Is Microsoft's AI Copilot? CoPilot? Co-pilot? MVP creates site to help get it right If you've lost track of what Microsoft's calling its AI assistant this week, Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant has created just the resource you need: a site called Let me correct that for you! The site was born out of his frustration at seeing members of the Microsoft community write product names incorrectly. Often. Microsoft …
But... Exactly how are we pedants supposed to use this invaluable new resource? Wouldn't it be easier if Microsoft simply stopped co-opting innocent generic terms for its product names?
Re "premise" - sorry dude, you're 20 years too late to that battle. The word has changed. Live with it.
Microsoft is simply following the same recipe as, for instance, Monsanto was using before it did the ultimate switcheroo1:
Change the name of products that got tainted often so that it's harder to perform online searches for the problems and compose a full history.
It's an old trick, but the search engines merrily go with it.
1Selling itself to another entity (Bayer) and THEN rename the products so it become a two layer hideout
...and suddenly it all makes sense. Names rise and fall as the 'house' members fortunes change within the sprawling behemoth of Microsoft. Teams are openly pit against each other in winner-takes-all contests where the winning team get to be flavour of the month, while the losing department gets a shrunken portfolio and so faces the brunt of the latest round of redundancies.
The House of Power was on the ascendent for most of the past decade, but the House of Copilot (a cadet branch of the House of Cortana which itself traces its heritage back to the now extinct house of Office via King Clippy) has recently blindsided everyone with its secret invasion fleet that seized control of the entire Kingdom of 365, and is now working to annex Azuria too. Many great and minor houses in both kingdoms have been forced to pledge fealty and accept Copilot agents within their ranks. Will Xboxia survive unscathed? Will Copilot's tyranny be ended? Will whatever comes next be worse? Find out next season...
In all seriousness, this kind of naming and renaming tomfoolery is very much the fault of a handful of people using it to secure their MBAs then move on up the ranks. Any sensible business would put a single team in charge of naming and organising their product catalog and leave it at that, but Microsoft has never figured out how to do that - and likely never will.
I believe that MS product naming has become an office-politics/internal-power-struggle token or flag. Whomever is momentarily more-powerful renames products as a demonstration of that power.
Once MS executives quit playing office politics, sanity of MS product names will resume.
Don't hold your breath waiting for that...
In isn’t just Microsoft that the coloured pencil department gets to play with. Cisco can be just as bad, in the last few years
Stealthwatch became Secure Network Analytics (sna)
DNA centre became catalyst centre (no I don’t use the American spelling)
Firepower management centre became Secure Firewall Management centre - still referred to as FMC by everyone including Cisco tac.
IOS became IOX-XE - I think that was avoid arguments with Apple but I don’t know.
And others I can’t recall.
Mind you in a previous job they company used AS-400, I-series, system-I, ibm power systems, all the same boxes rebranded.
So, he is frustrated that users can't follow the revolving merry-go-round of shell game bullshit that Redmond is spewing. Boo hoo.
They're users. They're not being paid a fortune to follow that shit, they're being paid to work.
If you guys spent more time being consistent in your naming procedures, we wouldn't be where we are now.
And your solution is to add yet another reference site to all the stuff we have to check to find out what it is we're supposed to be doing to get it right.
Well done. As if we had the time for that.
Microsoft's naming convenstions have been comnepletely incoherent since 365 was birthed (or shat out depending on your personal point of view).
I was aware of one collegue in a huge three way argument with MS over the pricing of a 365 add on called SCP. Some documents said it was includive in one package but MS was insisting it was a £1M per year add on. Nothing was conclusive. eventually (after some months) it turned out MS has two similar products, at two price points both called SCP.
And let not gloss over the lexigraphical bombscare that is calling a teamworking tool Teams, within which are, teams and chats. so we ahve to refer to Teams chats, Teams teams, as opposed to in-life teams.
And sometimes (often) your SharePoint team (file share) is connected to your Teams team (channel) so no one knows where to find stuff.
Except me, because I linked the SharePoint file storage to my OneDrive and make it appear as part of my own files, avoiding using both browser (SharePoint) or Teams client from file operations which are best* done with good ol' Explorer. (Seriously, I hate file management through browser or browser-like clients such as Teams. *Best = of these three, not of all options in the world.)
To be fair, sharepoint search is only half the solution you need. It has always left you to do the hard yards on tagging content to make it usable, and they have only just recently, 23 or so years since this all started, come out with the other half of the solution as a premium add on to do that automatically. And labelled it AI of course, because reasons, even though 3rd parties have been doing this kind of metadata extraction for at least 15 years.
MS was doing the classification and labelling in sharepoint content well before the AI bandwagon got rolling.
And the M365 solution is fine as long as you don't mind all your content going through the AI.
Camel case is writing names like 'camelCase', not 'CamelCase'.
letmecorrectthat4u is how you spell a website whose name ends in 'for you'.
Best solution for their problem is for a big list of all MS product and service names, and all their previous names, to be printed out and given to all their executives at a meeting, so that they can look at it and just weep.
"Microsoft famously rebrands stuff at quite a clip and isn't always consistent. In the case of Copilot, it started life as "Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365" before it was rebranded as "Microsoft 365 Copilot." Neither should be confused with the consumer version of Copilot, named "Microsoft Copilot." Nor with "Bing Chat" – another name used for what became Copilot."
So what's the problem here?
Did anyone else see problems with accessing m365roadmap.com?
> This site may be associated with malicious activity or malware.
> Access to this site has been blocked by the Protective DNS Service
> Site: m365roadmap.com
> Please contact your local Network Administrator or IT support if you require further assistance
> Look up this site on Cloudflare Radar for more information.
My first clues were that the https certificate kept being flagged as broken by Safari, and looking at http://m365roadmap.com redirected me to https://blocked.teams.cloudflare.com/?account_id=29551123a9c3d8800d290f99261f62c8&background_color=%23051d49&block_reason=&footer_text=Please+contact+your+local+Network+Administrator+or+IT+support+if+you+require+further+assistance&header_text=%E2%80%8BAccess+to+this+site+has+been+blocked+by+the+Protective+DNS+Service&location=1cbd2617104a481a8e3a61f71971acbf&logo_path=https%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.pdns.service.ncsc.gov.uk%2Fncsclogo146.png&mailto_address=&mailto_subject=&name=This+site+may+be+associated+with+malicious+activity+or+malware.¶ms_sign=TsX%2BXWBwl4tRFOe1jOYYo%2B5jwGOz7sVfQOSxu8KC4Es%3D&rule_id=2f58ad36-f290-4e8e-9e90-66e919a1a566&source_ip=81.156.196.193&suppress_footer=true&url=m365roadmap.com
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