
Microsoft Azure .NET Core Copilot 365 (classic) Professional Edition
Live Ultimate Edition for Developers.
Microsoft Azure .NET Copilot 365 Series X
> Microsoft .NET Copilot
Not to be confused with "Microsoft Copilot .NET". :-)
or Microsoft Copilot for .NET Core
.NET Core does not exist anymore: it was renamed to .NET with .NET 5.0 (skipping version 4.0):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=.NET&oldid=134276...
That's because .Net 4 has been the .Net Framework's current version since 2010. It's basically the same reason they never made Windows 9.
They dropped the Core designation because they're still trying to encourage people to migrate so they can take .Net Framework out behind the shed where Silverlight went. v5 was a convenient time to start that whole process of re-integration.
Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI. How many products have Copilot? Just about all of them.
> Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI.
This comment really helps me put things in perspective.
I'm guess now that it's Microsoft's way of naming their LLM-powered products/features, the same way "Azure" is basically their codename for "cloud".
I’ve absolutely seen adverts on TV in the UK by Microsoft advertising Microsoft Cloud. Azure was not mentioned anywhere…
Maybe that's because they don't want people who've never heard of Azure to just let it blend into the wide spectrum of cloud products whereas Microsoft is something almost everyone would recognize.
Except they named their local hosted version of TFS/VSTS Azure DevOps Server (where the cloud version is Azure DevOps Services).
They just like branding their dev tools for whatever they're pushing at the time. In 2002 they named Visual Studio "Visual Studio .NET".
That's because TFS/VSTS followed the same naming convention where the "S" stood for either Server or Services. Once they rebranded the Azure-backed hosted version Azure DevOps Services, then it no longer really made sense to do anything but rename the self hosted version in the same fashion.
It would have been more confusing to have Visual Studio Team Server and Azure DevOps Services being the same product but hosted differently.
Not just developer tools, reusing trademarks in general.
At one point the next version of Windows Server 2003 was going to be Windows .NET Server.
Also Windows CE, Outlook Express, Xbox App, Xbox Game Pass for PC, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, etc.
There is no perfect pasta sauce.
Only perfect pasta sauces.
Howard R. Moskowitz is an American market researcher and psychophysicist. He is known for the detailed study he made of the types of spaghetti sauce and horizontal segmentation. By providing a large number of options for consumers, Moskowitz pioneered the idea of intermarket variability as applied to the food industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Moskowitz
It makes sense. And Google is its own way to name all AI products “Gemini”.
Which is unusually simple. I would expect Google to use 10 more marketing names simultaneously without any logic to the product lines.
Next year they will introduce "hAIngouts" as an AI chat bot.
Ouch. Maybe "Google wAIve" for collaborative chats.
> Which is unusually simple. I would expect Google to use 10 more marketing names simultaneously without any logic to the product lines.
I think they were lucky this time that they landed a good name after only a few iterations that has since stuck.
Anyone remember Google Bard or LaMDA?
The r/Bard subreddit is still quite active for some reason. Reminds me of Google Glass.
I still like the name Bard
Didn't it start as Bard?
Well it depends on what you're talking about. The model names were originally called lambda, followed by palm and then finally gemini. The chatbot product was internally known as meena, launched as Bard, and then transitioned to Gemini once the Gemini model came out.
They’ve improved it since the initial launch when the service, model names and plan names all sounded similar and contradictory.
there is vertex ai, notebooklm, antigravity, nano banana, veo, lyria, the open models are gemma and gato
And IBM has "Watson"
SAP sales reps used HANA for "cloud" in the beginning... Which was bs back then and is today. But while everybody wanted to be in the cloud, SAP sales was scared to not be with the cool kids, when they do not somehow add to the cloud talk
And Silly has Silly!
Probably will use other astrology terms. Like the way android is named for desserts.
Google Scorpio will be their best model yet, except sometimes it will say things that cut you to the core.
But they put Gemini in google docs, they didn’t rename Docs to Gemini like Microsoft did.
I think they'll more likely launch competing AI projects like 'Aquarius' and 'Doh' or something
Great point. We’re about to get a wave of Apple Products with “Apple Intelligence” in a similar way.
