If Copilot was so great, surely I would have been asked to opt-in to a better Office 365 family plan with Copilot enabled, rather than trying to dark-pattern me into paying for a more expensive Copilot-enabled plan against my will (forcing me to attempt to cancel in order to be offered my old plan).
It probably doesn't help that Microsoft is using 'Copilot' to mean so many different things - their Office AI integration, Github's Copilot thing, some laptops now apparently - so that users who know what's going on get irritated and ones that don't get confused.
What's this "Office 365" you're mentioning? Microsoft has, I kid you not, actually renamed Office 365 to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Of which Copilot is one part, like Word and Excel. Yes, a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription gives you access to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Copilot. Please don't confuse it with GitHub Copilot, a completely different product. Or with Copilot Search in Bing.
Copilot Studio full - comes with above paid SKU plus a user entitlement (free), though agents are charged based on credits (1 cent USD/message) if the agent user doesn't have a paid SKU
Then there are the other SKUs, i.e. Security SKU, SharePoint SKU, etc.
What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes? There was Xbox One X/Xbox One S/Xbox Series S/Xbox Series X. Or .NET (previously .NET Core) vs. .NET Framework (which everyone used to just call “.NET”).
Years ago, I used to use a program called FolderShare, which was later purchased by Microsoft and renamed umpteen times to match the branding strategy of the moment.
I’ve always been amused by how the Wikipedia article starts off: “Windows Live Mesh (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare, Live Mesh, and Windows Live Sync) is a discontinued free-to-use Internet-based file synchronization application by Microsoft …”
I can't tell you how many times I've had customers buy the wrong MS product because the naming schemes are so confusing. Honestly for how often this happens and how long it's been part of their company it feels like us the consumer are on the butt end of some inside joke.
A little over a decade ago MS used to offer a full multi day course with certification simply to understand their licensing. If you were a reseller you needed at least some of your people to go through it if not all of them.
The funniest part was by the time they had got their certification, their information would often be outdated, so even their licensing experts would often be wrong about their licensing.
The tragedy is that Copilot actually was a brilliant name, back in the beginning when it was just a coding assistant. It was both evocative and descriptive: it's meant to help, but you are still in control. It was probably the best product name Microsoft had come up with years, so naturally there was no choice but to fuck it up.
.NET as a brand name was obviously chosen because the Internet was hot, and also because Microsoft has no taste. The Internet is no longer so hot, and now they have a name that has no hot implication to it. So maybe rebrand, which after all is the general tactic of people who have no taste.
So they would like you to believe they renamed Office 365 so you overpurchase: Office 365, which is just the office suite and email, is a separate set of SKUs from Microsoft 365, which also includes Windows Enterprise, Entra, etc.
There really is nothing officially called "Office 365" anymore, or "Office" in general. You're right that they have some (confusing) distinctions between Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot. For example, indeed you can purchase a "Microsoft 365" subscription that doesn't give you the enterprise AI features - but the app your employees will install to get access to Excel and Word is still called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" even if your org only has a Microsoft 365 subscription - at least on mobile.
Office 365 E3 is sold for $20.75 a month, Microsoft 365 E3 is sold for $33.75 a month.
And yes, confusingly, Microsoft also sells Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, which you'd think would be closer to the Microsoft 365 bundle... but it's not, it's a stripped down version of the Office 365 one. None of it makes sense, but "Office 365" is still very much, as I said previously, a whole set of subscription packages sold today, separate from Microsoft 365 ones.
Oh, interesting that they're still using it for subscription bundles, thank you for the correction. It's certainly gone from all of their B2C marketing that I could find - and it's also gone from the official app names. They're such a strange marketing department.
I cancelled my 365 subscription last night and was surprised to see that I was scheduled to pay $100 next month for an annual subscription tier that adds AI features that I would never use. The most valuable plan they offer is the one they charge the least for.
CoPilot One XS Series X? You really don't want the CoPilot One Series X, it's really a neutered version, and the CoPilot One XS Series S is decent but really doesn't cost any different, unlike the CoPilot XS Series S, which is obsolete.
I found it disappointing, that the same time MS gets a fine for bundling Teams with Office, they bundle another tool with it. As far I can tell it is an effective maneuver, previous company I worked for gave up selfhosted Mattermost instance, because "there is no point in maintaining it when we get Teams for free".
