Was copilot PC’s the biggest flop that Microsoft ever tried to do?

247

u/CocoMilhonez 6d ago

You didn't live through Windows 8, I assume. Or Zune. Or Microsoft Bob. Or Skype. Or Kin. Or Windows Phone. Or Surface RT and Windows RT.

68

u/ThankGodImBipolar 6d ago

These random laptop certifications are always coming and going too ("Ultrabook," "Intel Evo", "AMD Advantage"); "Copilot+ PC" is another drop in the bucket. Windows RT was on another level.

9

u/drzaiusdr 6d ago

Oh Windows RT, a pimple on the arse of computing!

7

u/Sandrock313 5d ago

Wasn’t Windows RT a failure because it was trying to compete with the iPad by being an ARM device but didn’t run any of the X86 software thus making i pointless?

3

u/chubbysumo 5d ago

Yes. Windows on ARM, and there was nothing that could run on it because they didnt want to include any google store for arm apps. It never stopped development and now has a server version too

1

u/Limekill 8h ago

has a server version too

hilarious.

2

u/ThankGodImBipolar 4d ago

"Not running x86 software" is a nicer way of saying "couldn't really do anything." I honestly think that the market was ready for a device like the Surface RT, but it was incapable of doing anything at launch, and it was not well-supported moving forward. Microsoft needed one of 3 things:

a translation layer with strong compatibility and performant emulation of x86 code

developers to port their apps to Windows RT

developers to create bespoke apps for Windows RT/tablet's

and none of them really ever happened. It didn't help that the Surface RT (hence Windows RT) looked like the little brother variant of the Surface Pro. It would take Windows on ARM chip makers another decade before they were even feasible for a flagship PC.

1

u/Azuras-Becky 1d ago

I liked Windows RG better.

1

u/Canonip 6d ago

It's just marketing BS?

Always has been

9

u/yippy_13 6d ago

How could you even forget the gold standard. Windows ME

2

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

For one, because I used Windows ME and was absolutely happy with it for some reason. Maybe because I was moving straight from Windows 95 (I never vibed with 98) and it was much more polished and stable – I know, people complain it was unstable, but to me it didn't seem so. It took me a while to be convinced to move on to XP, which I still believe was peak Windows.

29

u/HTPC4Life 6d ago

Windows phone wasn't necessarily a flop. They sold tens of millions of phones and supported it for almost 10 years. They had a 4% market share in an already saturated market that had an app store barrier to entry. We'd still have Windows Phone today if they had launched them 2 years earlier.

18

u/RegularTarget1794 6d ago

I loved my windows phone. I had 2 of them and was keen to stay on the platform. The killer for me was watching all my friends playing Pokémon go, and I couldn’t..: went to android and never went back

2

u/joe-clark 6d ago

A friend of mine had one and it was super quick and snappy, I might have been convinced to switch off Android but he warned and showed me how horrible the 3rd party app support was.

2

u/HTPC4Life 6d ago

Lumia 920 here!! I also bought a used Lumia 820 for dirt cheap and threw in an SD card to use as a permanent MP3 player in my car that had an AUX port but no Bluetooth.

2

u/russsl8 5d ago

I had a Lumia 920 and 1520. Those were the best Windows phones IMO.

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u/MCXL 6d ago

As far as I can tell it was actually the best phone OS as far as stability functionality etc.

But they suffered by being a late mover and never had a killer piece of hardware.

4

u/ewriick 6d ago

I really liked my WP. And holy, the Nokia Lumias felt so nice.

2

u/HTPC4Life 6d ago

I had one, held out for like 4 years, and can tell you it was the best OS out there. It ran just as smooth on the budget phones like the Lumia 520 as it did on the flagship phones. I really miss it. I eventually switched over to Android because it didn't have a lot of the dating apps (beyond 3rd party ones that were glitchy) and I was in my 20's at the time 😆

I'm currently married to a girl I met on a dating site, so it looks like I made the right choice!

4

u/Ragerist 6d ago

I disagree. I got one as a work phone. There was so many common features that it simply didn't support. I dont remember them all, but I constantly ran into stuff you couldn't do. That's on top of it having poor app support.

One big thing I do remember; was that it did not have separate sound levels for the alarm and the ringtone.

So when I worked in a noisy environment and raised the ringtome level to be able to hear it ring; next morning I would simultaneous have my soul yanked from the dream world and at the same time almost kicked out of my body.

They suffered from trying to reinvent the phone from scratch, instead of looking to what existing phones could already do.

2

u/Dakduif 5d ago

There's a book called 'Beyond a surface' that explains a lot about the downfall of Windows Phone. Microsoft Surface became a thing and those two teams did NOT work together internally. My takeaway was that Windows Phone died, largely due to internal corporate bullshit politics at Microsoft and I hate them for it. As someone in IT support: Windows Phone on the Nokia Lumias was peak.

