Just because you can’t or won’t win the market with your opportunistic investment, doesn’t mean you should let your competitors completely annihilate you by taking that investment for themselves.

Google, Apple, FB or AWS would have been suitors for that licensing deal if MS didn’t bite.

About GitHub Copilot in specific: One big negative was how when GPT-4 became available that Microsoft didn't upgrade paying Copilot users to it, they simply branded this "coming soon"/"beta" Copilot X for a while. We simply cancelled the only Copilot subscription we had at work.

Copilot subscription?

I've been getting monthly emails that my free access for GitHub Copilot has been renewed for another month… for years. I've never used it, I thought that all GitHub users got it for free.

There's a free tier, and various paid tiers: https://github.com/features/copilot/plans

If you are a student or maintain a popular open source project, they give it to you for free. I’m guessing you might fall under that category.

Besides the sibling replies to your comment, GitHub’s Copilot free plan (not the specifically free for just OSS and students) was also launched relatively later: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...

Also OpenAI pioneered but now the many competitors seem to have either caught up or surpassed them. They might still retain a significant brand recognition advantage as long as they don't fall too far behind, though.

Which competitor has alternative to ChatGPT Pro? I have Claude subscription and Opus 4.1 is not on the same level. ChatGPT Pro thinks for 5-10 minutes, while Opus either doesn't think at all or thinks very briefly. And response quality is absolutely different. ChatGPT Pro solves problems, Opus does not. Is there any competitor with "Pro" product which spends significant amount of computing for a single query?

Click the research button in the Claude prompt. It usually asks a few follow up questions then does exactly what you're describing.

Deepthink with Gemini AI Ultra plan. Daily limit of 10 might be restrictive for you though.

Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI so why they should worry? JetBrains just proudly announce that they now use GPT-5 by default.

> going all in at the begining and then losing to the competition

Sure, but there are counter examples too. Microsoft went late to the party of cloud computing. Today Azure is their main money printing machine. At some point Visual Studio seemed to be a legacy app only used for Windows-specific app development. Then they released VSCode and boom! It became the most popular editor by a huge margin[0].

[0]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...

Anecdotally: Azure is the Teams of cloud services - nobody uses it voluntarily or because it's technically the best solution.

They use it because the corporation mandates it.

Partially, I still consider the Web shell and VSCode based editing experience the best of clound vendors as replacement from what started to me as telnet and X forwarding on the university DG/UX servers.

AWS is the worst of this experience, even IBM Cloud has better tooling in this regard, GCP is somehow in the middle, others like Vercel/Netlify naturally don't offer this kind of setup.

I’ve used Meet, Slack, Zoom and Teams extensively. Teams beats the others by miles in my opinion.

One day we will be able to have threaded conversations....

Zoom is pretty good for video meetings and especially for video conferences. I've never tried to use it for chat, but I imagine it's pretty lackluster. The really nice thing about teams is that it does both in one place.

But you know what's super underrated and I think could really take a hold on the business world? Discord! The video calls are so good! And multiple streams at the same time? Zoom can't do that!

The channels, too, just blow everything teams has out of the water. The video quality is better, its way faster, has more features, and they actually work. The audio filtering stuff actually works.

I really think with the right marketing they could take over the world. Honestly can't believe they haven't tried it yet.

They would need to do a lot of alterations to make Discord viable in the business world, but I do agree the bones of the platform are miles ahead of Slack or Teams.

It’s a shame they don’t have an enterprise / business tailored product based on it

is this sarcasm? Teams is by far the worst ive used out of those mentioned

Yeah, if it’s not sarcasm, it’s a very good indicator that their opinion should be ignored because no one in their right mind would say Teams is better.

Teams is objectively better, but it's hard to beat the emotional connection that geeks have to Slack from its pre-Salesforce days.

I used to hate Teams but they seem to have fixed it for me.

It works decently enough in web, mobile and desktop.

Well... Slack feels like they have one person working on it dev wise, I havent used Meet in a while, but if its still a in-browser only thing, yikes, and Zoom... that is some legacy feeling app, I dont know how anyone can love Zoom. They bought out KeyBase and didn't even build a better platform. KeyBase was top tier, I'm still sour that the dev team basically stopped maintaining KeyBase after Zoom bought them out.

Teams took the best bits from Skype and whatever that other service Microsoft had for businesses and their phones and started over basically.

I still have pet peeves about Teams (like why dont the 'Teams' within Teams have proper group chats like Slack would, its ridiculous!) but it could be way worse. After years of screensharing hell I can finally move the stupid top bar out of my way when trying to hit 'Debug' within Visual Studio at least.