Almost. After battling with support for several months, a friend of mine recently learned that versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour. Makes me wonder what other features they're leaving out.
> Samer Baroudi, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, insists this is for your own good.
>
> "This offers a safer alternative to other bring-your-own-AI scenarios, and empowers users with Copilot in their daily jobs while keeping IT firmly in control and all enterprise data protections intact," Baroudi explained in a blog post.
whew. they seem to be confusing exactly who the customer is here. they think their target customer is the everyday windows user, but in reality the customer is every company's internal IT and infosec teams. theyre trying to persuade regular users to use the product, bit these users will in turm need to persuade their IT teams before this product can be used. big mix up for microsoft.
Microsoft enables self service trials and purchases on 365 tenants by default. Every new feature they deploy is on by default. This new personal account thing is also enabled by default.
Microsoft has been hostile to internal IT teams for a long time. They burned that bridge with me and my peers a long time ago. Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it.
MS hopes that users will start a trial for something, become reliant on it, then convince managers to override the IT teams and buy it. Just like how other SaaS products market to individual users instead of to IT departments.
It’s scummy.
No one should do business with Microsoft anymore at this point. That includes NPM, GitHub, VSCode too don’t forget. MS will get away with anything they want unless people push back and dump them.
Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it.
That is the traditional spin but if they pull many stunts like this how long will it continue? Corporate IT teams are infamous for being slow and unwieldy but that's not entirely fair because the corporate IT teams are usually also the ones on the hook if anything goes wrong. Screw up some sort of data protection or regulatory compliance issue and that can have serious and lasting implications for the entire business. Move fast and break things is not what you want when x% of your global turnover is at stake if a regulator decides to make an example of you. Letting anyone else play with your toys is definitely not what you want in that scenario - why else do Windows Enterprise and Education editions not try to force the same hostile measures onto their customers as all the lower tiers?
This looks like a huge misstep to me - the kind of mess that could actually be big enough to move the needle. And for Microsoft the greatest danger is probably the needle moving enough for everyone to see it. Once no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft except for that guy who just did it really could be the beginning of the end for them.
Microsoft also seems to have just abandoned one of the most powerful brands ever - Office - in a move that I can only assume was intended to show that Musk wasn't actually the craziest PR guy in the world when he renamed Twitter. There seems to be an outbreak of delusional thinking in Redmond and if this stuff doesn't get backtracked quickly I don't see a happy ending for MS here.
Apple for hardware. Maybe a few orgs even try PCs running Linux as we've seen in some governments looking to save $$$.
Google or countless smaller but established services for all the online stuff. The days when all businesses used Windows and Office for everything and the competitors were half-baked also-rans are long gone.
There is no lack of IT companies that will take your money if you're willing to move out of the Microsoft bubble. This is a momentum problem not a lack of competition problem.
Apple hardware can work, so long as the business isn’t dependent on any legacy desktop windows stuff (but there’s always VMs or RDP in that case).
But it is still somewhat a competition problem. Google workspace has better collaboration/live editing IMO but still lacks in some areas. Microsoft’s compliance/DLP stuff is better, InTune while not the best has actually shaped up to be a pretty good MDM and works on all OSes both desktop and mobile (including Linux), and you get endpoint EDR bundled as well as zero trust VPN (global secure access).
Google has no answer to a big chunk of what locks big enterprise into M365, but workspace is fine for medium and smaller companies that don’t need all of what MS has.
But I think those smaller companies are where the disruption will start.
MS used to be legendary for its efforts to maintain backward compatibility. I think it has lost a lot of credibility after the way it has managed Windows forward compatibility and support recently though.
It is apparently scrambling to offer extended support schemes right now rather than deal with the inevitable fallout of forcibly retiring Windows 10 on so many still-functional devices with no upgrade path to 11 even available.
It hasn't been very long since it forcibly obsoleted the Windows 7/8 generations that were also still in use on a significant number of devices at the time but did not include the level of control (or intrusion if you prefer) that Microsoft evidently wanted of its users' devices.
