It really says something that MS/Github has been trying to shovel Copilot down our throats for years, and Anthropic just builds a tool in a short period of time and it takes off.

It's interesting to think back, what did Copilot do wrong? Why didn't it become Claude Code?

It seems for one thing its ambition might have been too small. Second, it was tightly coupled to VS Code / Github. Third, a lot of dumb big org Microsoft politics / stakeholders overly focused on enterprise over developers? But what else?

I think the answer is pretty simple.

It's pretty clear that Microsoft had "Everything must have Copilot" dictated from the top (or pretty close). They wanted to be all-in on AI but didn't start with any actual problems to solve. If you're an SWE or a PM or whatever and suddenly your employment/promotion/etc prospects depend on a conspicuously implemented Copilot thing, you do the best you can and implement a chat bot (and other shit) that no one asked for or wants.

I don't know Anthropic's process but it produced a tool that clearly solves a specific problem: essentially write code faster. I would guess that the solution grew organically given that the UI isn't remotely close to what you'd expect a product manager to want. We don't know how many internal false-starts there were or how many people were working on other solutions to this problem, but what emerged clearly solved that problem, and can generalize to other problems.

In other words, Microsoft seems to have focused on a technology buzzword. Anthropic let people solve their own problems and it led to an actual product. The kind that people want. The difference is like night and day.

Who knows what else might have happened in the last 12 months if C-suites were focused more on telling SWEs to be productive and less on forcing specific technology buzzwords because they were told it's the future.

Microsoft can just get one of thier devs to build a coding agent but instead all of these companies are just bowing down to Anthropic just because Anthropic is selling execs a dream situation where they can fire most of the devs. None of the other coding agents are any worse than CC, Gemini & Crush are even better, Codex is decent and even something like Opencode is catching up.

I think big corporations are just structurally unable to create products people actually want to use. They have too much experience with their customers being locked in and switching costs keeping them locked in. Anthropic needed a real product to win mind-share first, they will start enshitifying later (by some accounts they may already have). The best thing a big corporation can do with a nascent technology like that is to make it available to use to everywhere and then acquire the startup that converts it to a winner first. Microsoft even fumbled that.

i think microsoft just doesnt have top talent building these products

because claude code do it fullstack u know, the model and implementation, the interation is seamless,

meanwhile ms and github, is waiting for any breadcrumb that chatgpt leave with