28 comments

  • wkat4242 2 days ago

    Which copilot does he talk about? The bing one, the M365 one, the GitHub one, the studio, the sales version that integrates work Salesforce bwaaaah. Microsoft marketing is a total confusing mess as always.

    And I agree with him regarding copilot for M365. It's really been rushed to market. it's good for a few things and really bad at other things it promises especially in excel.

    • thedougd 2 days ago

      M365 copilot is a poor product in search of a use. I expected it to be my assistant. So far I’ve found that it can’t do any of the things I would ask of an assistant. It cannot create calendar entries. It cannot identify (correctly) who reports to me or give me a list of email addresses for employees of a particular organization unit. So far I’ve found it okay at summarizing things, but not reliably. Of a large email chain it only summarized the most recent few emails.

      • wkat4242 2 days ago

        Yes indeed. And meeting notes are full of errors. Also because the transcription really sucks with non-native speakers. I'm often surprised the notes even make sense when I read the transcript garbage.

        The problem is that people are already relying on it. Several times a day I get copy pasted meeting minutes with the "generated by AI, check for accuracy" disclaimer still on it. But the user just dumped it onwards.

        This is not how this should work. The user responsible for the minutes should check the notes themselves and then send them on. They still save time by not having to write them from scratch.

        But of course people are lazy and when the incorrect minutes lead to the inevitable confusion they just shrug and quote that disclaimer. NO, you're responsible even if you've used the AI. Really ticks me off. These minutes are often for people that couldn't attend the meeting so they have no way to "check for accuracy".

        • emptiestplace a day ago

          I agree that people should care about what it is producing on their behalf, but as long as it looks like something, it's probably gonna fly—someone actually taking the time to read it is more of a hypothetical anomaly anyway.

          I suspect the real problem is much more fundamental: the vast majority of work we do is bullshit, and nobody gives a fuck about any of it.

          • wkat4242 a day ago

            If nobody is going to read it then just don't do minutes.

            But in my experience these minutes are referred to later to see what happened in the past especially when something went wrong and then this garbage makes for really confusing results and can even get people accused for incorrect decisions. Especially because the full transcripts and recordings are usually expired.

            Incorrect/misrepresented meeting minutes are a lot worse than none at all.

            That's why I do read them and correct the assholes that just dump them on the email because I don't want to be accused later of saying or doing something I didn't do.

  • zdware 2 days ago

    This is the same company that put out a local dev server for their frontend stack and let it rot into an unusable buggy mess 2 years later. They are planning to re-introduce it in 2025.

    Ive been using MS copilot successfully for Apex (Salesforce's backend language) and JavaScript. I would trust Microsoft over Salesforce any day for dev tools.

    • karlgkk 2 days ago

      apex is a child’s toy language designed to do simple form building applications. It’s no surprise that LLMs excel in writing it

      • zdware a day ago

        Yeah it's basically java 1.5...

  • sagman 2 days ago

    He's right. I asked Microsoft Copilot what Salesforce does but it could not explain

    • m463 a day ago

      Isn't salesforce what microsoft does? like deprecate win 10 to force sales of win 11?

      • sagman a day ago

        Jokes aside, I genuinely don't know everything Salesforce does. Used their tool to get customer feedback data once in my last company, and it was worse than anything I used from Microsoft (probably unfair comparison because I did not use a product from same category.) Also how long do you want an OS supported (they supported it for 10 years). It's not like Win 10 stops working once MS stops supporting it.

  • breadwinner 2 days ago

    Microsoft has blown their AI advantage. Perplexity.ai is what Bing could have been.

    • shadowvoxing 2 days ago

      You.com is pretty great too. It has greatly reduced my need for Google.

    • m463 a day ago

      Never underestimate the advantages microsoft has.

  • indigodaddy 2 days ago

    MS Copilot was pretty great up until the last few weeks when they rolled out a totally new version, that is indeed, vastly inferior to the previous product. Too bad they didn’t leave well enough alone.

  • linotype 2 days ago

    Salesforce owns Slack, a competitor to Microsoft’s Teams.

    • razakel a day ago

      Which is also a horribly bloated mess that doesn't really do anything you can't accomplish with IRC.

  • RHSeeger 2 days ago

    Co-pilot as in github copilot, available in IntelliJ? Because I find that to be pretty fantastic.

    • CitrusFruits 2 days ago

      They have an additional suite of products piggy backing off of GitHub co-pilot's success sharing the "Copilot" branding.

      • wkat4242 2 days ago

        Yeah it's such a confusing jumble. The Microsoft people we work with even get confused about which feature is in which copilot. And they keep changing stuff around. Until last week the copilot button in windows 11 worked fine with business M365 accounts but now you get a screen saying you must have a personal account.

        They're so hell bent on rushing this to market that they don't know what they're doing anymore.

    • wodenokoto 2 days ago

      What OpenAI might call a gpt, or others a chatbot, Microsoft calls a copilot.

      And all their copilot offerings are named copilot, and sometimes you are lucky enough that there’s a second word in the product name to differentiate it from the other products.

    • lovethevoid 2 days ago

      Copilot as in Microsoft Copilot

  • Sabinus 2 days ago

    A bit difficult to take this commentary entirely seriously when salesforce has launched a competing product, but I do broadly agree that Microsoft's AI offerings so far have been underwhelming.

    • spacecadet 2 days ago

      This. Onion, 2024, "CEO of competing product blasts competitors products as garbage!"

      • m463 a day ago

        "The onion movie is garbage" - rotten tomatoes

  • xpl 2 days ago

    > In the interview, Benioff also hyped up Salesforce’s new AI product, Agentforce

    • dangus 2 days ago

      You'd think they could have asked their AI to come up with a better name than that.