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Comment by munchler | Hacker News Reader

My problem with this isn't the price increase. It's the blurring of what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office) and services (e.g. OneDrive) into a soup of weird AI and cloud stuff that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot). My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in this new paradigm.

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Clearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...

You aren't wrong - however GP didn't use the terms "Teams" and "SharePoint". Those terms should never be used next to "understandable" unless properly negated or followed by "/s".

Every task I do in teams feels compromised as far as UX goes.

I loathe using that app.

Teams is the most loathsome piece of collaboration software I have ever used. When it comes to finding basic things, the UX is so far from intuitive that it makes you wonder if they're just trolling us with these awful designs. I remember being excited about a Slack competitor when it first came out, but the same issues it had back then still exist to this day. I wish they would just pull the plug on that piece of crap.

I still don't understand why Ctrl plus shift plus C starts a call on teams when V pastes text unformatted and it is right next to it. At least let me reassign this shortcut...

And the New Teams removed the ability to copy formatted chat logs with timestamps! I used that every single day

So I'm NOT crazy for remembering that being a feature in old Teams! Thanks for confirming!

It's not a Slack competitor if it comes free with your current Microsoft licence. It's just a takeover. If it were any good it would've steamrollered Slack, not competed with it.

And if you're a consultant and need to move between the multiple Teams instances that your clients use... it is so very painful.

Fun fact if you want to change your office hours timezone to something other than the US default in Teams, you can't do it from Teams, you can't do it from Outlook, you can ONLY do it from the settings in the Outlook web app. Absolutely bizarre and broken situation

I don't like Teams, but personal preference aside, I hate how in most companies I've worked at, there's multiple communications channels. 365 should be a one stop solution for this, emails, calendars, meetings, files, and chat, but in practice a lot of IT organizations also use Slack alongside it. Where I work now there's a split between IT and the rest because the rest uses Teams while IT uses Slack, causing the barrier between the two to increase, especially since designers - who should work closely with development - are on the Teams side of the fence.

You're not wrong.

In our org, at least, it's also the latest example of MSFT winning partly by being everpresent and partly by stumbles from competitors.

We are 100% work from home -- the company has no offices anywhere. Consequently, we do a lot of online meetings, with an emphasis on screensharing. (I don't think we've ever turned on cameras.) Our standard for a LONG time was GoToMeeting, because while it was more expensive, it WORKED every time, including and especially when we used it with customers.

But GTM got sloppy, and Teams was suddenly everywhere, and then GTM messed up their easy Outlook integration, and all of a sudden we were using Teams.

This reminds me of a very old e-mail from bill gates to his direct reports about the poor usability of windows (xp?)

This one? https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...

Slash-Dot chortled at that mail but I yearned to work for a software company where the CEO would spend their after-hours time actually eating some dog food & providing feedback (at the time I worked for a mobile phone company and all the mails from the C-suite to the world at large ended with "sent from my (competitor device)" because they preferred to use them and seemingly didn't care to drive improvements to their own products.)

Rereading that makes me shake my head. Things didn't get that bad overnight. The fact that so many UX crimes were allowed to fester is proof that Microsoft doesn't care about or understand UX.

That is (was?) the problem, it reads like a dozen different teams were involved in that whole process and they all talked past each other, or there was no unified vision, or no process manager involved. But keeping oversight and ensuring a single view of a whole set of products like that is difficult. Of course, Microsoft didn't make it easy for themselves either, at the time having Windows Update via a website and no "app store" equivalent.

That said, the current state isn't that much better; they do have an app store at the moment, but all the alternatives are still there as well. Developer tools you install via nuget or chocolatey or whatever, games via Steam, Epic, or each individual developer's launcher, loads of stuff you just get via a download off a website, etc.

But with Copilot you can now ask it to find the file for you. Isn’t AI amazing?

I work in IT support helping customers with this type of thing and this specific problem you just described still trips me up regularly.

And it's been like that at at least 3 or 4 companies I've worked at so it's not just this specific organisation.

> that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot)

This isn't even a new dumb move for Microsoft. In the early 2000s, they applied the .NET brand to lots of random things that were completely unrelated to the runtime/framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

They are doing the same thing to Xbox right now. Really working hard to kill the brand.

Yep. I've been an Xbox player since 2002. Huge Halo fan. Thousands of hours on 3 different generations of Xbox. I still have my Halo 3 special edition helmet. I keep up with gaming news and listen to multiple gaming podcasts every week.

