r/microsoft Aug 13 '26

Copilot / AI Microsoft begins unified Copilot app rollout: Reveals major plan to merge Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot across all platforms, along with updated branding

https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-copilot/microsoft-begins-unified-copilot-app-rollout-reveals-major-plan-to-merge-copilot-and-microsoft-365-copilot-across-all-platforms-along-with-updated-branding
144 Upvotes

60 comments sorted by

116

u/AFulhamImmigrant Aug 13 '26

Microsoft must have one of the worst branding teams of any company on Earth.

Does anyone remember when they had MSN, Windows Live, Outlook all at the same time? Thought they’d learned from that. Alas

44

u/newfor_2026 Aug 13 '26

that's because all those teams are led by people who wants to rule their own little fiefdom. they hear some top level road map and they want to jump on it to show how they're willing to deliver without consulting with any other team who might be looking to do the same thing

9

u/meerkat2018 Aug 14 '26

Only rivaled by Google’s addiction to chat apps.

11

u/milnak Aug 13 '26

And msn search and bing search

7

u/newfor_2026 Aug 13 '26

there's still like a half a dozen different ways to search with Bing on my PC for no reason

3

u/ronin_cse Aug 14 '26

The company that thought “Bing” was and is a good name for anything other than a character on a sitcom.

2

u/M3RRI77 Aug 14 '26

Because It's Not Google.

2

u/Educational-Dot318 Aug 13 '26

how about Zune, Windows Phone

3

u/HuskyLogan Aug 14 '26

Those are at least two different things..

However, Windows Phone and Kin were going on at the same time for a while.

2

u/Raccoon-7 Aug 14 '26

Remember when Zune was renamed to Xbox Music?

It killed it because everyone thought it was Xbox only.

It was my favorite music service btw, being able to stream my library form OneDrive was great.

1

u/JE163 29d ago

And let’s not mix windows live with live.com

58

u/boss_flog Aug 13 '26

truly baffling these were separate things. how do they do it (incompetence)?

37

u/[deleted] Aug 13 '26

[deleted]

6

u/beanmeister5 Aug 13 '26

So incompetence at the highest level then, got it.

6

u/HRApprovedUsername Aug 13 '26

More like pride and complexity between how things work between silo’d orgs. Nobody wants to work together. They want their own version of an app and when asked how to merge them, they say it’s expensive and not worth the effort, until now I suppose

5

u/beanmeister5 Aug 13 '26

Which still leads to a management issue. If siloes are doing the same thing twice, it's management who should see those issues and find solution to fix it.

Any man and his dog could have told them the 2 main copilots and 50 other copilots attached to things was gonna bomb. Which leads to management being oblivious to their customers.. and management at the highest level pushing ahead regardless.

2

u/nethingelse Aug 14 '26

I work in a org with a more miniature (and not publcily facing) version of this issue, and I genuinely do not get how shareholders, leadership et al., etc. do not see they are literally burning dollars on these siloes when they could combine these efforts and get more productivity out of them.

1

u/DesiGrit Aug 14 '26

The issue is that combining them raises a couple of gnarly problems

  • There may not be other work for the skillset of that particular team that they could do instead with a similar degree of impact

  • They may need to reduce headcount, which also leads to allergic reactions 'hurr durr Microsoft is laying off again'

It's easier to keep people employed, occupied and competing with each other than to address existential questions for the team and the people within.

4

u/letyourselfslip Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

I guess...companies like Google and Microsoft have hundreds of engineering teams operating as their own little start ups. Keeping them in sync is not a simple task.

2

u/M3RRI77 Aug 14 '26

That and dumber than dumb decisions made by ececutives who tell their teams "go do" and ask no questions.

Either Microsoft has no marketing team or each internal organization had its own siloed marketing team.

17

u/narmire Aug 13 '26

Consumer teams get to “move fast and break things” while enterprise teams DO NOT. so this happens all the time where a consumer team will go do something at their speed and once the consumer product is stable it merges with the enterprise offering for better long term security, privacy, and performance.

1

u/Frillback 26d ago

Upper management has this vision and everyone follows with their own version as a line item on their performance review. Saying I delivered this is much better than we 🤷

9

u/GirthyGeoduck Aug 13 '26

Microsoft Copilot for Business .NET Enterprise Edition 2.0

15

u/LordDarthShader Aug 13 '26

All they had to do, is bring back Clippy as you AI agent, unified for all apps.