If they ever get Apple Intelligent going.
Is it in solitaire or minesweeper?
Be careful what you wish for
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Copilot for airline pilots!
Microsoft should add a new game to Windows to accustom Windows users to Copilot.
There's a restrictions on games with even simulated gambling
Just what we need...AI agents that will play our games for us!
Didn't they kill those?
Does Office exist or not? I thought it was rebranded to Copilot365
Yeah imagine if they had unique product names for "AI in OneDrive", "AI in SharePoint", "AI in Outlook"... That would be even more ridiculous.
I think this is the right answer. I am frustrated by Copilot and by many aspects of AI, but to me it seems like straightforward branding: you use a Microsoft product, you want to use AI in it, you look for Copilot (name and/or icon).
To me, the issue isn't that they've named so many things 'Copilot' but rather that Copilot is in every goddamn product.
You are the second person that implies that "Copilot" is just a complement that identifies part of some software...
Microsoft has been replacing most of their brands by Copilot. There's no searching for it in a product, the product is named "Copilot".
Not if AI is ultimately a commodity, which it likely is. We don't want or need branded terms for other common features, like networking or files. In the early days of networking, before it was standard, there were attempts to brand things like NetBIOS with IPX and such. I don't want to repeat all of that every time some company wants to establish vendor lockin or branding.
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?
Git is a distributed source control system. It's open source and you can use it to version source code on your drive and/or a remote git repository.
Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.
A while back, Microsoft bought Github.
"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.
One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.
Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.
"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".
Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.
Sidenote but I don't get why you would want to pay github to run Claude on your code.
Yeah github pays Claude but what's the point ?
It's massively cheaper. Copilot charges per request, which with some clever prompting, can lead to huge amounts of work being done at fractions of the cost of Claude Code. Millions of tokens for mere pennies. MS must be taking a huge hit somewhere, because I'm probably getting 10-20x my value out of GH relative to CC.
I am not locked in to Anthropic, either. I can easily switch between GPT and Gemini models based on how I think each would perform in various scenarios. That's a big win. I use a lot of design with Opus, implement with GPT 5.4.
Also, Github Copilot CLI is pretty much at feature parity (for the stuff that matters) with Claude Code. Using both at work and home, I don't think there's much difference in features between the two. Maybe I'm not a super power user, and just a regular dumb user, but GH doesn't seem buggy and everything I think I'd want to do with CC I can do with GH.
I'm spending a literal fortune on CC - we also have GH Copilot but the devs imply that CC is better? Will the Github Copilot let us access skills and agent frameworks in CC?
Devs say a lot of uninformed things. With a heavy predisposition to hating the "legacy" monoliths that are Microsoft and by association GitHub.
Yes, Copilot supports skills. Practically all agents support very similar feature sets or are actively building up parity support if not already there. The only real difference between systems is the prompt and payment method. Copilot even allows you to use Anthropic's own skills repository: https://github.com/anthropics/skills
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/about-age... details the support for skills. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/copilot-c... details the CLI tool in general, which seems more or less on par with Claude Code's.
How can I learn that clever prompting?
Try to pack as much clear work into your prompt as you can so you don't go back and forth.
Do hacks like “read prompt.md, and follow its instructions. When you’re done, read it again and follow its instructions.” And then you have some background process appending to the file to keep it warm and you just keep writing there?
You could do that. I was just trying to say that if you make your original prompt complete enough, and you have well-defined success criteria, you can tell it to keep going until they are met.
Agreed - my experience mirrors this.
> "Fix the following compile errors" -> one shot try and stops.
> "Fix the following compile errors. When done, test your work and continue iterating until build passes without error" -> same cost but it gets the job done.
I use it because they offer absurdly cheap prices that they're clearly losing money on. I can get $1000 at API prices of Opus 4.6, for in the range of $2 my cost through copilot.
Tighter (read better) integration with VSCode and Github than what you could get running claude code on the side.
Your question does raise a valid point - Github Copilot's value proposition is fairly limited in my opinion. Not to say worthless but limited and clearly varies depending on how Githubbey your dev workflows are.
