Microsoft Is Forcing Its AI Assistant on People - And Making Them Pay (msn.com) 101
Microsoft has integrated its AI assistant Copilot into Microsoft 365 subscriptions in Australia and Southeast Asia, simultaneously raising prices for all users. The move forces customers to pay for AI features regardless of interest, prompting complaints about intrusive pop-ups and price hikes, WSJ reports. From the report: Some users said on social media that Copilot pop-ups reminded them of Clippy, Microsoft's widely derided Office helper from the late 1990s, that would frequently offer unsolicited help.
[...] The change demonstrates the lengths to which Microsoft is going to try to profit from its huge investments in AI. Copilot, which is built with technology from OpenAI, is a key part of Chief Executive Satya Nadella's plan to keep expanding Microsoft's software business for consumer and corporate customers.
[...] The change demonstrates the lengths to which Microsoft is going to try to profit from its huge investments in AI. Copilot, which is built with technology from OpenAI, is a key part of Chief Executive Satya Nadella's plan to keep expanding Microsoft's software business for consumer and corporate customers.
Annoying and useless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Annoying and useless (Score:5, Funny)
It really is a shame that there aren't any free and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office.
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You forgot to mention "fully compatible". That takes the "/s" away from the intention.
Re:Annoying and useless (Score:4, Informative)
Various version of Microsoft Office aren't even compatible with each other.
Re:Annoying and useless (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell that to people and companies who have hundreds, thousands and, some, maybe millions of such documents and/or tools which generate such documents.
While you are technically correct, it has little to do with how things work in reality.
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Microsoft Office is not a good format for document archival.
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Microsoft Office is not a good format for document archival.
As long as it's for Archival, then you can print to PDF. You can use Office automation to print all your Word documents to PDF.
Working documents which you must maintain the capability to edit are harder. It's better if you just create long-term working documents as PDFs with PDF-editing software in the first place.
Word documents for simple letters, correspondence, presentations, working papers, and brief documents only which have a short lif
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Tell that to people and companies who have hundreds, thousands and, some, maybe millions of such documents and/or tools which generate such documents.
You think we haven't? Microsoft has captured (and abused) mindshare in the management level and upwards for decades.
While you are technically correct, it has little to do with how things work in reality.
Let us strive to improve how things work in reality, and not just give up, as it appears you have.
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I'm sorry, I have picked my battles a LONG time ago. This ain't one.
Those who thin themselves in a million causes solve none.
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While you are technically correct, it has little to do with how things work in reality.
While you theoretically have a point, let me elaborate on what others have already said about why your point has little to do with how things work in reality.
In my current project at work, most of my coworkers are using Office 2016. The CM person from our parent corporation is using Office 365 or some other slightly newer version -- and formatting regularly gets screwed up when we send documents for CM to process and release. We save documents in PDF format as well, but our parent corporation is required
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But if someone would have used an 8 (soon to be 9)-year old F/OSS rich text editor, instead of a newer version, there would have been huge functionality differences (and, probably, incompatibility issues as well).
You might want to test, say, Libre Office 5.2.0.1 versus 25.2.0.1, you might be in for a surprise. I don't even want to open the can of worms with OpenOffice vs Libre Office.
Point is: there's bias. People slam the solution they dislike, while ignoring the issues of the solution they like.
But in the
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If I still had access to the code, I bet my LaTeX documents I wrote at my last job 15 years ago would still work exactly the same as they did then. They also look better than anything that Word generates.
Your suggested comparison of Libre Office 5.2 vs 25.2 is, well, pretty stupid as well. Serious Microsoft Office incompatibilities start a single release apart because Microsoft wants to push people to its subscription version of Office.
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"They also look better than anything that Word generates."
Sharper typefaces, perhaps?
Better keming, too?
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My suggested comparison is spot-on, friend.
You mentioned two Microsoft Office versions 8 years apart, I suggested two LibreOffice versions 8 years apart. Trying to keep variables to a minimum.
But whatever, the Internet has become a bunch of echo-chambers and circle-jerks, and whoever dares not sing the same song in tune with the rest would quickly get mobbed.
Carry on.
For what it's worth, I don't particularly love any of those tools, but I recognize the difficulty to switch from one to another, and the fact
Re: Annoying and useless (Score:1)
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"Fully compatible" isn't a requirement for Microsoft Office.
It is for Excel. If the Finance/Accounting team/manager or CEO's Excel spreadsheets start breaking due to a change without regard for compatibility there would be fricking firings rapidly, most likely, until they get their Excel back.
For some components of the Office suite you may be able to get away with less than fully compatible. But noone gets fired over continuing to upgrade Office in the name of keeping that compatibility. When new ve
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>"You forgot to mention "fully compatible". That takes the "/s" away from the intention."
Microsoft Office isn't even "fully compatible" with Microsoft Office. For probably 90% of users, alternatives like LibreOffice are more than good enough. And that is just one of several good choices.
Also, if document compatibility is really important, especially over long time periods, then one should NEVER choose a proprietary file format.
