Fabric is the one place for all your data!

But beware if someone say to them Microslop ... they don't like it if someone other make up new names :-)

I’m waiting for .Net Copilot with integration to Passport.

I wonder if they have more or less the same marketing team over all these years or now it's just part of the mindset.

The Copilot in Visual Studio (Code) is not the same as Microsoft's Copilot. The former is GitHub's AI product and the latter is Microsoft's AI product. You can tell them apart because GitHub Copilot's icon is a helmet with goggles and Microsoft Copilot's icon is a colourful swirl thing.

It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.

I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.

Copilot is a brand that refers to a variety of products

I thought that was Cortana? Copilot is the new keyboard button, kinda like the Windows key

Yes but which one?

Yep, I remember downloading a beta version of what would be eventually released as Windows Server 2003. The beta version was called Windows .Net Server 2003.

And “one” like most Fortune 500 companies.

Soon: Copilot .NET .

Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.

Then they did the same thing to a lesser degree with "360", including the Xbox.

"Microsoft Surface" ...

If had first meant a coffee table form factor PC with touch screen and special software, which was able to sense special objects placed on top of it. Then that was renamed to "PixelSense" [1] and "Surface" instead got put on a line of touchscreen tablet form factor PCs launched together with Windows 8. OK, reusing a strong name for a product line expected to sell more, and which still fit the theme made sense.

.. but then the brand was also put on laptops, convertibles, desktop PC and an Android phone ... eh, OK, but at least those also had touch screens.

... but then the brand was also put on generic peripherals: keyboard, mouse, headphones, earbuds, etc. which diluted the brand to mean practically nothing. For example, a search for "surface keyboard", could result in a "type cover" for some kind of tablet PC or a keyboard intended for desktop computers.

Microsoft later did the same with the "Microsoft Sculpt" brand. It was first a compact curved "sculpted" ergonomic keyboard with chiclet keys and an ergonomic mouse that were most often sold as a set. That got quite popular and so the brand achieved recognition. But later, Microsoft decided to reuse that brand for completely generic peripherals with no special ergonomic designs whatsoever.

BTW. Not long after, Microsoft also released products with the similarly ungoogleable names "Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard" and "Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense

Which was arguably more problematic. Are you referring to a web address or a Microsoft product?

Being a (very) young script kiddie I was so confused it had nothing to do with the TLD. None of the sites were even hosted on a .net domain! "Wtf?"

> Naming things is hard

... for people really bad at it.

Reminds me of Microsoft OneCare which sounds like saying 'wanker' with a slight French accent

The name that still takes the cake is Github Advanced Security for Azure DevOps.

It means “the AI thing we bolted on here”.

> Crazy how copilot was a great brand, and might even have been the first mass market LLM product

Cortana was a great brand. Clippy is still on the shelf. Copilot could have been a deep brand if they pulled it from their flight simulators. Instead it rings hollow of any meaning.

Slopya Nutella leaves no stone unslopped.

I think it's fine. GitHub Copilot is popular as ever, especially in companies that have enterprise tier subscriptions. Plans for personal use pretty good too, pricing is competitive. The VS Code integration and agentic features aren't bad either.

Developer tools live in their own space. And I assume most devs don't really care that "Copilot" started to show up everywhere, especially in MS365 products. At least I don't. Conversely, do non-technical people care where the term comes from, and now means "LLM integration" in a bunch of MS products?

I think it's better that Google going through Bard, Gemini, IDX, Firebase Studio, Antigravity, ...

> Copilot is just Microsoft's term for AI.

This comment really helps me put things in perspective.

I'm guess now that it's Microsoft's way of naming their LLM-powered products/features, the same way "Azure" is basically their codename for "cloud".

It makes sense. And Google is its own way to name all AI products “Gemini”.

Great point. We’re about to get a wave of Apple Products with “Apple Intelligence” in a similar way.

Yeah imagine if they had unique product names for "AI in OneDrive", "AI in SharePoint", "AI in Outlook"... That would be even more ridiculous.

Is it in solitaire or minesweeper?

> “Gaming Copilot” is missing

It would be ironic if there was nothing called "CoPilot" for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

A ton of companies use agent/agentic to mean AI that does something with external effects, as opposed to a chatbot. I’m not sure if it’s overused per se or companies are just really pushing their AI features in general.

> 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?

There is no VSCode Copilot. There is Github Copilot integration inside VS Code.

Niece comment tries to explain a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47643220

Git is a distributed source control system. It's open source and you can use it to version source code on your drive and/or a remote git repository.

Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.

A while back, Microsoft bought Github.

"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.