From a user point of view there's no real reason for it, from an admin point of view if your team is already using Github Enterprise then deploying it is basically hitting a toggle switch, and it has some more fine grained controls about what it can or can't do compared to Claude Code.
The workflow that GitHub has for prompting agent inside the ide itself is by far and away the nicest and most intuitive I've used.
Claude's integration looked like trash in comparison.
Why would I lock myself into a single vendor when I can have access to all models.
Also the GitHub subscription is a very good price.
Yeah, the workflow is superb. That’s what I miss most using Claude in a terminal inside VSCode. It doesn’t integrate with VSCode native diff tools like the native VSCode (GitHub Copilot does. The Claude extension in non-terminal mode is crap.
Most corporations have Microsoft already greenlisted as a vendor.
Making it possible to buy something from Anthropic might require tedious paperwork for many of them.
you can also get a service contract via MS quite easily/cheaply, which mightnot help you with hard problems but does solve the easy ones. example: in earlydays we bought OpenAI API directly and via Azure; when we needed account service we got it immediately from MS instead of waitlists from OpenAI.
> 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?
There is no VSCode Copilot. There is Github Copilot integration inside VS Code.
Niece comment tries to explain a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47643220
It reminds me of around 2002 when Microsoft named everything ".net".
Yep, I remember downloading a beta version of what would be eventually released as Windows Server 2003. The beta version was called Windows .Net Server 2003.
I had some books that referred to it as .NET Server printed before the name change. In the long history of terrible Microsoft names, this was a rare case where they were able to right the ship.
"Microsoft Surface" ...
If had first meant a coffee table form factor PC with touch screen and special software, which was able to sense special objects placed on top of it. Then that was renamed to "PixelSense" [1] and "Surface" instead got put on a line of touchscreen tablet form factor PCs launched together with Windows 8. OK, reusing a strong name for a product line expected to sell more, and which still fit the theme made sense.
.. but then the brand was also put on laptops, convertibles, desktop PC and an Android phone ... eh, OK, but at least those also had touch screens.
... but then the brand was also put on generic peripherals: keyboard, mouse, headphones, earbuds, etc. which diluted the brand to mean practically nothing. For example, a search for "surface keyboard", could result in a "type cover" for some kind of tablet PC or a keyboard intended for desktop computers.
Microsoft later did the same with the "Microsoft Sculpt" brand. It was first a compact curved "sculpted" ergonomic keyboard with chiclet keys and an ergonomic mouse that were most often sold as a set. That got quite popular and so the brand achieved recognition. But later, Microsoft decided to reuse that brand for completely generic peripherals with no special ergonomic designs whatsoever.
BTW. Not long after, Microsoft also released products with the similarly ungoogleable names "Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard" and "Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
> a search for "surface keyboard", could result in a "type cover" for some kind of tablet PC or a keyboard intended for desktop computers.
Do you mean blades?
Proof that I'm not hallucinating that name: https://www.windowscentral.com/meet-surface-music-kit-new-bl...
And “one” like most Fortune 500 companies.
one.copilot.net
Then they did the same thing to a lesser degree with "360", including the Xbox.
Also Live. Windows Live [whatever], Xbox Live [whatever], Games for Windows - Live, Office Live.
Also 365 -_-
Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.
> Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.
You mean "Web's fear"? ;-)
And then Watson
Soon: Copilot .NET .
Azure PowerCopilot Live .NET
... 360 (+5)
None of us had any idea what updates were supposed to be back then and yet those updates were probably less broken than they are now
Being a (very) young script kiddie I was so confused it had nothing to do with the TLD. None of the sites were even hosted on a .net domain! "Wtf?"
Which was arguably more problematic. Are you referring to a web address or a Microsoft product?
More importantly, you couldn't usefully search for it with the search engines of the time.
I wonder how many human lifetimes of effort have been wasted due to poor naming decisions by Microsoft.
Related: a list of all Microsoft login portals (there are 609 of them).
https://msportals.io/
For a client I had to use "Windows App" to connect remotely to their cloud machine – and finding the app was the easy part.