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Anything that can print, or otherwise export, to a PDF file is as "fully compatible" as is necessary. I would never waste anyone's time or attention with a .doc, .docx, or any other spawn of redmond; because who the hell even knows what version of word or office they're using versus mine and how much that would bork the content and formatting; or, for that matter, if they're even using office at all versus gSuite like any normal company that's not staffed by troglodytes who never dragged themselves out of
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If only the world would evolve around you...
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That PDF, on the other hand, will display and print correctly no matter what operating system, office suite, or version of either that the recipient has access to.
Not necessarily. Not every program or browser incorporates the full range of pdf capabilities, and unless teh fonts are embedded problems arise if the recipient doesn’t have the same fonts.
Running macros, updating spreadsheets, etc., is not possible in a pdf. Even something simple as editing text can be problematic.
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Even embedded fonts is no guarantee.
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It really is a shame that there aren't any free and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office.
You're (obvious and justifiable) jab/sarcasm aside, it was fairly easy for me to migrate my documents and spreadsheets from Office (2010) to LibreOffice (7.3) with the exception of my many Publisher files, which are mainly holiday cards. Draw was able to open and edit them fine, but the internal structure is completely different and the paper/print handling is deficient compared to Publisher. Maybe there are templates I haven't found and/or I just need more experience with Draw. At the moment though, I'
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The problem is that if you need to work with other people using MS_office, collaborating on documents is hard because they are not fully compatible. Once you have MS office on the computer, its tempting to use it for everything.
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The problem is that if you need to work with other people using MS_office, collaborating on documents is hard because they are not fully compatible. Once you have MS office on the computer, its tempting to use it for everything.
If you simply must share a document with an MS Office-head, you can can export to docx from LibreOffice. Problem solved (insofar as MS Office follows its own docx format, of course.)
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I've been using a combination of LibreOffice and Scribus for my amateur publishing needs for over a decade and find them quite satisfactory. Scribus is currently used to publish a number of professional magazines, and can do things that Publisher either can't, or at least can't easily do.
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Office isn't the stumbling block, really. Active Directory is.
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Like a modern day Clippy, this is one more Microsoft swing and a miss. Make it useful first, then we can talk price.
Exactly! They're justifying the price increases as needed investment dollars to make the product better which is nonsense. The problem is, there's no easy way for most people to avoid paying for this "investment in future greatness" while being stuck with the smelly turd that is Copilot.
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Year of the Linux Desktop,2025 (Score:1, Funny)
Windows is basically a poor imitation of Chrome OS by now.
They'll force a new Windows 12 with CoPoilot AI co-processor minimum requirements document that will obsolete some of your perfectly working Windows 11 equipment if you hadn't already learned from the transition away from Windows 10.
Let it die already.
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This isn't about windows.
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Microsoft's incompetence in telemetry and PR might suggest otherwise, but they don't really datamine you ChromeOS style. ChromeOS is focused to datamine you through Google login and driving you towards exclusively using the browser and their webservices to datamine you some more, if you use some Google subscriptions it's gravy.
Microsoft doesn't know what it wants with Windows. Does it want to be like Apple and ultimately make money from hardware, store and slowly expanding into third party niches? Does it w
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The answer to all of your questions is "yes". It wants all of this. They believe the browser should still belong to them. They believe that AI will let them take over search and advertising. I expect a Copilot Phone at some point.
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They'll get nothing.
Microsoft 365 and Azure seemingly endless cash is covering up the rot.
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I expect a Copilot Phone at some point.
They've given up on phones on more than one occasion. I cannot say they won't try again, but I don't think it would come so close after their most recent failure.
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Does [Microsoft] want to be like Apple and ultimately make money from hardware, store and slowly expanding into third party niches?
As far as hardware is concerned, I actually like the Microsoft Surface tablet/laptop hybrid. It's one of the very few MS products I have ever enjoyed using.
Yawn (Score:1, Troll)
This will be yet another moaning session by Microsoft's victims who will do absolutely nothing about it except to ask their abuser to use a little lube next time.
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
They have three options:
1. Take it in the arse
2. Complain and hope for a recall of this decision
3. Switch to an open source alternative, which comes with a plethora of problems and additional costs of its own.
Now, Microsoft, devious as it is, knows most users would take option 1, hopes that not enough users would take option 2, and also knows even less users would take option 3.
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For a large portion of companies, and even home users, one of the open source office suites will do what they need. The number of people who need to create a spreadsheet with six thousand functions or a document needing some type of high falutin formatting is not that large. Most people just want to create a letter or throw some data into columns and crunch a few numbers.
If Microsoft saw people moving away from Office in sufficient numbers, they would change their tune. The cost to using open source is n
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Breaking news: there are numerous tools which generate documents in Word or Excel formats. Refactoring those tools costs money and time, arguably much more than just shelling some extra yearly payment, which is largely discounted for bulk licensing.
Once you broaden the scope, you end up with a LOT of use cases which make switching to F/OSS prohibitive.
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I can read and write German, but I do it badly. Your point being?
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Pretty much anything with macros, yes.
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Option 2 might actually work in countries with consumer protection laws.
