I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.

That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.

Incentives almost always drive the outcome.

You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there

That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.

I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.

> Why can't it just be called "internet"?

Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.

Those are just two of the several Copilots MS now has, including re-branding the entire Office suite as Copilot… It's is a brand - as you said, a name – not a product.

> Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.

Given xbox one x and xbox series x, I still don't know which one is the latest one.

MSFT not being good at naming things is not new.

Edge /is/ a chromium based browser, it makes sense people wouldn't feel the need to download Chrome unless they want to use their google account to sync devices.

Agree. I gave it a shot recently after being a hater of MS browsers since the 90's and am actually very happy with it. I love the Workspaces and syncing features. Arc had something similar, but Arc started to stall out remain frustratingly buggy. Edge is now my go-to...

I really enjoyed Edge after it launched, but when they stuffed in all of the shopping plugins and integrations I bailed on it.

Does Edge share your browsing history with Microsoft?

Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.

What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.

And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?

I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.

Youtube comments have been nice and constructive for a few years now