The difference this time is that it's showing contempt for even large customers' control. Corporate IT departments with all those externally imposed constraints can resist compromise and surrendering control much more strongly than most home users or small organisations.
This should be a strike against MS's trustworthiness, if true. A lot of workplaces are hesitant to utilise AI models due to privacy or sensitivity concerns.
FTA: "Government tenants (GCC/DoD) for some reason don't support this capability, the one that Baroudi insists "does not create new data exposure risks."
So the government customers that can really strike back at MS don't get this enabled by default. Very interesting...
I would also wonder if this would trigger IT review due to data access patterns. Having copilot start accessing documents would likely trigger certain security systems at many companies that are designed to prevent corporate espionage. It seems like a good possibility anyway, I certainly wouldn't be willing to risk it just so I could generate AI slop emails.
I actually ran into this recently. Someone linked a doc in iirc a teams chat. Ok, I have teams on my phone. Click the link and get a basic file view, controls are wonky so I’ll download it and…
> You need Edge to download this file
Oh no thanks, not on my phone. I can screenshot the relevant part?
> Screenshot is a black rectangle
Ok well I can copy and pa- fuck!
> Clipboard contains “your organization’s security policy prohibits copying on this device”
—
Also, my org’s policies apparently prevent me from using the official GitHub app, but I can browse the repo on edge? Make it stop.
Can’t see that going down well with sysadmins or legal or compliance
Even the ability to upload docs would already break rules potentially. eg data storage jurisdiction. Retention. Etc
The places that do allow confidential info on copilot did a mountain of work to ensure all the legal and compliance is fine. No way this “btw it’s enabled now just use your own“ approach flies
First I thought this was an old Aprils Fools post like the 'bring your gun to work day' posts back in the day. This is going to really make it hard to IT who are trying to enforce their company's contract mandated 'you can't charge AI work as billable work' clauses too. I would expect a push to the survey tool that identified all Microsoft subscription tokens on a person's equipment and narcing on those who do this. It feels like we're in the desperation zone here.
Large companies negotiate and get lower rates, but individuals get the sticker price. So it is in Microsoft's interest if more people took up the individual option. That said, I don't see it working in companies where everything is locked down.
Facebook should do bring your Meta glasses to work day for all the companies that are not as hip as they are.
Some companies might have IT departments that blocked X. Elon should buy xatwork.com or better yet use twimg.com to serve X but only at your workplace.
PirateBay is probably blocked at many workplaces. That's pretty backwards thinking. I think PirateBay should focus on creating more alternative frontends to bring back torrenting at work.
CloudFlare should smuggle in WARP so that you can tunnel out of your workplace.
Could put some cloud policies in place for IT departments to maintain control if they want.
More likely not enough businesses paying for Copilot licenses so they need to get employees using it to put pressure on IT teams to cave in and buy once a high up enough employee complains that it’s become essential to their job so they can boost Copilot sales and make line go up.
Microsoft aren't really reading the room here... I have to use 365 for work, I keep trying to disable Copilot wherever I can and in various apps (like Outlook) it's turned itself back on a few times...
Streaming company IP to Microsoft is a dumb thing to do. Solid reason to not permit Copilot.
This doesn't cleverly usurp the silly backwards IT team, it's sending confidential data to Microsoft for the benefit of Microsoft and the detriment of your company. I.e. clear cut firing offense.
If the above makes sense to you, consider not using the windows 10/11 spyware system and/or not sending all company email through their servers.
Microsoft will lose near 0% of customers over this. They might even gain market share! Existing customers will complain and then learn to live with and continue paying.
There's nothing any of their competitors can do - look at Slack vs. Teams. Those who don't like it found alternatives a long time ago.
Sysadmin here and this is the unfortunate truth. This is already disabled in my tenant along with the million other “features” MS shoves down our throats monthly.
But, we remain and businesses have no appetite to exit Microsoft, not that there’s an equivalent bundled competitior to everything a 365 license gets you.
So I keep tabs on what’s coming out of Redmond, curse at them inside, and then disable the crap and move on with my job.
MS knows no one is leaving so they continue to get away with it.
We have compliance guidelines in place, Microsoft is trying to cater to the shadow IT folks that disobey company guidelines to try out stuff, and then have fun with IT and their employer when things go wrong.