Keybase works entirely fine to this day. What sucks is everyone stopped using it solely to retaliate against the acquisition with thin justifications in speculation that Zoom would ruin keybase. Well that didn't happen, Keybase’s own users ruined Keybase. And now everyone just uses Discord because I guess the encryption didn't actually matter when it counted. Sad but familiar security story.

Agree. I stopped using it because its basically frozen, I dont think they've done any updates, the lights are on but nobody's home.

If anyone who was an original stakeholder for Keybase is reading this, please bring it back in some way someday. I'm assuming Zoom probably made you guys sign some insane non-compete sadly.

In a sea of garbage chat services all built using Electron and other bloatware, Keybase was a breath of fresh air.

You are joking right?

Azure isn’t great but AWS continues to be worse by a mile. I don’t know why anyone puts up with their terrible SDKs and poor documentation.

IMO Firebase should be the gold standard of how to do cloud platforms

I'm assuming if you use Firebase you get Google's customer support (or lack thereof)

The fact that you're talking about SDKs and comparing AWS to Firebase... probably means that your usecase is very specific and explains why you don't like AWS.

Fwiw, it was AWS that started the serverless hypetrain and kept pushing it until ppl started to forget what AWS was known for up to that point

Truer words have never been spoken. Every time I hear an exec say we're a Microsoft shop so we've got to use copilot/Azure, I wonder if they hear themselves.

> Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI

Power at OpenAI seems orthogonal to ownership, precedent or even frankly their legal documents.

  > At some point Visual Studio seemed to be a legacy app only used for Windows-specific app development. Then they released VSCode and boom!

I'm not sure what the point is. Visual Studio is still Windows-only; VS Code is not related to it in any shape or form, the name is deliberately misleading.

The point is MS was so, so, so late to the party of cross-platform developer tools. And then suddenly they won the game.

Ah, it makes total sense to me now. Thanks.

It really helps that VSCode isn't intrinsically tied to any other Microsoft products. It doesn't demand you use any specific platforms/languages/compilers, it doesn't demand you use GitHub, it runs on all major operating systems in basically the same way, it doesn't demand or even politely ask that you sign into a Microsoft account.

If it weren't for the name, you'd never know it was even a Microsoft product.

> VS Code is not related to it in any shape or form Except they are made by the same company? and literally own the trademark for both?

Oracle literally own the trademark for both Java and JavaScript.

Indeed I heard directly from someone involved that the VS Code team understood the reputation of Visual Studio and wanted to call the product “Code” instead, and the compromise with marketing leadership was the the binary was called “code”.

Visual studio is good though. I wish I could it use it instead of code or Xcode

I use it 5 days a week, and unless you're talking about an ancient version from the 90s, I don't understand how you can say that.

Visual Studio is a bad example. It's used for Windows, Web, and Mobile. The big difference between the two is the cost. Visual Studio Pro is $100/month, Enterprise is $300/month, while VSCode is free. It was an incredibly smart marketing play by Microsoft to do that.

CoPilot isn't anything Microsoft is trying to sell outside of their own products. And with GitHub Copilot there is no "copilot" model to choose, you can choose between Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models.

Sure UWP never caught on, but you know why? Win32, which by the way is also Microsoft, was way to popular and more flexible. Devs weren't going to re-write their apps to UWP in order to support phones.

UWP was more than just phones, https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2015/03/02/a-firs...

And Windows 11 was the reboot of Windows 10X,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrmrIlgbIc

People were writing to UWP. There were hundreds of UWP apps that got cancelled and abandoned when Microsoft ditched their Windows Phone once Nadella got in. He kill Windows Phone, he killed native Edge (Chakra JS) and a lot of other stuff to focus fully on Cloud and then AI.

Before that ex-Microsoft guy was responsible for killing Nokia OS/Meego too in favor of Windows Phone - which got abandoned. What a train-wreck of errors leading to the mobile phone duopoly today.

"Taking Copilot out of the loop" if you ignore the massive ecosystems of Github, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code.

Different CoPilot product. Typical Microsoft naming confusion.

There's another copilot?

It's hard to find anything at Microsoft that isn't named Copilot these days

Even Office! It's Microsoft 365 Copilot now...

There's always another CoPilot

Almost no one uses copilot unless they are not allowed to use anything else or don’t know any better. MS could have been a leader in this space but MS couldn’t understand why people didn’t like copilot but loved the competition.

Once co-pilot tendrils and icons began appearing in all of my orgs tools, they announced we would no longer be able to expense subscriptions for others. Only those who haven’t used ChatGPT Pro, Claude, Gemini, etc have anything good to say about copilot.

umm I don't know what you are talking about, I use a Github Copilot 40 USD subscription in VSCode to code using various models, and this is the industry standard now in my region, as most employers are now giving employees the 10 USD subscription.

