As everything is grouped under cloud and ai at Microsoft, Azure means now basically anything produced by Microsoft.

I’ve absolutely seen adverts on TV in the UK by Microsoft advertising Microsoft Cloud. Azure was not mentioned anywhere…

Except they named their local hosted version of TFS/VSTS Azure DevOps Server (where the cloud version is Azure DevOps Services).

They just like branding their dev tools for whatever they're pushing at the time. In 2002 they named Visual Studio "Visual Studio .NET".

Which is unusually simple. I would expect Google to use 10 more marketing names simultaneously without any logic to the product lines.

And IBM has "Watson"

But they put Gemini in google docs, they didn’t rename Docs to Gemini like Microsoft did.

Probably will use other astrology terms. Like the way android is named for desserts.

It doesn’t make sense. Google has a least its own LLMs, MS just uses others. So Copilot could be OpenAI or Anthropic.

At work we have licenses for Copilot and Copilot but not Copilot and everyone gets Copilot but only some get Copilot.

I think they'll more likely launch competing AI projects like 'Aquarius' and 'Doh' or something

I don’t think we’ll see Apple actually rename all their apps over it. It’s simply a feature, it doesn’t change what the app is.

Also, Apple tends to make system services that are implemented once and work across all apps I the OS, like with their writing tools. The app didn’t change, it can just take advantage of a new system level feature… and so can 3rd party apps.

If they ever get Apple Intelligent going.

Be careful what you wish for

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft Flight Simulator

Microsoft should add a new game to Windows to accustom Windows users to Copilot.

Just what we need...AI agents that will play our games for us!

Didn't they kill those?

I think this is the right answer. I am frustrated by Copilot and by many aspects of AI, but to me it seems like straightforward branding: you use a Microsoft product, you want to use AI in it, you look for Copilot (name and/or icon).

To me, the issue isn't that they've named so many things 'Copilot' but rather that Copilot is in every goddamn product.

Not if AI is ultimately a commodity, which it likely is. We don't want or need branded terms for other common features, like networking or files. In the early days of networking, before it was standard, there were attempts to brand things like NetBIOS with IPX and such. I don't want to repeat all of that every time some company wants to establish vendor lockin or branding.