Didn't you get the memo that crime is legal now? Sure, maybe some admin in 2028, might start proceedings against them in 2029, that would be decided against them by ~2035. But you see, _this time_ forced bundling will work!
They did exactly this in the early days of computing, having people who bought microcomputers run DOS and set up ad hoc networks etc. then later, IT had to adopt and support it.
The length that these companies are going to avoid another financial crisis is hilarious... They poured trillions in they don't know how to salvage it...
It's scary because this will be worse than 2008, and it's right around the corner, think about how much Nvidia has grown because of LLM investment from companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, what will happen to inventory once it crashes? It's not just AI companies that will suffer, hardware companies will see massive dumping and unless they can do significant advancements soon, this won't suddenly be fixed.
They cannot admit to themselves that they've created a massive bubble that cannot be contained.
The idea is that users can circumvent IT policies which explicitly have not enabled or banned such products. Microsoft is hoping to sneak under the tent to enable more subscriptions directly from users if they cannot get companies to pay.
Which is a bold play. At my company, were I to try and smuggle data out to a third party-that is normally an insta-termination level offense.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Microsoft is encouraging employees of other companies to break company policy, so that Microsoft can gather more data.
Uploading company internal documents to Microsofts servers, circumventing IT, is obviously something most companies would see as a severe violation of duties by the employee.
The KPIs of some random Microsoft middle manager trumps customer priorities. They have a quota to meet!
But to play the Devil's advocate: back in the good old days, before Google was a thing, I would go out to customer sites and they would ask me with a straight face "why I needed the Internet?" to do my job. (These days I just tether to my phone, but this was long before that was a viable option.)
Soon, access to AIs will be like access to Google: mandatory for getting your work done to an acceptable standard in a reasonable time.
Those that fight against this are trying to hold the tide back with a broom.
If Copilot was so great, surely I would have been asked to opt-in to a better Office 365 family plan with Copilot enabled, rather than trying to dark-pattern me into paying for a more expensive Copilot-enabled plan against my will (forcing me to attempt to cancel in order to be offered my old plan).
It probably doesn't help that Microsoft is using 'Copilot' to mean so many different things - their Office AI integration, Github's Copilot thing, some laptops now apparently - so that users who know what's going on get irritated and ones that don't get confused.
What's this "Office 365" you're mentioning? Microsoft has, I kid you not, actually renamed Office 365 to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Of which Copilot is one part, like Word and Excel. Yes, a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription gives you access to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Copilot. Please don't confuse it with GitHub Copilot, a completely different product. Or with Copilot Search in Bing.
I present to you, the page of Copilots: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/whic...
(Note that they recently simplified their enterprise SKUs - there used to be one more I believe.)
This is hilarious.
> If you're an end user, have a Copilot installed, and not sure what Copilot you have
lol so they’re basically admitting their products are so confusing users need to read this document to understand which product they’re using.
There are many enterprise SKUs.
365 Copilot Chat - free SKU
365 Copilot - paid SKU
Copilot Studio lite - comes with above paid SKU
Copilot Studio full - comes with above paid SKU plus a user entitlement (free), though agents are charged based on credits (1 cent USD/message) if the agent user doesn't have a paid SKU
Then there are the other SKUs, i.e. Security SKU, SharePoint SKU, etc.
What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes? There was Xbox One X/Xbox One S/Xbox Series S/Xbox Series X. Or .NET (previously .NET Core) vs. .NET Framework (which everyone used to just call “.NET”).
>> What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes?
You can use Windows App [1] to connect to Windows to run your Windows apps.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/overview
I also use Windows App to connect to my Fedora box from my Mac :-P
Years ago, I used to use a program called FolderShare, which was later purchased by Microsoft and renamed umpteen times to match the branding strategy of the moment.
I’ve always been amused by how the Wikipedia article starts off: “Windows Live Mesh (formerly known as Windows Live FolderShare, Live Mesh, and Windows Live Sync) is a discontinued free-to-use Internet-based file synchronization application by Microsoft …”
I can't tell you how many times I've had customers buy the wrong MS product because the naming schemes are so confusing. Honestly for how often this happens and how long it's been part of their company it feels like us the consumer are on the butt end of some inside joke.