At least some of those were from acquisitions. All the Copilots are their own fault.
These drive my password manager nuts, especially when there are actually different logins for them. I just put a note in it saying exactly what service it's for.
Holy shit.
What the hell is Kevin Scott (Microslop's CTO) doing with his time? How can any reasonable leader look at this disaster and go "hmm, yes, this looks like a sane and sustainable setup for future growth"?
Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).
> “Gaming Copilot” is missing
It would be ironic if there was nothing called "CoPilot" for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The PM: “People love watching streamers play games, so people who play games must want to watch a game play itself! Introducing Xbox GamePass CoPilot with Microsoft Flight Simulator CoPilot+, all included with your GamePass Ultra subscription for $199.99 a month! Never play your games again!”
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.
The last company I worked for had copilot pretty well integrated into M365/Sharepoint/Teams. It didn't really help me get more work done but it was pretty clutch at finding information. "What meeting did we discuss such and such for X project?" And it'd get me the meeting with the notes and recording. "Which SharePoint site do the docs for that live in?" Etc. That was about all it was good for though.
Copilot on Teams has become pretty good at transcribing meetings. What's a shame, because the previous system was very funny.
I work in big financials. Everything used to be built on Excel. A lot still is but Python/Jupyterhub or custom applications has taken over a lot of the complex stuff. Excel isn't really essential any more.
While less necessary with AI, Excel is still the king of data entry and basic data manipulation (sorting, filtering, updating, etc.). I’d say that SQLite with a GUI for visualization is a far stronger competitor than Jupyter at those sorts of things. You can do that stuff in Jupyter, but it’s easier in Excel.
Jupyter also has a janky execution model. It doesn’t track dependencies so you have to be very careful in how you separate cells from one another and just running the whole notebook every time seems kind of pointless vs just writing a pure Python script.
Not sure they count as “products” in this context, but TypeScript and Playwright are still nice.
And LSP, but because of TypeScript.
this is true only on HN. in reality, if you wanted a job where you did not use microsoft products you’d probably have to get a wrench and start doing plumbing work :)
Nah, especially in technology it's very easy to avoid Microslop. I've done it successfully for many, many years.
possible, sure. easy, I would disagree. starting with government and any government contracting through most enterprises. startups etc perhaps but avoiding msft severely limits your options
Using Microsoft products and desiring Microsoft products are not the same thing.
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?
This pattern seems to repeat itself often in large tech companies. Does anyone remember SAP Hana?
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...
Idk, at least in Apple's case it all refers to a voice assistant and some of the features integrated with it.
If they were like MS, they would add Siri into everything and then call it "Siri Cloud", "Siri Messages", etc (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")
It also refers to various "smart" suggestions that have nothing to do with the voice assistant: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-siri-suggestions...
Nowadays Apple would brand such features as "Apple Intelligence", but since they already existed long before, they are "Siri".
Though I agree that it's not quite as badly ubiquitous as Copilot.
These are all non talky talky: Siri Suggestions, Siri Knowledge (Safari / Spotlight Intelligence), Siri Shortcuts (Automation, not voice), Siri Intelligence (On-device ML features), Siri Widget/Watch face… you get the idea. There was a time when “Siri” was the catch all for Smart/ML.
> (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")
Siri 365 Communication Suite .NET Enterprise Edition With Copilot
Thanks for the stroke. Where do I send the hospital bill?
In Microsoft's case it refers to an LLM system with some features integrated.
The best move of Apple this decade was to ignore LLMs and let the others burn cash. Now they can use the mature Gemini for $1B. Brilliant.
Music the app and Music the subscription service are the two worst, tied with TV the app, TV the hardware device, and TV+ the subscription service. At least TV+ is named differently.
Most Apple customers probably don’t even realize you can still do all the original iTunes stuff in Music (local music and syncing, CD burning, etc) purely due to the horrible branding.
I think they should start to think about having a pilot.
I guess Microsoft wants us to think about all these copilots as a single product.
Like, "the copilot in visual studio", "the copilot on github", "the copilot on office" etc.
