Microsoft has pushed its "Copilot" AI in a lot of places. It's in Windows. It's in Office (excuse me, "Microsoft 365") applications. It's in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, and GitHub. If Microsoft has a property, Microsoft has injected Copilot into it.
Little of this (if any) has gone over well with customers. Combined with the injection of advertising, the push of AI has created so much dissatisfaction that customers are leaving Windows for Mac or (gasp) Linux.
A lot has been written (or recorded and posted on YouTube) about this. I won't rehash the arguments here.
What I will ask is this: Why is Microsoft doing this? Why is Microsoft putting Copilot into its products and services willy-nilly, much like it did with the ".NET" label for product names.
I have an idea:
Microsoft doesn't know how customers will use AI, or what they want to do with it.
This is a change for Microsoft. For much of its life, Microsoft has played "catch-up" with technology. After its lead with BASIC, and its fortunate contract with IBM for PC-DOS, Microsoft has been following others. It followed Apple's MacIntosh computers with Windows. It followed a number of database providers with SQL Server. It followed NetScape with Internet Explorer. It followed Java with C#. It followed the iPod with the Zune (look it up). It followed Amazon AWS with Azure.
Now Microsoft is following other AI providers with its Copilot. But those other AI providers are different from Apple and NetScape and Sun Microsystems (the makers of Java). They all knew what their customers wanted, and they provided a solution that met those wants.
Today's providers of AI don't know what their customers want. They don't know how to make a profit from AI. But they are popular and Microsoft is following them, which means that Microsoft doesn't know when their customers want from AI and Microsoft doesn't know how to make a profit from AI.
I find all of this rather unsettling.
