Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11 Copilot in Windows is set to get even more assertive after Microsoft added a function that makes the AI assistant's window pop up after a user's cursor hovers over the icon in the task bar. Microsoft's Copilot has touched every part of Redmond's portfolio in the past year. The IT giant even went so far as to drop a bare-bones …
But in all seriousness, we've seen MS attempt this before - indeed, with Clippy. They want to make computing 'warm and fuzzy' for the unwashed masses, from Bob (remember that?) to Clippy. This is yet another attempt at the 'fuzzy'.
Probably like Bob, and Clippy, CoPilot's current UIX will get flushed down the toilet at some future point in time, when the market & the great unwashed get sick of the "wonderful experience!" imbued by a constantly-nagging prompt. Just have patience, MS is a slow learner.
It is very apparent what is happening here: Microsoft is being driven by their marketing department. "New and shiny!" are the rules, and "AI!" is today's buzzword.
And the hardware sellers are all-in, saying "Yes please!" because they foresee / hope that it will drive hardware update sales.
From the perspective of the industry it is all a win-win. We, the users, aren't really part of the discussion - we are expected to buy in to whatever they decide to push. But that is every industry nowadays, from Apple to Oracle to Ford. The Quarterlies are king, and we're actually an inconvenient stepping stone to that end - we, the customer, are unpredictable. The MBA's hate that. They want us to behave exactly like their formulas, believe in the industry and their newest products. They couldn't believe when people walked away from their mortgages in 2008 - what do you MEAN they aren't paying?!! - and continue to believe in their own majesty, their decisions are infallible. Push the latest, the hottest trends, the buzzwords and the hype - show us the money!
It is not as if we don't know this. We simply believe, in our own naivete and hope, that they won't do the same lies and delusions that they pulled on us before.
Aren't we the silly ones.
I figured all along that this is the reason that they are shoving this down everyone's throat.
It's why we are now seeing all of this AI crap everywhere. A while back a bunch of large investors were told that AI is the future by some hucksters trying make a quick buck, and they all jumped in head first with billions of dollars. Now, even though no one really wants any of this, they have to show "adoption rates" to justify investing other people's money in this nonsense.
Every new version of Windows makes the previous versions look great.
Moving from Windows 10 to Windows 11 is like the old Windows XP to Windows Vista up/down-grade. Originally I thought Windows 7 was not so good (I'd been upgrading Windows for years) but nowadays Windows 7 is so much better, more reliable and wonderfully easier to use that every version since it first appeared.
I have been using W11 for half a year now, and it's fine(tm)... You can configure it to remove most of the idiot things that should not be enabled from start. If we disregard any potential "improvements" "under the hood" and just consider the user experience, in my not so humble opinion it's a slight downgrade from 10, mostly from crap being added that I don't want front and centre (Onedrive I look at you). I have luckily avoided most of the horrible bugs people have experienced so I'm not tainted by them in either direction as of now. My verdict is Meh, don't upgrade unless you are forced to or if it's a new system and you don't want to mess with upgrading when they try to force you away from 10.
When anything AI related tries to make it's way onto my desktop It will be gone the moment I figure out how to disable it, that's crap I don't want.
There's not a single feature I have found that I feel like wow, that is nice!
In another year or two it may be (with configuration to disable crap) an on par experience with 10.
> W11 for half a year now, and it's fine(tm)... You can configure it to remove most of the idiot things
But that is the problem for any version after Windows 7 - you have to thrash it to within an inch of its life to make it palatable /usable - AND YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THIS!!
Well we can't rule out it's the usual "every other version is rubbish and should be skipped" - we'll have to wait for Windows 12 and see.
Just as a reminder: 98 good (or was it 95 good, 98 bad, 98 SE good? a little before my time). ME bad. XP good. Vista bad. 7 good. 8 bad. 10 good. 11 bad.
If anyone wants to argue that all Windows releases are bad, that's fine with me too.
"It looks like you're trying to scram the reactor... would you like some help with that? or how about pictures of other reactors or a trip to Amazon.com to see if they have the tool to scram the reactor...... my sensors are detecting increased radiation and temperature, are you still sure you want to scram the reactor? there are many exciting alternatives on the microsoft website to help you be more productive while suffering from terminal radiation sickness.... heres a link to some funeral homes that deal in hazardous remains......"
Does anyone else get a whole 'talkie toaster' vibe whenever these companies witter on about AI assistants AND NO I DONT WANT A FLAPJACK!
Ah, so you're a waffle man?