A little over a decade ago MS used to offer a full multi day course with certification simply to understand their licensing. If you were a reseller you needed at least some of your people to go through it if not all of them.
The funniest part was by the time they had got their certification, their information would often be outdated, so even their licensing experts would often be wrong about their licensing.
I'm still hoping for "Xbox One Series X" next
"Microsoft Copilot X" would be more on-brand for 2025.
I mean… they made that. The Xbox Series X is a faster Xbox Series S which is a faster XBox One…
The tragedy is that Copilot actually was a brilliant name, back in the beginning when it was just a coding assistant. It was both evocative and descriptive: it's meant to help, but you are still in control. It was probably the best product name Microsoft had come up with years, so naturally there was no choice but to fuck it up.
Microsoft marketing execs all rename their human children too, once they reach age 2.
>> What is it with Microsoft and confusing product naming schemes
Old but still relevant, Microsoft redesigns the iPod packaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k.
Oh my good gravy you weren’t joking.
How long until the brand piñata .NET gets renamed?
I mean looking at it..
.NET as a brand name was obviously chosen because the Internet was hot, and also because Microsoft has no taste. The Internet is no longer so hot, and now they have a name that has no hot implication to it. So maybe rebrand, which after all is the general tactic of people who have no taste.
Waiting for a rebranding to .AI Core Copilot 12 Fall Creators Update Service Pack 3.
Maybe Copilot will get wrapped into a Sky.NET meta-platform.
So they would like you to believe they renamed Office 365 so you overpurchase: Office 365, which is just the office suite and email, is a separate set of SKUs from Microsoft 365, which also includes Windows Enterprise, Entra, etc.
There really is nothing officially called "Office 365" anymore, or "Office" in general. You're right that they have some (confusing) distinctions between Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot. For example, indeed you can purchase a "Microsoft 365" subscription that doesn't give you the enterprise AI features - but the app your employees will install to get access to Excel and Word is still called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" even if your org only has a Microsoft 365 subscription - at least on mobile.
Please don't try to correct people if you do not know what you are talking about. I have quoted the different SKUs recently.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/com...
Office 365 E3 is sold for $20.75 a month, Microsoft 365 E3 is sold for $33.75 a month.
And yes, confusingly, Microsoft also sells Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, which you'd think would be closer to the Microsoft 365 bundle... but it's not, it's a stripped down version of the Office 365 one. None of it makes sense, but "Office 365" is still very much, as I said previously, a whole set of subscription packages sold today, separate from Microsoft 365 ones.
I also recommend this spreadsheet if you need to truly break your brain: https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcor...
Oh, interesting that they're still using it for subscription bundles, thank you for the correction. It's certainly gone from all of their B2C marketing that I could find - and it's also gone from the official app names. They're such a strange marketing department.
I cancelled my 365 subscription last night and was surprised to see that I was scheduled to pay $100 next month for an annual subscription tier that adds AI features that I would never use. The most valuable plan they offer is the one they charge the least for.
Yes they recently raised the price by merging copilot into it. No version of office is offered without copilot.
In April, I switched to Microsoft 365 Personal Classic which doesn't contain Copilot.
Has this been discontinued?
> No version of copilot 365 is offered without copilot.
FTFY.
And I believed that they actually begrudgingly provide that option in the EU?
Microsoft will clarify the situation by offering “CoPilot One”.
CoPilot One XS Series X? You really don't want the CoPilot One Series X, it's really a neutered version, and the CoPilot One XS Series S is decent but really doesn't cost any different, unlike the CoPilot XS Series S, which is obsolete.
Microsoft is master of confusing programs, confusing naming and plans. Pretty much everything they produce is royally unclear in its naming.
They previously renamed Remote Desktop to Windows App.
That's how you get your lunch eaten by Chrome Remote Desktop.
I found it disappointing, that the same time MS gets a fine for bundling Teams with Office, they bundle another tool with it. As far I can tell it is an effective maneuver, previous company I worked for gave up selfhosted Mattermost instance, because "there is no point in maintaining it when we get Teams for free".
Oh, shit. I could have gotten my old plan? Yay. >sigh< I assumed I was just stuck paying more and didn't research it.