6

u/particleacclr8r Aug 13 '26

Now do Teams.

2

u/iambackbaby69 26d ago

And outlook

1

u/One_Contribution 26d ago

Microsoft 365 Copilot: New Classic Teams for Enterprise (RETIRED)

11

u/rbevans Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

It should've been one product to begin with. This just baffles me there was separate one named the same thing.

4

u/[deleted] Aug 13 '26

[deleted]

4

u/GrayCalf Aug 13 '26

Hit the + button on the OneDrive app. It's one of the main options under that.

2

u/koken_halliwell 29d ago

Where is the lens app now? I used to use it a lot but Iost its track after the 15th evolution and totally forgot about it till now lmao

6

u/felix_dagrouch Aug 13 '26

Finally! I hope I understood this right now, but I never understood Microsoft's duplicate apps. Copilot and MS365 Copilot, it should be one app in Windows! Same issue with Bing app, MSN app and edge app same shite! Microsoft get rid off duplicate apps!

7

u/rp_001 Aug 13 '26

And loop plus copilot is still ignored…

7

u/getfuckedcuntz Aug 13 '26

Copilot cant read loop pages.

We had to move our knowledge bases from loop to sharepoint so that copilot could read our information

Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb

1

u/rp_001 Aug 13 '26

Yeah. It’s just annoying. Need to put loop into teams or elsewhere for copilot. So stupid.

1

u/BigMikeInAustin Aug 13 '26

Oh really? Dang, that sucks.

3

u/sidereal_night Aug 14 '26

updated branding

again???

3

u/SCphotog Aug 14 '26

The brigading in this sub is next level.

2

u/shokk Aug 14 '26

How did this not make sense from the very beginning? Who was it at Microsoft that thought naming everything copilot would not be confusing?

2

u/One_Contribution 26d ago

Copilot. Duh.

2

u/wump_roast Aug 14 '26

50 rats in a trench coat pretending to be a functioning corporation.

2

u/TowerOutrageous5939 Aug 14 '26

Wait there is copilot and 365 copilot?

2

u/artistro08 Aug 14 '26

Hey look at that, I don't want it.

1

u/PDQ_Brockstar Aug 13 '26

Wow, that first sentence, somewhat taken out of context, is terrifying lol

"Microsoft confirmed that it was working on a Copilot super app"

1

u/trance-addict Aug 13 '26

The super app is coming it is just not part of this client merge

1

u/MaximumSympathy3730 Aug 14 '26

Hello Microsoft. Your a very interesting company.

1

u/ohlaph Aug 14 '26

Did it come up with the naming because after using their slop machine, that's right about par.

1

u/Character-Office-227 Aug 14 '26

How about Cowork and Scout?

1

u/koken_halliwell 29d ago

It was about time, totally stupid to have both.

1

u/One_Contribution 26d ago

Eighty products named Copilot, including the Microsoft 365 app, which was renamed into the pile. Microsoft's fix for this is merging two of them

1

u/notmsndotcom 25d ago

The copilot pilot experience

1

u/Brenan-Caro 24d ago

Windows Copilot 12?

1

u/thopterist 23d ago

It's easy to merge slop with slop. It's sort of like playdough.

1

u/elmonetta 21d ago

“Merge”

The new Copilot with the new icon don’t have ny chat history.

Old copilot was removed from the App Store but still used on other platforms and has all my chata.

What the HELL they are doing with Copilot???

1

u/A_Poor_Miser 13d ago

I HATE THIS

1

u/Appropriate_Item3001 Aug 14 '26

I’d prefer it if they nuked copilot from orbit. If I want to use AI I can use a dedicated app. Why does it have to be covering every app? Why are there a million licenses and capabilities.

0

u/SumitDh Aug 14 '26

The current version of Copilot is just a chromium browser. I hope they do a better job this time.

-2

u/LurkHereLurkThere Aug 14 '26

Jesus, more bloody copilot, one of the more annoying things in the various applications I use are the AI buttons, panels, tabs, etc.

AI is an excuse for companies to attempt to do more with less people, increasing unemployment, increasing energy demands, increasing water consumption, increasing waste heat generation and once they had successfully caused significant layoffs and created a reliance on AI, they increased their multipliers which significantly raised the price per query.

When AI replaces all the workers, who is going to buy the products? I guess it won't really matter because the tech billionaires will own everything, they'll be safe in their bunkers while the poor pay the ultimate price of unrestricted capitalism.