Fewer than 4.5% of Microsoft 365 customers pay for Copilot after three years, only 1% use it weekly, and Microsoft raised prices regardless.
  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    57 minutes

    This is a good time to remind everyone of LibreOffice, which is free and fantastic.

    Also O&O ShutUp, which helps you turn off Windows’ intrusive anti-privacy features and delete Copilot. If you’d like to learn more I made a video about Windows privacy earlier this year.

  • blazeknave@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48 minutes

    What’s even behind it? I always assumed openAI given the early investment deal. Is Microsoft an AI vendor with their own frontier models?!

    • Zorque@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      I mean, it works at small scale… when people are honest about their products and desire… and dont just want to make money.

      Basically outside of capitalism.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    6 hours

    Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.

    And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there’s too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.

    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      6 hours

      ‘365’ subscribers got rate increases specifically because the copilot bullshit was bundled in. they’re already paying for it… they just don’t use it. and you have to jump through hoops, such as feigning a cancellation, just to be offered the non-copilot plan. most don’t know that even exists as an option.

    • dan1101@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6 hours

      Also when there are shortages of material goods, prices and profits go up.

        • Ekky@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          58 minutes

          Only if the software is being run on your own computer and not the cloud. Servers cost money and power.

  • yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6 hours

    Microslop is confused that the people forced to pay for shitty software won’t pony up for the optional shitty software.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 hours

    Microsoft claim there’s over one billion Windows 11 users though… So wouldn’t 4.5 % still be huge?

  • kescusay@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6 hours

    I mean, did anyone expect anything different? The frontier providers that Copilot depends on switched to token-based billing in a desperate and ludicrous attempt to somehow turn a profit on AI, so of course Microsoft is gonna jack up their prices too.

    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
      4 hours

      The service is the holy grail of MBA. You own nothing and pay constantly. Subscriptions galore and there is zero portability so high vendor lock-in once you start customizing. The pricing agreement is entirely one sided so the execs can set bonus payout performance objectives in ways that let them take advantage of properly timed price increases.

      It’s similar to AWS, Azure and the rest of the cloud platforms and i’ve never heard anybody say moving to those saved them money even after staff reductions.

    • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1 hour

      You’re doubly confused. You’re thinking of GitHub Copilot, when this is about M365 Copilot. Last I heard, they have 78 different products called Something Copilot, so confusion is understandable.

      But then what you’re actually thinking of is the “GPT” series of large language models, developed by OpenAI.
      GitHub Copilot is merely a GUI and a harness for large language models. It defaults to the GPT models, and is probably somewhat optimized for them, but it can use other models as well.

      This harness can influence the quality quite a bit, as it decides which source code files to feed into the model for context. I’m not aware of people saying that GitHub Copilot is particularly good at that, but it’s available as an extension for IDEs, so it automatically knows which files you’re editing, which can be useful.

      And yes, the GPT models have fallen quite a bit behind since the start of the year.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish
        1 hour

        But in Copilot Chat in MS Office for example, isn’t the LLM itself Copilot? That’s what I’m talking about as being a weak LLM — I know originally it was some variant of ChatGPT.

        GitHub Copilot now is less a model and more a router. Kind of a pity, they had a solid lead there. I at least used it to complete yaml and json configs and it made fewer typos than me.

    • TheOctonaut@piefed.zipEnglish
      2 hours

      Copilot isn’t an LLM. You can choose different LLMs per response, eg Chat GPT, Claude.

  • HackThePlanet@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6 hours

    Strange, I thought that paying more and more to get, in most cases, less and less was a good business move.

  • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5 hours

    I genuinely think AI is useful for about 2% more adoption of things than was going on before. 2% more coders, 2% more artists (for whatever that’s worth which isn’t a lot), just 2%.

  • HieroProtagonist@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6 hours

    The thing with Copilot is… it’s pretty useless. I mean, i am pro AI, i use Mistral daily for various tasks and toyed with others like ChatGPT and Grok, but Copilot is surely the least capable of the big models.

    • TheOctonaut@piefed.zipEnglish
      2 hours

      Second upvoted person in this /c/technology thread who thinks Copilot is a model and not an interface to several other models and literally naming models you can use in Copilot.

      I don’t know if ignorance of the technology you’re commenting on is considered a plus only if it’s AI.

    • nymnympseudonym@piefed.socialEnglish
      5 hours

      Ditto. I use Codex and Claude Code on a daily basis. Copilot feel like it’s from the 80s, a few generations behind

      • TheOctonaut@piefed.zipEnglish
        2 hours

        Microsoft CoPilot 365 is not GitHub Copilot. I’ll give you a pass on Microsoft’s incredibly bad naming policies.