Someone said - in Linux, everything is a file. In Microsoft, everything is a copilot. Lol.
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lateforwork
Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI. How many products have Copilot? Just about all of them.
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chatmasta
I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap?
This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea which GitHub MCP server I setup in Claude Code, but the domain has “githubcopilot” in it. Am I burning copilot tokens (or “requests” or whatever is their billing unit) when I use this from Claude?
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quag
It reminds me of around 2002 when Microsoft named everything ".net".
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schappim
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...
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chatmasta
Related: a list of all Microsoft login portals (there are 609 of them).
Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).
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BirAdam
The only Microsoft products I’ve actively heard people desire within the last 5 years are VSCode and Excel. Microsoft have so severely damaged their brand that they’ve finally shed the image of oddly gray Dell midtowers running XP on Pentium 4.
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Tiereven
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.
mandeepj
It's not a product, but enablement or a feature! Just like a 'Pro' label :-)
TradingPlaces
For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.
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starkeeper
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.
georgeburdell
Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson
firefoxd
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
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bmenrigh
Reminds me of around 2002 when MS slapped “.Net” onto everything.
gwf
It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.
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r0m4n0
To be fair, Google does it too. I just had the product I work on renamed to Gemini Enterprise. Sure we use Gemini but it’s confusing because it’s not really an “enterprise” version of Gemini. It’s just a way to name drop what it uses under the hood. This was our third rename in 4 years so probably will change again soon
nlawalker
I actually was just thinking about doing something very similar for this but for "agent," specifically in the Microsoft ecosystem. There are a zillion different proper nouns (products, services, frameworks, toolkits and tools, SDKs etc.) containing "agent" now, plus a bunch of other things that are now "agentic".
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claysmithr
I can't wait for Copilot Copilot for Copilot 365 X Copilot X
claaams
No one can ruin microslops branding better than microslop.
1a527dd5
Ignoring the disaster that is their branding/naming.
Copilot is _amazing_. Everyone is hyping about Claude, but I'm way more productive with the copilot cli. The copilot cloud agent is great, and copilot code review is great (we also tried the new very expensive claude code review - it was slow and expensive).
Forget that it's Microsoft, forget that everything is Copilot and go and give it a shot.
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Dwedit
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.
ChicagoDave
If this isn’t an indictment of MS management (pun intended), I don’t know what is.
shireboy
I get that it's annoying, but also don't know what else one would do? "FooPilot is our Office AI toolset, BarWonk is our code assist tool"? There are also a lot of Claudes and GPTs. Naming things is hard.
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tedk-42
Microsoft slowly becoming the IBM of the 21st century.
Razengan
It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again
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2OEH8eoCRo0
It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.
yunnpp
Plot twist: he used Copilot to generate the figure.
giancarlostoro
Its annoying especially since Copilot exists in Visual Studio (Code too I believe) and its not exactly "the same" thing as far as I can tell. I really hate Microsoft's naming conventions. At least call that one Copilot for Devs or something more meaningful.
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mirekrusin
They should have called it Micro.
BikeRanger
We just call it Cope.
Azure Cope. GitHub Cope. SharePoint Cope. Etc.
yieldcrv
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
stephenlf
Microsoft yearns for the flight simulator.
EvanAnderson
Microsoft is uniquely unable to name / brand anything sensibly:
"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows" / "Outlook (classic)"
.NET: .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Windows .NET Server. Ugh...)
The love of the term "Explorer": "Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "File Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"
Similarly is the love of "Defender": "Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"
"Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)
Windows 95 shipped with an email client called "Exchange" that could be used peer-to-peer (using a filesystem-based "Microsoft Mail Postoffice"), but there was also the email server platform "Exchange"
"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams" / "Microsoft Teams for Business"
How many of those are used regularly by more than 0.1% users?
rdsubhas
Blame brain dead product managers who merely want to hoist their poor quality yearly performance review slop on something existing that carries SEO/SEM value.
Most of the time, these piggy backers only pull down the value of what they're riding on.
walrus01
This is what happens when you have some sort of top-down directive from the C-level people to put "AI" in everything, and dozens of department/project managers who all have their own fiefdoms
Handy-Man
It's just one brand: Copilot
sublinear
> .. the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things. Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’.
Right, so then it's not a "product", or even a range of "products".
It's a brand name and inherently pointless to map out. It doesn't even have to involve any "AI" to be given the branding. All that matters is it's a thing they have, new or old, that they'd like to push people towards.
throwaway87543
Okay. But how many products have Gemini or Claude in the name?
Someone said - in Linux, everything is a file. In Microsoft, everything is a copilot. Lol.
Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI. How many products have Copilot? Just about all of them.
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?
It reminds me of around 2002 when Microsoft named everything ".net".
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...
Related: a list of all Microsoft login portals (there are 609 of them).
https://msportals.io/
Surprisingly, I immediately noticed that “Gaming Copilot” is missing (i.e. The version of Copilot that Microsoft shoehorned into the Xbox mobile app).
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.
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.
It's not a product, but enablement or a feature! Just like a 'Pro' label :-)
For a moment it was called Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Naming things is hard.
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.
Reminds me of the 2010s when IBM called everything Watson
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
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
Reminds me of around 2002 when MS slapped “.Net” onto everything.
It's the new .NET in that it been so overused as to become almost meaningless.
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
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".
I can't wait for Copilot Copilot for Copilot 365 X Copilot X
No one can ruin microslops branding better than microslop.
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.
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.
If this isn’t an indictment of MS management (pun intended), I don’t know what is.
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.
Microsoft slowly becoming the IBM of the 21st century.
It's MSN, Plus, Live, Surface, 365 all over again
It sucks they got rid of Cortana. The thought of being Master Chief with a Cortana of your own sounds badass.
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.
They should have called it Micro.
We just call it Cope. Azure Cope. GitHub Cope. SharePoint Cope. Etc.
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
Microsoft yearns for the flight simulator.
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...
Isn’t it just their AI llm thing?
Related/same discussion:
What Is Copilot Exactly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603231
How many of those are used regularly by more than 0.1% users?
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
It's just one brand: Copilot
> .. 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?