As I alluded in a comment yesterday, for me it's not as much Talkie Toaster, more "Eddie the shipboard computer".
"Hi guys, I just want you to know that I am here to help and I am going to get so much of a kick out of helping you! <ticker tape, ticker tape>"
I remember when the first-gen iMac came out, and suddenly every single peripheral on the market - and a fair few household appliances, too - was clad in translucent teal plastic to ride the iMac design hype.
And history repeats now with AI. It'll be a "feature" of everything from graphics cards to vacuum cleaners. Probably even iomega zip drivesUSB memory sticks, too.
Seems everything they're doing in the last, oh say 5 years or so, has been directed at running the last users with an IQ above room temperature off the platform permanently.
Maybe their marketers have been infiltrated by an Apple sleeper cell....
I suspect that MS’s marketing department’s target audience isn’t the techie at all, but the ‘C’ suite executives, who (mostly) understand as much of how this all works as my cat does (and Timmo is not the brightest cat on the planet)!
It doesn’t matter if entire IT departments recognises it as the ‘Emperor's New Clothes’ that it is and advise against it all - if the top bosses fall for the ‘it’s AI’, ‘it’s the future’, ‘it’ll make us a fortune’; snake-oil salesman pitches, then that is what they will demand be installed.
And Microsoft know it - they have long given up on the domestic user (the X-box being an exception), and even small businesses, and only concentrate on the enterprise market, which presumably is where the money is, and, of course, anything that requires a recurring subscription.
I’m afraid that slick advertising, geared to the unsuspecting executives, trumps knowledgable IT experts every time!
Maybe their marketers have been infiltrated by an Apple sleeper cell....
Maybe, but then you have to wonder why Apple put AI hardware ("Neural Engine") in their recent CPUs, and what they plan to do with it.
If I could pay less for a CPU without this, I would. In fact, I'd pay the same, or maybe more, for a CPU without it.
Popping up a window so you can interact with their AI is only half the story: before long, we'll find that the pop-up is also fed a bunch of data grabbed from the windows underneath so AI can 'predict' what you might be about to ask and get the answers for you more quickly. Have a wild guess who profits from the data that gets slurped...Hint: it won't be you.
The mere possibility of this happening, or more likely that CoPilot is actively scanning everything you're working on "to be as helpful as possible" is why I disabled it immediately, and suggested the rest of my team do the same.
Dear MS, kindly stop putting shit on our PCs that we didn't explicitly ask for. Thank you.
To go off on an AI tangent, has anyone seen the AI image generation function which has appeared in Photoshop? It's laughably bad! Really demonstrates the blinkered approach to shoe-horning AI in absolutely everywhere, even to the extent of adding something which looks like a toy for five-year-old kids into a program aimed at graphic designers.
Hadn't thought about iTunes for years.
I remember having to download it to use an iPod that I had been given and the first thing it did was rename some music files without asking for permission.
There was apparently some switch in the settings for 'do not make changes to user files without asking' , but I didn't know that at the time .
Anyhoo, it became obvious that Apple had spent a great deal of time and effort to make it as difficult as possible to copy data to and from a storage device so I threw it in the bin and deleted iTunes.
Ah, memories.
We're in the twilight of Microsoft's Windows dominance. The company is only introducing unwanted features in Windows that fatten its bottom line (or inflate its stock price) and ignores the needs and wishes of its customers.
All this AI shit is only added so Nadella can claim his $100 million bonus for having inflated the stock price. Nothing else.
How long until the customers start to vote with their feet?
Yeah but aren't the majority of Windows users SME and Enterprise? Home users are a small minority overall. Business are historically slow to shift, so it'll be a very slow loosening of the wheel bolts that gradually drop off one by one, the wheels getting wobblier and wobblier, and suddenly one (or all) of them falls off and MS plunges into a financial ravine.
Microsoft seem hellbent on destroying Windows, don't they?
There doesn't seem to be any joined up thinking in terms of what they ship to the Desktop or how they change the Desktop, just a series of experiments.
It seems to be one massive playground involving billions of Desktops, but the end-user makes none of the rules up and half the time, isn't sure what the games are.
Everything is "opt-out", except for things which you can't "opt-out" of.
Even the "opt-out" things can often mysteriously "opt-in" again after an update.
Talking about updates, it feels like every update is a roll of the dice - you never quite know what you'll get, never exactly know when it'll hit - aside from a few paltry options to skip for a while - and never know whether it's going to break something.
In short, if you use Windows 11 as your personal Desktop Operating system, your computer is no longer yours - it isn't under your control.
Windows 10? Not much better.
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