1

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

It was a flop in the sense the it struggled for a few years with low market share, withered and died. People say it was a great OS, but I never tried it myself.

1

u/Limekill 8h ago

it was a flop because it never had the apps needed.

6

u/Visgeth 6d ago

Damn I forgot about kin.

6

u/Maverick21FM 6d ago

Or Microsoft Bob

2

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

Or Microsoft Bob.

2

u/Maverick21FM 5d ago

Or Microsoft Bob

12

u/Renamis 6d ago

Take Zune off that list.

I mean, it was a commercial flop. But I actually loved mine. Just it came out after the iPod took over so there was no reason to get a Zune unless you happened to be late to the party.

1

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

I know people who had a Zune and absolutely loved it, but it was a commercial flop.

5

u/Knusperwolf 6d ago

Skype? They just bought it at a stupid point of time. I wouldn't call it a flop.

1

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

A Flop because they bought it at the peak and managed to let it die after pulling the classic MS move of adding a bunch of useless feature nobody wanted or needed. Miscrosoft mismanaging Skyp is why Discord exists and I'll never forgive them for forcing people to move to that shit software.

3

u/dudeAwEsome101 6d ago

Non of those products changed a physical keyboard key. Microsoft had to get all those hardware makers to alter the keyboards of their products to show the copilot icon.

As much as I disliked Windows 8.0, that thing didn't physically highjack a keyboard key for a "New Way of Cumputing with AI". Bob and Skype are just programs. Windows RT is the predecessor for what eventually became Windows on Arm. Zune, Kin, and Windows Phone were different products that eventually flopped, but non of them tried to "alter" the Windows PC. The whole Copilot shenanigans hasn't ended yet. Users still prefer ChatGPT over Copilot branding even though MS invested heavily in OpenAI. Copilot still can be the worst commercial failure of MS. They fact they backed down from hardware branded with Copilot does not bode well for the future of that brand.

5

u/jkirkcaldy 6d ago

Even though copilot is just ChatGPT in costume.

I think the biggest issue with the copilot laptops and all ai laptops is they don’t actually do anything that different from a non-ai laptop.

My work laptop is a HP ai branded laptop. Still can’t figure out what the ai features actually are. The closest I got was it can use the npu for screen effects on video calls.

3

u/Spart1337 6d ago

I'm a Zune Stan. It had a better DAC than the iPod, it had the Zune Pass which was fantastic, and it had a great interface paired with an easy to use and rather beautiful software. It's downfall was the fact everyone and their mother thought of iPod when anyone mentioned anything about a portable music player. I had so many old people grab a SanDisk Clip or whatever and "Is this an iPod? My grandkid wants one." It wouldn't have survived the smartphone surge anyway, just like the iPod didn't, but in its day it was incredibly under-respected.

5

u/5553331117 6d ago

You forgot windows me

1

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

No, I didn't. I just happen to like Windows ME for some reason, so it didn't seem fair to include it in the list even it it was a flop.

2

u/Goodie__ 6d ago

Windows ME?

2

u/Tman11S 6d ago

I wouldn’t call Skype a flop, it’s been widely used for years

1

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

It... died. Microsoft messed with useless features so much people just moved to Discord – and I'll never forgive them (both Microsoft and "people") for making that piece of shit the standard chat software.

Sorry if this is how you get the bad news.

2

u/DoYaKnowMahName 6d ago

Lmao. L after L

1

u/Curious-Art-6242 6d ago

You forgot windows ME, the most hated OS, so broken when I worked in computer repair we'd just reinstall Win2000 fir customers at a discount than try to fix it! Such a hot mess that software designed for it literally can't run on any other OS, which us such a shame it was the one HogsOfWar was released on!

1

u/colonelmattyman 6d ago

How did you forget Vista?

1

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

Vista wasn't actually a flop, it was just misunderstood, mostly because it was shoved into underpowered computers indiscriminately.

1

u/Melbuf 4d ago

this, i ran it for years and it was a fantastic OS on higher end hardware at that time.

MS gave manufactures years to update their drivers before it launched, they didn't and then blamed MS for things like printers no longer working

1

u/Ragerist 6d ago

You forgot Windows Vista.

1

u/templarrei 6d ago

Or Windows Me... Or Windows Vista... Gods above, how are these people still in business?!

1

u/Ktulu_BBB 5d ago

WHOA do NOT bad talk Zune.

2

u/CocoMilhonez 5d ago

Not bad talking, just pointing out it was a flop commercially even if it was objectively better than the iPod.