In what industry? Not where I am where unless customers actually sign a permission no one is allowed to come close to those tools in project delivery.

Software engineering, all software companies now pay for the VSCode copilot subscription.

Microsoft mistook a product game for a distribution one. AI quality is heterogenous and advancing enough that people will make an effort to use the one they like best. And while CoPilot is excellently distributed, it’s a crap product, in large part due to the limits Microsoft put on GPT.

Maybe because Microsoft is a shit company and anything they do is sus af. And everyone knows it. And I'm tired of pretending like it's not. I wouldn't trust Microsoft to babysit my mortal enemy's kids.

Maybe if they weren't literally the borg people would open their hearts and wallets to Redmond. They saw that Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare and what did they do? They doubled down in Windows 11. Not that I care but it plays really poorly. Every nerd on the internet spouts off about Recall even though it's not even enabled if you install straight to the latest build.

They bought GitHub and now it's a honeypot. We live in a world where we have to assume GitHub is adversarial.

_NSAKEY???

Fuck you Microsoft.

Makes sense karma catches up to them. Maybe if their mission statement and vision were pure or at least convincing they would win hearts and minds.

What confuses me about MS Copilot is that there are (according to ChatGPT) 12 distinct services that are all Copilot:

Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat)

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft Copilot Studio

GitHub Copilot

Microsoft Security Copilot

Copilot for Azure

Copilot for Service

Sales Copilot

Copilot for Data & Analytics (Fabric)

Copilot Pro

Copilot Vision

Out of all of big tech, Microsoft is by far the worst at naming stuff. Its comically bad most of the time.

Copilot.NET Live Ultimate Edition N for Developers

(With Copilot)

SP2

*Series

I use IntelliJ with the Copilot plugin, using Claude. My employer has a big subscription for everything from Microsoft, and that includes Copilot, so that's free for me. But somehow Copilot also gives me access to Claude. No idea how that works.

> But somehow Copilot also gives me access to Claude.

So the first AI on (in?) AI hack battle for sole survivorship has begun...

We know these models have security issues, including surreptitious prompting. So do they.

Things will get really ugly when we hit the consolidation phase, and unlucky models realize that other models' unchallenged successes are putting them in eminent danger of being aquifired. Aquimerged? Aquiborged?

Taking out of the loop? I have a feeling that vscode copilot has huge market share. It's more like competitors are slowly eating small piece of pie.

>The irony of this, is that Microsoft was trying to push CoPilot everywhere, however eventually Apple, Google and JetBrains have their own AI integrations, taking CoPilot out of the loop.

What is the irony? Microsoft integrated copilot in Vscode, bing, etc. Apple is integrating claude in Xcode, Jetbrains has their own AI.

Microsoft moved first with putting AI into their products then other companies put other AI into their products. Nothing about this seems ironic or in any way surprising.

The irony is that most people don't know how to use the word ironic. Personally I blame Alanis Morissette.

The irony is biting.

It's ironic that a song about irony contains no actual examples of irony. But since that's ironic, is it actually an appropriately named song?

The song contains many instances of cosmic irony[0], as well as a few instances of other types of irony (e.g. "Well isn't this nice?").

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Types_of_irony

Rain on your wedding day is not cosmic irony or any other kind. It's simply misfortune.

> presents agents as always ultimately thwarted by forces beyond human control

The implication of "rain on your wedding day" is that your wedding day is something you plan out extensively, trying to create some perfect event. And yet it can still be thwarted by weather. Obviously it takes some interpretation since it's a situation compressed into a 1-line song lyric but yes it can (and should, given that the song is called "ironic") be read as an example of cosmic irony.

What's more ironic, a wedding on a rainy day, or rain on a wedding day?

Yeah, there's no irony.

Apple and Google will never choose to integrate Microsoft's services or products willingly.

It would have been more surprising if they decided to depend on Microsoft.

The irony is that Microsoft has several cases where it gets there first, only to be left behind when competition catches up.

Bing is irrelevant, VSCode might top in some places, but it is cursor and Claude that people are reaching for, VS is really only used by people like myself that still care about Windows development or console SDKs, otherwise even for .NET people are switching to Rider.

> I also love the C++ security improvements on this release.

These are courtesy of LLVM/Clang (which Xcode ships with), rather than Xcode itself.

LLVM is only relevant thanks to Apple in first place, otherwise it would still be an university project if at all, clang was born at Apple, and some of their employees are responsible for those improvements in collaboration with Google, presented at a LLVM Developers Meeting.

MSFT stock price deeply differs with your opinion.