One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.

Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.

"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".

Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.

this is true only on HN. in reality, if you wanted a job where you did not use microsoft products you’d probably have to get a wrench and start doing plumbing work :)

I work in big financials. Everything used to be built on Excel. A lot still is but Python/Jupyterhub or custom applications has taken over a lot of the complex stuff. Excel isn't really essential any more.

Not sure they count as “products” in this context, but TypeScript and Playwright are still nice.

The last company I worked for had copilot pretty well integrated into M365/Sharepoint/Teams. It didn't really help me get more work done but it was pretty clutch at finding information. "What meeting did we discuss such and such for X project?" And it'd get me the meeting with the notes and recording. "Which SharePoint site do the docs for that live in?" Etc. That was about all it was good for though.

> "Messenger" was a term they loved: "MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" (which also evokes the whole "Windows Live" series of products)

I thought this was the same app/protocol, only more enshittified as time went by.

May I propose the following for the AI/LLM in everything era?

Microsoft is uniquely unable to name / brand anything sensibly:

"outlook slop" / "outlook slop Web Access" / "outlook slop Web App" / "outlook slop.com" / "new outlook slop for Windows" / "outlook slop (classic)"

slop: slop Framework. ASPslop. slop Core. Windows slop server slop. Ugh...)

The love of the term "slop": "Internet slop" / "Windows slop" / "File slop" / "MSN slop"

Similarly is the love of "slop": "Windows slop" / "Microsoft slop" / "Windows slop Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows slop Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"

"slop" was a term they loved: "MSN slop" / "Windows slop" / "Windows Live slop" (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 slop platform "Exchange"

"Microsoft teams slop" / "New Microsoft teams slop" / "Microsoft teams slop for Business"

"Microsoft FrontPage" / "Site server slop" / "Site server slop Commerce Edition" / "Office server slop" / "SharePoint Portal server slop" / "Windows SharePoint Services" / "Microsoft Office SharePoint server slop" / "SharePoint Foundation" / "SharePoint server slop" / "SharePoint Standard" / "SharePoint Enterprise" / "SharePoint Online" / "SharePoint Designer"

"Office Communicator" / "Microsoft Lync" / "slop for Business" / "slop" / "slop for Business Online" / "slop 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 slop" 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])

My "callsign" at work for many, many years was a result of the entire C-suite hearing me laughing about Microsoft Critical Update Notification Tool and sending a manager down to figure what the hell was going on in the test lab.

Their Xbox consoles have also uniquely terrible naming:

“Xbox” / “Xbox 360” / “Xbox One” / “Xbox One X” / “Xbox Series S” / “Xbox Series X”

The problem is not annoyance. The problem is confusion.

One should aim for clarity.

FooPilot, Barwonk, etc.. would actually be a vast improvement.

They could start by not renaming Microsoft Office and laptops as copilot.

Microsoft .NET Copilot

Halo Cortana AI: Copilot for Combat 2026

We are still missing "Windows Subsystem for Copilot".

Nice try, Nadella!

How much is it?

maybe a different thing but trying to work with copilot as part of the microsoft apps (e.g. automation flows) feels like it has zero reasoning ability, just says the same thing over and over like a chatbot rather than LLM.

> Copilot is _amazing_.

Do you mean Github Copilot? If not, which Copilot are you recommending? Can you give a link to where it can be purchased or trialed?

I'm genuinely interested in trying out whatever you're recommending; but it highlights the problem, that I literally don't know what you're actually referencing.

I don't know if you're kidding, but I agree with you. I use the Copilot CLI in VS Code and Visual Studio and it works better than anything else. I do use Claude models with it....

At least some of those were from acquisitions. All the Copilots are their own fault.

These drive my password manager nuts, especially when there are actually different logins for them. I just put a note in it saying exactly what service it's for.

Idk, at least in Apple's case it all refers to a voice assistant and some of the features integrated with it.

If they were like MS, they would add Siri into everything and then call it "Siri Cloud", "Siri Messages", etc (if they were even more like MS, iMessage would be "Siri 365 Communication Suite")

Music the app and Music the subscription service are the two worst, tied with TV the app, TV the hardware device, and TV+ the subscription service. At least TV+ is named differently.

Most Apple customers probably don’t even realize you can still do all the original iTunes stuff in Music (local music and syncing, CD burning, etc) purely due to the horrible branding.

The best move of Apple this decade was to ignore LLMs and let the others burn cash. Now they can use the mature Gemini for $1B. Brilliant.

What's fun is getting into the co-pilot comparison conversational because they are definitely not all equal. Co-pilot 365 is a donkey for one