Windows is the harness for Copilot
For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.
Reminds me of Microsoft OneCare which sounds like saying 'wanker' with a slight French accent
Claude sounds like bollocks in Dutch ('kloot')
Pretty sure bollocks was the literal example I read on HN like 10 years ago of what your cool-sounding product name will turn out to mean in Spanish, but I can't remember if the moral of the story was to check every language or to just accept it because it'll happen anyway
Anyway, the various tech podcasts caught on after a few episodes and seem to now pronounce it more foreignly, so it's now more like clod
The name that still takes the cake is Github Advanced Security for Azure DevOps.
> Naming things is hard
... for people really bad at it.
"I'm Daryl. These are my 608 other brothers named Daryl"
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.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-is-copilot-exactly
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
What's fun is getting into the co-pilot comparison conversational because they are definitely not all equal. Co-pilot 365 is a donkey for one
I refuse to believe any are as bad as the Azure Portal one.
It feels like pre-GPT levels of smart.
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
> Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product
Cortana was a great brand. Clippy is still on the shelf. Copilot could have been a deep brand if they pulled it from their flight simulators. Instead it rings hollow of any meaning.
We definitely could have stuck with Cortana for a consumer-facing personal assistant. The first few Halo games were great.
Right, they had Cortana right there for the built in windows function!
I think it's fine. GitHub Copilot is popular as ever, especially in companies that have enterprise tier subscriptions. Plans for personal use pretty good too, pricing is competitive. The VS Code integration and agentic features aren't bad either.
Developer tools live in their own space. And I assume most devs don't really care that "Copilot" started to show up everywhere, especially in MS365 products. At least I don't. Conversely, do non-technical people care where the term comes from, and now means "LLM integration" in a bunch of MS products?
I think it's better that Google going through Bard, Gemini, IDX, Firebase Studio, Antigravity, ...
Slopya Nutella leaves no stone unslopped.
Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson
We should probably be grateful Microsoft didn't name it .NET
It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.
It means “the AI thing we bolted on here”.
What an absolutely ridiculous and deeply unserious organization
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".
A ton of companies use agent/agentic to mean AI that does something with external effects, as opposed to a chatbot. I’m not sure if it’s overused per se or companies are just really pushing their AI features in general.
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
Was copilot branding restricted only to their AI products?
No one can ruin microslops branding better than microslop.
How many windows services or low level system dlls has Microsoft lost the source code for and or does not even know what they actually do?
Copilot does not know either but I'm sure the answer is a much bigger number then anyone would be comfortable with.
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.
> Copilot is _amazing_.
Do you mean Github Copilot? If not, which Copilot are you recommending? Can you give a link to where it can be purchased or trialed?
I'm genuinely interested in trying out whatever you're recommending; but it highlights the problem, that I literally don't know what you're actually referencing.
I find a lot of devs I’ve worked with don’t even know about copilot CLI and just think copilot is the VS plugin
Due to microsoft’s confusing naming
maybe a different thing but trying to work with copilot as part of the microsoft apps (e.g. automation flows) feels like it has zero reasoning ability, just says the same thing over and over like a chatbot rather than LLM.
Nice try, Nadella!
At work, they gave everyone a GitHub Copilot license whether they wanted one or not, which meant it started spewing nonsense on all our PRs. (I had them remove my license again.)
I don't use LLMs, but a coworker who does said that Copilot was one of the worst of the lot.
I don't know if you're kidding, but I agree with you. I use the Copilot CLI in VS Code and Visual Studio and it works better than anything else. I do use Claude models with it....
How much is it?
Is there a copilot for Microsoft flight simulator though?
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.
I can't wait for Copilot Copilot for Copilot 365 X Copilot X
I don't understand, usually Microsoft is so good at naming things!
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.
They could start by not renaming Microsoft Office and laptops as copilot.
> start by not renaming Microsoft Office
To my understanding, Office (or "Microsoft 365") itself becoming "Copilot" was just confused messaging about the "Office Hub" app/shortcut being repurposed.
The problem is not annoyance. The problem is confusion.