Almost. After battling with support for several months, a friend of mine recently learned that versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour. Makes me wonder what other features they're leaving out.
> versions of Office without AI do not allow you to create Teams meetings that last longer than an hour
What other advantages are there?
> Samer Baroudi, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, insists this is for your own good. > > "This offers a safer alternative to other bring-your-own-AI scenarios, and empowers users with Copilot in their daily jobs while keeping IT firmly in control and all enterprise data protections intact," Baroudi explained in a blog post.
whew. they seem to be confusing exactly who the customer is here. they think their target customer is the everyday windows user, but in reality the customer is every company's internal IT and infosec teams. theyre trying to persuade regular users to use the product, bit these users will in turm need to persuade their IT teams before this product can be used. big mix up for microsoft.
Microsoft enables self service trials and purchases on 365 tenants by default. Every new feature they deploy is on by default. This new personal account thing is also enabled by default.
Microsoft has been hostile to internal IT teams for a long time. They burned that bridge with me and my peers a long time ago. Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it.
MS hopes that users will start a trial for something, become reliant on it, then convince managers to override the IT teams and buy it. Just like how other SaaS products market to individual users instead of to IT departments.
It’s scummy.
No one should do business with Microsoft anymore at this point. That includes NPM, GitHub, VSCode too don’t forget. MS will get away with anything they want unless people push back and dump them.
Unfortunately, MS knows it’s a captive audience and enterprises aren’t rushing to exit Microsoft anytime soon so they continue to get away with it.
That is the traditional spin but if they pull many stunts like this how long will it continue? Corporate IT teams are infamous for being slow and unwieldy but that's not entirely fair because the corporate IT teams are usually also the ones on the hook if anything goes wrong. Screw up some sort of data protection or regulatory compliance issue and that can have serious and lasting implications for the entire business. Move fast and break things is not what you want when x% of your global turnover is at stake if a regulator decides to make an example of you. Letting anyone else play with your toys is definitely not what you want in that scenario - why else do Windows Enterprise and Education editions not try to force the same hostile measures onto their customers as all the lower tiers?
This looks like a huge misstep to me - the kind of mess that could actually be big enough to move the needle. And for Microsoft the greatest danger is probably the needle moving enough for everyone to see it. Once no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft except for that guy who just did it really could be the beginning of the end for them.
Microsoft also seems to have just abandoned one of the most powerful brands ever - Office - in a move that I can only assume was intended to show that Musk wasn't actually the craziest PR guy in the world when he renamed Twitter. There seems to be an outbreak of delusional thinking in Redmond and if this stuff doesn't get backtracked quickly I don't see a happy ending for MS here.
Who are these companies going to go to? Moving away from MS products is notoriously hard for larger enterprises.
Apple for hardware. Maybe a few orgs even try PCs running Linux as we've seen in some governments looking to save $$$.
Google or countless smaller but established services for all the online stuff. The days when all businesses used Windows and Office for everything and the competitors were half-baked also-rans are long gone.
There is no lack of IT companies that will take your money if you're willing to move out of the Microsoft bubble. This is a momentum problem not a lack of competition problem.
Apple hardware can work, so long as the business isn’t dependent on any legacy desktop windows stuff (but there’s always VMs or RDP in that case).
But it is still somewhat a competition problem. Google workspace has better collaboration/live editing IMO but still lacks in some areas. Microsoft’s compliance/DLP stuff is better, InTune while not the best has actually shaped up to be a pretty good MDM and works on all OSes both desktop and mobile (including Linux), and you get endpoint EDR bundled as well as zero trust VPN (global secure access).
Google has no answer to a big chunk of what locks big enterprise into M365, but workspace is fine for medium and smaller companies that don’t need all of what MS has.
But I think those smaller companies are where the disruption will start.
Ah yes, killed by Google...
Google is a pile of its own risks. For all the problems MS has they keep backwards compatibility running for years if not decades.
MS used to be legendary for its efforts to maintain backward compatibility. I think it has lost a lot of credibility after the way it has managed Windows forward compatibility and support recently though.
It is apparently scrambling to offer extended support schemes right now rather than deal with the inevitable fallout of forcibly retiring Windows 10 on so many still-functional devices with no upgrade path to 11 even available.