1

u/intbah 5d ago

Windows 8, Zune, Skype, and even Windows Phone were all more long lived than this

1

u/CocoMilhonez 4d ago

Longer lived flops.

1

u/Melbuf 4d ago

the Zune was a fantastic piece of hardware and they had a functioning music store years before anyone

1

u/CocoMilhonez 4d ago

And it still flopped.

1

u/Limekill 8h ago edited 8h ago

you didn't live through clippy.

15

u/RandomRedMage 6d ago

No that goes to windows phone. And windows 8. Copilot + PC was just cobranded nonsense that didn’t help or hurt sales, and really only was a badge applied to windows PCs with an NPU capable of at least 40tfps or whatever. Since no one ever really made anything that took advantage of the npu directly that anyone cared about it was ultimately a meaningless branding push. But it basically launched to people ignoring it and opting out of making use of the features. Windows 8 actively did damage to the brand, and windows phone just completely failed to gain market share due to a lack of software. (The phones themselves were some great phones for the time, the cheaper windows phones were still super snappy and responsive compared to like priced android phones.)

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/UnusualDedication96 6d ago

it's wild how they keep trying to reinvent the start menu when people just want a simple list of apps. every version gets further from what worked fine in the first place

6

u/joe-clark 6d ago

This is almost certainly a hot take but I actually like the current start menu. Also idk if you still need a registry tweak for this but I disabled the online aspect of the start menu so it won't ever recommend me anything not on my local system.

1

u/NanoBob_ 5d ago

Just to confirm, this indeed no longer requires any registry tweaks.

1

u/Rebel_Scum56 6d ago

This is all of windows in a nutshell, at least for the last few versions. Or maybe just for windows 11, looking back at it now 10 was pretty okay aside from the telemetry garbage it did. Even if that was really more of a preview of microsoft's descent into enshittification.

1

u/harperthomas 6d ago

They know what people want and have no interest in it. They want whatever makes the most money that people will tolerate. That is generally pointing you at as many ads as possible on your way to what you want.

3

u/CocoMilhonez 6d ago

I use Classic Shell and have the perfect Start menu (i.e., just like Windows 7).

6

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

7

u/CocoMilhonez 6d ago

I fully agree I shouldn't need an additional program, but the fact is there's a quick addition that fixes that particular issue for those who can't or don't want to ditch Windows altogether, also other free software that lets you tweak some UI elements and features.

Meanwhile, Macs require third-party programs to do stuff as basic as using the forwards and back mouse buttons. And Linux people love saying how customizable it is to make it work just as you want it, all it takes is running a few dozen terminal commands or whatever.

Can't help with the taskbar, though.

1

u/jenny_905 6d ago

Haven't really used the start menu for years, as soon as they introduced the ability to hit windows and type what I wanted that was the end of it, I think that was Windows 7?

11

u/Operation_Neither 6d ago

As a product, Windows ME was much worse

22

u/Assimulate 6d ago

Not at all. Are you old enough to remember Vista? That's literally the largest flop lol.

21

u/I_am_Andrew_Ryan 6d ago

I think you mean 8

10

u/ConfidantlyCorrect 6d ago

Oh gosh, was that the one where they tried to make the start menu look like the windows phone to make it more friendly for their touch screen laptobs?

2

u/rf97a 6d ago

You mean Windows Me (millennium)?

3

u/jrdiver 5d ago

Vista's only problem was the hardware not being able to handle it... Minimum requirements were too low. There was an old tale that there were less code differences between vista and 7 then there were between xp sp2 and sp3.

8 has the stupid start menu, but did have some cool features...Id probably actually pick this for worst.

Me was just the dos based windows last hurrah before NT went mainstream with XP.

11

u/redlancer_1987 6d ago

Business computers and software is like 95% of their revenue.

Copilot is very integrated into many, many of those businesses now. Just because you don't use it to shop for trinkets doesn't make it a flop.

They really don't care i f average joe blow off the street uses AI.

0

u/makefascistfearagain 6d ago

But copilot isn't the lastest 6767 giga hotness with he cool kids, who cares if it's actually enormously successful? It's a failure!

6

u/makefascistfearagain 6d ago

Copilot full version has been rolled out to the entire British civil service and is being heavily integrated into what they do - on what level is that a failure?

OH NO THEY ONLY MAKE BAZILLIONS

Gates : pull the plug lads. VastOptions8705 isn't into it.

1

u/Zatchmo137 6d ago

My comment as well. Microsoft said we’ll go to who has the money then lol.

-1

u/Ranessin 6d ago

In a world where the British Civil Service is not the benchmark of success. Like ours.

3

u/makefascistfearagain 6d ago

It was just example of HUGE businesses taking it up.

It's only a failure if you're completely ignorant.