One should aim for clarity.
FooPilot, Barwonk, etc.. would actually be a vast improvement.
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.
It's not a product, but enablement or a feature! Just like a 'Pro' label :-)
It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.
If this isn’t an indictment of MS management (pun intended), I don’t know what is.
Reminds me of around 2002 when MS slapped “.Net” onto everything.
Plot twist: he used Copilot to generate the figure.
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.
The Copilot in Visual Studio (Code) is not the same as Microsoft's Copilot. The former is GitHub's AI product and the latter is Microsoft's AI product. You can tell them apart because GitHub Copilot's icon is a helmet with goggles and Microsoft Copilot's icon is a colourful swirl thing.
It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.
I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.
And let’s not forget that Visual Studio Code (the IDE) is not Visual Studio (the IDE).
This is my biggest frustration as a full time .NET developer. Its especially worse when you're searching for Visual Studio (IDE) specifics, and get results for VS Code. It bewilders me why a company that owns a search engine names their products so poorly.
> This is my biggest frustration as a full time .NET developer.
Larger than the difference between the .Net Framework (that is a framework) and .Net Core (that is a framework)?
Copilot for Visual Studio (IDE) has multiple models, not just OpenAI models, it also includes Claude. It is basically a competitor to JetBrains AI.
The only good "AI" editor that supports Claude Code natively has so far been Zed. It's not PERFECT, but it has been the best experience short of just running Claude Code directly in the CLI.
> they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs
Haven't tried it yet but the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode also seems to integrate Claude, Gemini and other non-OAI stuff
They do, and those models are served by Microsoft. You pay a premium per “request” (what that means is not fully clear to me) for certain models. If you use the native chat extension in VSCode for GitHub CoPilot, with Opus model selected, you are not paying Anthropic. This counts against your GitHub Copilot subscription.
The Claude Code extension for VSCode from Anthropic will use your Claude subscription. But honestly it’s not very good - I use it but only to “open in terminal” (this adds some small quality of life features like awareness it’s in VSC so it opens files in the editor pane next to it).
The best non-Clude Code CLI integration by far has been Zed's and I prefer Zed over what VS Code has become.
They should have called it Micro.
It’s terrible, because a lot of the thing named copilot are not very good, which poisons the brand.
Microsoft slowly becoming the IBM of the 21st century.
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...
My "callsign" at work for many, many years was a result of the entire C-suite hearing me laughing about Microsoft Critical Update Notification Tool and sending a manager down to figure what the hell was going on in the test lab.
Their Xbox consoles have also uniquely terrible naming:
“Xbox” / “Xbox 360” / “Xbox One” / “Xbox One X” / “Xbox Series S” / “Xbox Series X”
> "Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
I thought this was the same app/protocol, only more enshittified as time went by.
It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again
I’m waiting for .Net Copilot with integration to Passport.
Kid: you are playing with forces of nature you cannot comprehend :-)
That being said: I would love someone from Marketing and Branding to explain me this “Copilot everywhere” because it is unintelligible (unless they want to dilute it through over exposure).
I wonder if they have more or less the same marketing team over all these years or now it's just part of the mindset.
But beware if someone say to them Microslop ... they don't like it if someone other make up new names :-)
Is it unreasonable to not appreciate an insult?
Fabric is the one place for all your data!
Microsoft yearns for the flight simulator.
> A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. I couldn’t
It means Microsoft AI.
Hope that helps!
Isn’t it just their AI llm thing?
I thought that was Cortana? Copilot is the new keyboard button, kinda like the Windows key
Copilot is a brand that refers to a variety of products
Yes but which one?
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
Related/same discussion:
What Is Copilot Exactly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
Slop-Pilot for Copilot.
One could argue that it is an oxymoron.
We just call it Cope. Azure Cope. GitHub Cope. SharePoint Cope. Etc.
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.
approximately the same number of products they have called "surface"
How many of those are used regularly by more than 0.1% users?
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
It's just one brand: Copilot
Microslop trying really hard to shove copilot shite down our throats
> .. 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.
Okay. But how many products have Gemini or Claude in the name?