It hasn't been very long since it forcibly obsoleted the Windows 7/8 generations that were also still in use on a significant number of devices at the time but did not include the level of control (or intrusion if you prefer) that Microsoft evidently wanted of its users' devices.
The difference this time is that it's showing contempt for even large customers' control. Corporate IT departments with all those externally imposed constraints can resist compromise and surrendering control much more strongly than most home users or small organisations.
This should be a strike against MS's trustworthiness, if true. A lot of workplaces are hesitant to utilise AI models due to privacy or sensitivity concerns.
FTA: "Government tenants (GCC/DoD) for some reason don't support this capability, the one that Baroudi insists "does not create new data exposure risks."
So the government customers that can really strike back at MS don't get this enabled by default. Very interesting...
I would also wonder if this would trigger IT review due to data access patterns. Having copilot start accessing documents would likely trigger certain security systems at many companies that are designed to prevent corporate espionage. It seems like a good possibility anyway, I certainly wouldn't be willing to risk it just so I could generate AI slop emails.
How do they even prevent leaks? Trying to paste something and getting a "Your organization's policy disallows this" would be amazing.
Next they should block me when I try to type the content manually into the Glorified Auto-Correct..
I actually ran into this recently. Someone linked a doc in iirc a teams chat. Ok, I have teams on my phone. Click the link and get a basic file view, controls are wonky so I’ll download it and…
> You need Edge to download this file
Oh no thanks, not on my phone. I can screenshot the relevant part?
> Screenshot is a black rectangle
Ok well I can copy and pa- fuck!
> Clipboard contains “your organization’s security policy prohibits copying on this device”
—
Also, my org’s policies apparently prevent me from using the official GitHub app, but I can browse the repo on edge? Make it stop.
Can’t see that going down well with sysadmins or legal or compliance
Even the ability to upload docs would already break rules potentially. eg data storage jurisdiction. Retention. Etc
The places that do allow confidential info on copilot did a mountain of work to ensure all the legal and compliance is fine. No way this “btw it’s enabled now just use your own“ approach flies
Microsoft's desperation is getting embarrassing.
First I thought this was an old Aprils Fools post like the 'bring your gun to work day' posts back in the day. This is going to really make it hard to IT who are trying to enforce their company's contract mandated 'you can't charge AI work as billable work' clauses too. I would expect a push to the survey tool that identified all Microsoft subscription tokens on a person's equipment and narcing on those who do this. It feels like we're in the desperation zone here.
Large companies negotiate and get lower rates, but individuals get the sticker price. So it is in Microsoft's interest if more people took up the individual option. That said, I don't see it working in companies where everything is locked down.
Next up, new job requirements added to job listings. MS 365 required.
This is pretty unacceptable in so many ways.
Facebook should do bring your Meta glasses to work day for all the companies that are not as hip as they are.
Some companies might have IT departments that blocked X. Elon should buy xatwork.com or better yet use twimg.com to serve X but only at your workplace.
PirateBay is probably blocked at many workplaces. That's pretty backwards thinking. I think PirateBay should focus on creating more alternative frontends to bring back torrenting at work.
CloudFlare should smuggle in WARP so that you can tunnel out of your workplace.
Could put some cloud policies in place for IT departments to maintain control if they want.
Recall was my final straw.
Are they trying to get more training data?
More likely not enough businesses paying for Copilot licenses so they need to get employees using it to put pressure on IT teams to cave in and buy once a high up enough employee complains that it’s become essential to their job so they can boost Copilot sales and make line go up.
Microsoft aren't really reading the room here... I have to use 365 for work, I keep trying to disable Copilot wherever I can and in various apps (like Outlook) it's turned itself back on a few times...
Solid marketing play.
Streaming company IP to Microsoft is a dumb thing to do. Solid reason to not permit Copilot.
This doesn't cleverly usurp the silly backwards IT team, it's sending confidential data to Microsoft for the benefit of Microsoft and the detriment of your company. I.e. clear cut firing offense.
If the above makes sense to you, consider not using the windows 10/11 spyware system and/or not sending all company email through their servers.
Microsoft will lose near 0% of customers over this. They might even gain market share! Existing customers will complain and then learn to live with and continue paying.