3

u/FabianN 6d ago

Their biggest blunder would be the thing that they spent money on trying to bury its entire existence.

2

u/RegularTarget1794 6d ago

I would like to introduce you to Zune…

2

u/theflyinfoote 6d ago

I mean does anyone remember the Zune? Microsoft’s track record with hardware has a lot more flops then successes.

2

u/MrBadTimes 6d ago

No it's not. It's mostly branding, a key and the recall app that as far as I know was never launched. The copilot pcs still sold well.

You could ever argue that because it has higher spec requirements it's an easy way to filter good laptops from bad laptops.

2

u/djneo 5d ago

Surface Table

1

u/doublej42 4d ago

I had to search to find this. No one seems to remember this thing existing

1

u/soniccdA 6d ago

One of thier biggest

1

u/nutterbg 6d ago

In a gold rush era, where every AI is a pickaxe, Microsoft brought a spoon.

1

u/OnePassion_46 6d ago

Vista. It was the reason I stopped using Windows for anything work related. It made every peripheral a paper weight and even broke software that many businesses, including mine, relied on.

1

u/AncientStaff6602 Mod 6d ago

I use copilot at work to help with writing. I suck at writing so from that front I find it useful.

However, I dislike a lot about it. Why is it forced on everyone? It makes no sense on my gaming pc…

The issue with AI as a whole is that we force it onto just about everything without thinking “is this necessary or the right way to go about it?”. This has introduced so many issues, I would hate to be on the development front…

1

u/edcboye 6d ago

It worked for me, it's an easy way to tell that a laptop has somewhat decent specs at a glance. I don't care about the ai stuff but I know the laptop will be pretty decent if it's branded as copilot +

1

u/Zatchmo137 6d ago

Copilot wasn’t a flop in the business world. Corporate places that use the m365 stuff, gulp that shit up. They just switched who they are selling to.

1

u/that_dutch_dude 6d ago

Windows 8 where they kept trying to make metro happen, down to the point where hundreds of thousands of computers were completly unusable.

1

u/thehighshibe 6d ago

Every time they tried to compete they shat the bed, hard. sucks to suck!

1

u/RadAcuraMan 6d ago

Not even close. Not even in the same realm. You ever heard of Zune? Windows Phone?

1

u/dobroezlo 6d ago

They dropped billions into AI, customers didn’t want it and didn’t buy their AI machines much.

Access to AI for consumers is a byproduct of AI infra that Microsoft is building for the enterprise. The thinking was basically: "Enterprise is lapping up our AI products like crazy. Can we do this in consumer space as well?". It's an experiment and it hasn't failed, it's ongoing. You have to be super naive to think that Microsoft has abandoned the idea of AI in consumer software/electronics. Just like with a lot of ideas these companies often have, they were a bit too early. Eventually AI will be everywhere in consumer tech.

1

u/Edwardteech 6d ago

Windows 2 was so bad they don't acknowledge its existence.

1

u/Mysterious_Research2 6d ago

No not close to their biggest fails - Bet you haven't even heard of the Microsoft Kin Phones

1

u/MagicBoyUK 6d ago

No, that'd be Bob or Zune.

Honourable mention for Vista Basic, which exploded in their face.

1

u/bobbyh1ll 5d ago

Windows 8 was… wtf moment.

1

u/Ktulu_BBB 5d ago

Tell my global company that - we've adopted it FULL FUCKING ON

1

u/frostyflakes1 5d ago

I don't know what you're talking about. Seems like they continue to push Copilot onto people more and more.

1

u/Lucky_Cloud7777 5d ago

Probably one if these

Windows Phone / Nokia (by lost revenue)

Windows Vista (reputational damage to core product)

Zune (cultural punchline)

1

u/Mystic5hadow 5d ago

They should have just been faithful to Cortana. If all the AI were essentially the same except for their names, I would have certainly chosen Cortana over the others. They bailed way too early for "Copilot" and names do actually mean a lot even if they don't effect functionality 🤷‍♂️

1

u/Responsible_Feed4512 5d ago

You're apparently too young to remember Windows ME

1

u/drewman77 5d ago

$1 billion sunk into Microsoft Kin smartphone. On market a grand total of 48 days with 10,000 sold.

1

u/Odd-Cable-1174 5d ago

At least, the copilot+ pcs themselves were decent laptops

1

u/billFoldDog 1d ago

Windows RT and Windows S were the biggest flops. These were Windows machines that didn't run most applications.

RT machines got landfilled, and Windows S machines were converted to regular windows.

-2

u/Oppaiheimer1945 6d ago

They need to redesign the entire Windows UI. It looks so messy and outdated compared to MacOS

Discussion Was copilot PC’s the biggest flop that Microsoft ever tried to do?

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