But even I can't reliably name the last two generations of Xbox without a pause. I always have to stop for a second and think it thru because the naming scheme is so abysmal.

It gets worse. Did you see this ad?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYBSNQLsBKk

Looking at the market, I think we can all agree where Microsoft is heading:

The XBOX COPILOT, the new handheld PC powered by AI!

XboX ActiveX XP CoPilot 360-365.NET 2025 Pro Azure Edition

Not to be confused with Entra (formerly Azure AD) Edition

But that's my lived experience. I play Xbox games with friends who are playing on an Xbox console, but I'm playing on my Windows-based Legion Go or my Windows PC on a desk at home or even cloud rendered through a web browser on a Linux box.

Xbox isn't just a single physical hardware device. Its a platform for playing games.

I do agree though, the naming patterns for their consoles has been absolutely atrocious. I consider myself somewhat of a gamer but if you just gave me the list of consoles there's absolutely a non-zero chance I'd fail at picking the rankings of performance and age.

And ActiveX before that. It literally just meant self-activating COM objects but came to include a scripting host, OLE, CDO, and a multimedia framework.

Ahhh!! So that's when they added .NET to the name Visual Basic .NET

Well, Visual Basic .net is based on the .net framework, can't deny that. It's a very different language from the previous non-.net Visual Basic versions, so much that some people rather argue that "Visual Basic" is the problematic part of the name, not the ".net".

Though also interesting to note that the development team at the time didn't feel like it was substantially a different language and the first VB.NET compiler was Version 7.

It’s funny seeing the Stockholm syndrome in action (or plain old forgetting) with OneDrive being touted as being part of the products, whereas it was the beginning of the mess that is now Office.

> what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office)

I only assume you refer to the pre 2000 state of Office. Confusion started way befor AI.

And to me the OneDrive - was forced on my in the job - was never a properly usable product, allowing others think differently, but to me, its weird ways and failures (i.e. renaming files) are jus barriers to efficiency.

The move to a subscription model is where I started to lose the thread, and it’s gotten worse from there.

I understand OneDrive as Microsoft’s version of Dropbox, but the more it’s integrated into Windows/Office, the more confusion it causes me.

I was confused to discover (while deleting OneDrive), that it had changed my Desktop folder from User/Desktop to User/OneDrive/Desktop.

That confused me too. Made me a little angry when I was looking for something in Documents. I went to Users\username\Documents and the data wasn't in that folder. Turns out Windows maintained two Documents folders. That one + OneDrive\Documents.

I had uninstalled OneDrive the first time I used this laptop. But that wasn't enough. I had to reinstall OneDrive. Turn off folder backups. Unlink the PC from OneDrive. Then uninstall it again. That fixed the two Documents folders problem. OneDrive\Documents went away and the contents put back into Users\username\Documents.

A fairly frustrating experience and wasted about an hour troubleshooting it.

Before Office 365 (later Microsoft 365), things were pretty clear.

This hacker news post is refreshing but unexpected. When I’ve one googled reviews of one drive, i’ve usually found the top results are threads of IT folks raving about how great one drive is compared to shared drives.

I have always been puzzled by the threads since it’s a mess with a bad UI with bad default locations for the various programs.

It was all part of Microsoft 365 already; Copilot just adds the AI slop.

Yes, and I was already struggling to understand what Microsoft 365 actually meant. Adding AI and renaming it all to Copilot is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Microsoft 365 = Word documents without absolute positioning.

I tried it once to make a lost cat poster and ended up just using Krita.

> My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in this new paradigm.

It’s been broken for some time, mate. The era of subscription based models blurred it long ago.

Copilot is turning into Microsoft's Watson.

Im still trying to figure out if Loop is part of normal Office or what. Its a better OneNote since they seeminly dont update OneNote at all.

Please, never in its history has anything from Microsoft been "clearly understandable".

Notepad is quite simple

It even has usable features, like inserting the current date and time (my cat showed me that one!)

First I've ever noticed this. I was little surprised it now has infinite tabs, did that come in with win11? I also noticed today that it has autocorrect, never noticed that before! I generally just use it as a clipboard for ascii text so it might be it's been like this forever.

> use it as a clipboard for ascii text

this was one of my favorite uses as well, especially when copying something from Word. copying to Notepad before copying to a terminal has saved me from so much grief of debugging why something is acting other than expected

Copilot is a button. ;)

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