There's nothing any of their competitors can do - look at Slack vs. Teams. Those who don't like it found alternatives a long time ago.
Sysadmin here and this is the unfortunate truth. This is already disabled in my tenant along with the million other “features” MS shoves down our throats monthly.
But, we remain and businesses have no appetite to exit Microsoft, not that there’s an equivalent bundled competitior to everything a 365 license gets you.
So I keep tabs on what’s coming out of Redmond, curse at them inside, and then disable the crap and move on with my job.
MS knows no one is leaving so they continue to get away with it.
Microsoft's logo should be a Banyan tree. They do it so well.
> A banyan [...] develops accessory trunks from adjacent prop roots, allowing the tree to spread outwards indefinitely. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banyan
Unisys might have something to say about that, they absorbed Banyan Systems[1] in 2003
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banyan_Systems
This reeks of desperation.
We have compliance guidelines in place, Microsoft is trying to cater to the shadow IT folks that disobey company guidelines to try out stuff, and then have fun with IT and their employer when things go wrong.
Bring Your Clippy to Home Day
"Clippy did not want to harvest you with AI copilots. Clippy only wanted to help."
Presumably there's a paid option to prevent this in your org too, though maybe that paid option is to enable Copilot for your org
Wait, isn’t this similar to Microsoft+Explorer bundling from eons ago?
Didn't you get the memo that crime is legal now? Sure, maybe some admin in 2028, might start proceedings against them in 2029, that would be decided against them by ~2035. But you see, _this time_ forced bundling will work!
No need to look so far back: https://www.theverge.com/news/776968/microsoft-teams-eu-comm... . I didn't even know they weaseled out their way out of that penalty.
They did exactly this in the early days of computing, having people who bought microcomputers run DOS and set up ad hoc networks etc. then later, IT had to adopt and support it.
I unilaterally declare that it's "Satya Nadella gives all Microsoft employees a $30,000 raise from his own bank account" Day.
From the linked blog post it sounds like IT still fully controls permissions to use or not use this. It's just that users can pay for it.
Look up "echoleak"; the controls and permissions on co-pilot are an afterthought.
That would make sense, but that was not blindingly obvious from reading the article.
The length that these companies are going to avoid another financial crisis is hilarious... They poured trillions in they don't know how to salvage it...
It's scary because this will be worse than 2008, and it's right around the corner, think about how much Nvidia has grown because of LLM investment from companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, what will happen to inventory once it crashes? It's not just AI companies that will suffer, hardware companies will see massive dumping and unless they can do significant advancements soon, this won't suddenly be fixed.
They cannot admit to themselves that they've created a massive bubble that cannot be contained.
Maybe I get it, isn’t this forcing employees to pay for their own AI?
The idea is that users can circumvent IT policies which explicitly have not enabled or banned such products. Microsoft is hoping to sneak under the tent to enable more subscriptions directly from users if they cannot get companies to pay.
Which is a bold play. At my company, were I to try and smuggle data out to a third party-that is normally an insta-termination level offense.
Yeah this is MS spitting in the face of their actual customers, the IT teams that buy, deploy, and manage their software.
I’m a sysadmin and this is basically MS saying “fuck you” to my face.
Why don't they start to fix their AI they have running in Azure? Talk about useless!
Do they mean “force Copilot down your throat” day?
Microsoft wants more data
This is absolutely ridiculous. Microsoft is encouraging employees of other companies to break company policy, so that Microsoft can gather more data.
Uploading company internal documents to Microsofts servers, circumventing IT, is obviously something most companies would see as a severe violation of duties by the employee.
This is an awesome move. AI is the largest enabler of stubborn slow companies making the latest models available to their people.
That being said MS copilot is kinda klunky (like the rest of MS's product offerings)
The KPIs of some random Microsoft middle manager trumps customer priorities. They have a quota to meet!
But to play the Devil's advocate: back in the good old days, before Google was a thing, I would go out to customer sites and they would ask me with a straight face "why I needed the Internet?" to do my job. (These days I just tether to my phone, but this was long before that was a viable option.)
Soon, access to AIs will be like access to Google: mandatory for getting your work done to an acceptable standard in a reasonable time.
Those that fight against this are trying to hold the tide back with a broom.