[Bayaz]

Unsurprising. I tried it probably a year ago. I asked it what meetings were in my calendar for the day and it couldn’t even tell me that. To add insult to injury, they wanted an annual commitment with up front payment at the time.

[RachelF]

Many other recent Microsoft products are below average. I'm thinking Teams, Outlook, Windows 11. Azure and Office are better.

I guess they spend their money on sales and licensing and not on developing good products now?

[gtowey]

Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really.

They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together.

Who else can offer that?

For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.

[wkat4242]

Yes, that's the thing. I see the same. Every time we had to move from a third party product to a MS one we always had to limit what we wanted to do because the MS solution was far less capable and if we asked about it we'd just get stupid answers like "why do you want to do that, we don't work that way".

But they push it through the CTO with really good initial pricing, then when you're hooked they screw you on the next contract negotiation.

The old saying is: "Microsoft is much better at talking to your boss than you are". Which still rings true IMO.

[wkat4242]

Even office isn't that good. It's basically been static in features for 25 years (until copilot came around). It took them a decade to surpass the 65535-row problem in excel. Microsoft get really lazy when they have a virtual monopoly. We saw the same with Internet Explorer. They just left it to whither away until it was too late.

And yeah Teams, I can't stand it. Outlook too, in particular the "new" one that doesn't do half the things the old one could do and requires all your email to be in MS cloud even if you have another provider.

[seec]

> Microsoft get really lazy when they have a virtual monopoly.

That's not very specific to Microsoft really. You can say the same thing about Google, Apple or any other big corp that managed to capture a market where users don't really have real alternatives.

[wkat4242]

I don't agree, for example Google hasn't done to Chrome what Microsoft did to IE, just basically dropping all development. And Chrome probably has a bigger marketshare than IE ever did.

[calvinmorrison]

well also it's all tied together. no shuffling contracts for slack, email, etc.

[dripdry45]

I mean, it worked for Oracle right?

[jukkan]

The crazy thing is how the premium M365 Copilot has only gotten worse as the free Copilot Chat has been rolled out. When the AI assistant from Microsoft can't create a calendar entry in Outlook, what are they even doing with this tech at MS?

You either get A) hallucinations of "I created the calendar entry now" (it didn't) or B) an .ics file you need to download, then import to Outlook manually.

More tests about this scenario in here: https://www.perspectives.plus/p/assistants-without-hands

[p_ing]

The Meeting Management MCP server (aka Outlook calendar) can do that easily with pretty much no configuration required on the end user side.

A year is a long time in the tech industry, let alone LLM (or Copilot) history.

[rcarmo]

The difference is that Copilot will have access to your calendar _and_ associated resources (messages, meeting transcripts, etc.) and be able to relate them to files you have access to. It’s become quite useful in telling me which of the action points for a specific meeting are being handled by whom _now_ and where the resulting documents are even if the meeting was weeks ago.