this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Fewer than 4.5% of Microsoft 365 customers pay for Copilot after three years, only 1% use it weekly, and Microsoft raised prices regardless.

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[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

This is a good time to remind everyone of LibreOffice, which is free and fantastic.

Also O&O ShutUp, which helps you turn off Windows' intrusive anti-privacy features and delete Copilot.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 14 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

More proof that "supply and demand" was made up the whole time

[–] Zorque@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

I mean, it works at small scale... when people are honest about their products and desire... and dont just want to make money.

Basically outside of capitalism.

[–] StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

You'd think they would have learned this lesson with clippy. Instead they made Clippy 2

[–] Lanske@lemmy.world 18 points 3 hours ago

We are encouraged to use CoPilot at work and i hate it

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 50 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.

And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there's too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 17 points 5 hours ago

'365' subscribers got rate increases specifically because the copilot bullshit was bundled in. they're already paying for it.. they just don't use it. and you have to jump through hoops, such as feigning a cancellation, just to be offered the non-copilot plan. most don't know that even exists as an option.

[–] dan1101@lemmy.world 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Also when there are shortages of material goods, prices and profits go up.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

Software supply is inelastic though?

[–] yesman@lemmy.world 58 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Microslop is confused that the people forced to pay for shitty software won't pony up for the optional shitty software.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 14 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Corporations and governments are doing it anyway because MS is entrenched

[–] db2@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
[–] themaninblack@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

Db2! Talk about entrenched!

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Microsoft claim there's over one billion Windows 11 users though... So wouldn't 4.5 % still be huge?

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Last year Windows 11 was estimated at 400 million “devices”. Thats 16-17 million possible copilot users.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/it-took-almost-4-years-but-windows-11-finally-overtakes-windows-10

[–] FLP22012005@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago

Hardly worth a new fucking key on my keyboard.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 18 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, did anyone expect anything different? The frontier providers that Copilot depends on switched to token-based billing in a desperate and ludicrous attempt to somehow turn a profit on AI, so of course Microsoft is gonna jack up their prices too.

The service is the holy grail of MBA. You own nothing and pay constantly. Subscriptions galore and there is zero portability so high vendor lock-in once you start customizing. The pricing agreement is entirely one sided so the execs can set bonus payout performance objectives in ways that let them take advantage of properly timed price increases.

It's similar to AWS, Azure and the rest of the cloud platforms and i've never heard anybody say moving to those saved them money even after staff reductions.

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 9 points 4 hours ago

But let's sack half of id software in response

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Isn’t copilot one of the worst LLMs anyways? Why should people pay for it?

[–] trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 44 minutes ago

You're doubly confused. You're thinking of GitHub Copilot, when this is about M365 Copilot. Last I heard, they have 78 different products called Something Copilot, so confusion is understandable.

But then what you're actually thinking of is the "GPT" series of large language models, developed by OpenAI.
GitHub Copilot is merely a GUI and a harness for large language models. It defaults to the GPT models, and is probably somewhat optimized for them, but it can use other models as well.

This harness can influence the quality quite a bit, as it decides which source code files to feed into the model for context. I'm not aware of people saying that GitHub Copilot is particularly good at that, but it's available as an extension for IDEs, so it automatically knows which files you're editing, which can be useful.

And yes, the GPT models have fallen quite a bit behind since the start of the year.

[–] TheOctonaut@piefed.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

Copilot isn't an LLM. You can choose different LLMs per response, eg Chat GPT, Claude.

[–] HackThePlanet@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 hours ago

Strange, I thought that paying more and more to get, in most cases, less and less was a good business move.

[–] rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 hours ago

I genuinely think AI is useful for about 2% more adoption of things than was going on before. 2% more coders, 2% more artists (for whatever that’s worth which isn’t a lot), just 2%.

[–] HieroProtagonist@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

The thing with Copilot is... it's pretty useless. I mean, i am pro AI, i use Mistral daily for various tasks and toyed with others like ChatGPT and Grok, but Copilot is surely the least capable of the big models.

[–] TheOctonaut@piefed.zip 0 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Second upvoted person in this /c/technology thread who thinks Copilot is a model and not an interface to several other models and literally naming models you can use in Copilot.

I don't know if ignorance of the technology you're commenting on is considered a plus only if it's AI.

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social -2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Ditto. I use Codex and Claude Code on a daily basis. Copilot feel like it's from the 80s, a few generations behind

[–] TheOctonaut@piefed.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

Microsoft CoPilot 365 is not GitHub Copilot. I'll give you a pass on Microsoft's incredibly bad naming policies.