The thing that really confuses me about this is that it has very real negative consequences. I cannot have a conversation about Copilot!

If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.

And if I ask them (which I always do) they still have trouble describing the product, because Microsoft give them no help at all. How DO you explain that something was the Copilot thing that's a feature on GitHub.com that shows up in the web interface there, as opposed to whatever the heck other forms of GitHub Copilot.

(Amusingly there are 15 "GitHub Copilot..." products listed on the linked website and I can't tell which if any of those 15 corresponds to the chat UI on the logged in GitHub.com homepage, or that's available in the "Agents" tab in a repository.)

Surely Microsoft feel this pain all the time? Bug reports in "Copilot" must be almost impossible to interpret.

> I cannot have a conversation about Copilot!

> If someone says "I used Copilot to..." or "Copilot is great for..." or "Copilot sucks because..." they haven't communicated any useful information to me, because I have no idea what product they are talking about.

I think this is basically a rephrasing of the reason for the shared name. This appears to be an attempt at brand unification.

Microsoft wants user's experiences with their products to blend together into an undifferentiated (in more positive terms, "seamless") set of interactions. Not a set of discrete pieces of software, just interacting with Microsoft via Copilot to... ask it to do their work for them, mostly. This is the AI-native future they're building towards. You complain that users can't talk about what tool they're using. Microsoft doesn't want people knowing or caring what tool they're using. Just pay your subscription and have Copilot read and respond to your email for you.

It's a feature, not a bug. If nobody can pinpoint which instance is crashing, you can't confidently figure out if you need to cancel the $19/mo, the $30/mo, or the $39/mo SKU. Obfuscation as a service.

What are being called GitHub Copilot Products seems to confuse products with licensing plan and features.

I always think of GitHub Copilot as the product.

I can purchase the Business or Enterprise plan.

That enables features like Reviews, Chat and so on.

IMO this chart (at least for GitHub Copilot) is confusing products, features and licensing.

That's not to say it isn't confusing understanding what features are available when you get a GitHub Copilot license, but calling them all Products feels wrong. I can't purchase GitHub Copilot Reviews separately as far as I'm aware.

If people ever wonder how this happens... let me tell you this is the organic evolution for giant multinational corporations. You have thousands of teams doing some computer stuff. And never, ever will it happen that responsibilities and product design get clearly cut for the hot ai stuff. At least hundreds of teams will fight to own a part of this "copilot" thing which leads to over a hundred new products named copilot. It's not just Microsoft, every single one of the big boys does this. You can't escape it. You know why? Because they all know the alternatives are even worse.

at my workplace some of the devs are using github copilot (their own private account). Boss said that our company already has copilot and everyone can use it instead of private accounts.. it is enabled in our microsoft account. Of course, this is not what the devs need. Now I understand why this is so confusing, because there are many copilot products.

It's similar to how difficult it was to search for .NET or C#

This.

Github CoPilot is decent but the rest of the copilot ecosystem is a hot mess. It’s not surprising MSFT is struggling to monetize AI.

Copilot is Microsoft Watson.

That almost seems like a deliberate strategy by some "genius" PM... a lot less bug reports for specific products with actionable items for their teams, in favor of more insufficient reports to blame the one creating the report instead.

Clippy is finally getting his revenge