[jdietrich]

Users have "brutally rejected" pretty much everything that Microsoft have done since MS-DOS. Some cohort of users will get incredibly angry about any conceivable change to mature software. Add in the people who passionately hate anything AI-adjacent and you've got a recipe for a social media firestorm that probably doesn't accurately reflect the sentiment of the average user.

Personally, I think that Copilot for Work is a good product that does useful things. I use it daily. It isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it's nicely integrated with the wider 365 ecosystem and it has saved me a bunch of time on tedious tasks. The usual LLM caveats apply, but I just don't get why someone would be so annoyed by an entirely optional feature.

[tapoxi]

Microsoft has a bad history of actually making things optional. Required Microsoft account, Edge automatically importing your browser history and syncing it to Microsoft, OneDrive automatically copying your files and sending it to Microsoft, the repeated attempts after every update to make Edge default again...

They haven't given a fuck about the user experience for years and that's colliding with AI exhaustion. There's well over a dozen different things you need to turn off in various parts of Windows at this point to make it accept your decisions and stop throwing ads in your face, all tucked behind multiple layers of dark patterns.

[kgwxd]

But in the end, you could run what you needed, and move the garbage they threw in, out of the way. Now, I can't run Minecraft without logging into the MS Store. That was the last straw for me, and I built my entire career on Windows and .NET.