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Therefore, TFS itself says:
Microsoft has integrated its AI assistant Copilot into Microsoft 365 subscriptions in Australia and Southeast Asia
It avoided places where option 2 might work at nation-level.
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Australia does have consumer protection laws. Remember Dell got smacked down for misleading discounts, Apple got smacked down for unreasonably short warranty periods, and eBay got smacked down for forcing sellers to accept PayPal.
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Looking forward to see some Microsoft smacking, too :)
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You've never been to Australia if you think it's "woke".
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Your option 3) is, indeed, not without complexity/pain/cost. *BUT* you generally only have to go through it once. From that point on, you are free of 1) and 2), which happen over and over again and will likely continue to happen over and over again.
Change is rarely easy. But some change is worth the time/cost.
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And some change is not.
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But at home, it's linux. I won't tolerate the Microsoft hegemony in my house on my hardware. I made that choice 7 years ago and haven't regretted it even once.
Microsoft can get fucked so far as I'm concerned.
Don't expect your dictator to ... (Score:2)
Microsoft bribes companies not to support Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
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Sorry to derail your conspiracy theory but your post is begging the question. A tiny tiny super minority of internet users demanding support for Linux is not relevant. There are well over 2 billion computer users out there and 99.99% don't even know what Linux is let along give a shit to demand support for it.
Game companies support Linux as much as their market share affords them to, which is to say emulate or go away, you're not a market big enough. You don't need some conspiracy theory to see it just does
You're 25 years too late (Score:2)
People have been demanding Linux support for 25 years now, its obvious that Microsoft has special deals with gaming companies and major proprietary vendors. They don't want software freedom, they want software as a service just like IBM in the 1960s and DEC in the 1970s.
Sounds like you're fighting the battle from 20 years ago. MS's monopoly is largely irrelevant. Little is done on the local OS beyond playing video games these days, so the OS barely matters. Anything (beyond games) that matters?...you can run on mac or windows.
Linux? Well..they're already the dominant server platform...they DEFINITELY won that battle. MS supports Linux on Azure quite nicely. Under Nadella, MS has been quite happy to play nice with others and get some sweet Linux revenue. That whol
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Office 365 runs fine on Linux, probably only in Chrome or Edge, though.
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>"Office 365 runs fine on Linux, probably only in Chrome or Edge, though."
Then it is broken by design...
If it works only in a particular browser while not in others that are standards-compliant, then it isn't coded to actual standards.
Complain before it gets worse!
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You can also use multiple profiles in Firefox, even at the same time, to keep everything separate.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.howtogeek.com%2F2093... [howtogeek.com]
Not saying you should or would want to do this, but if Firefox is your preference and you want to count as a non-Chrom* user, the option is available.
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Microsoft in know for scamming their customers (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft Sucks!
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I do remember them. And I do remember a friend that decided to stay on MSDos lost his harddrive when he accidentally overwrote upper memory in some Pascal code. I did the same, all I got was a memory protection error from DRDos. MSDos was utter crap even back then.
The amazing new concept of forcing users to do thi (Score:3)
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This is mainstream Indian culture getting integrated into company at every level in its final stages. When Westernized Indian elites and old guard of other cultures are finally fully overrun by Gujarat's mainline culture's H1B hires. It's a natural end point of many years of nepotistic hires going from cognitive Westernized elites making company better at first to normative Indian product managers applying derision and downright sadism commonplace in mainstream Indian relationships to company's captured cli
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I guess operating systems and that stuff have become such a small part of their profits
The opposite actually. OSes are a large part of their profits so they use them to expand profits by offering "value added" features and upping the price. There's $25bn in yearly revenue in the OS alone.
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>"perhaps that they feel they can shove users around like slaves?"
There are LOTS of users that actually are, sorta, slaves of their own making/choosing.
A matter of principle (Score:2)
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Indeed. And that is exactly the task of an OS or office suite: To not stand in your way and to not distract you from the work you are trying to do.
They are Microsoft and It is what it is! (Score:2)
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I'm force to use Microsoft at work where we use niche software that is only available on Windows.
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>"I'm force to use Microsoft at work where we use niche software that is only available on Windows."
This isn't actually/completely true.
It is possible to use another operating system (for example, Linux) for the bare metal, the desktop, and any other apps. The MS-Windows-only application could be abstracted away, either locally or through the network and displayed/used locally when/if needed.
Now, that can be a challenge, but it is done all the time. Granted, if the majority of the needed applications a
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Apple has a walled garden that Microsoft can only dream about. And Microsoft hasn't helped much either by abandoning more technologies than you can count, throwing away their reputation for backward compatibility, and letting Google and Apple dictate their future just to save a few dollars here and there. If you surrender your technical leadership position for going on twenty years now eventually it is going to hurt and your customers are going to hate you too.
Internet Explorer, Silverlight, Flash, native
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"Apple has a walled garden that Microsoft can only dream about."
Sorry but what? If you want to talk about walled gardens, talk about Windows OS market share, and MS Office market share, and AD market share. THAT's a walled garden that Apple can only dream about.
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Market share does not make a walled garden. A walled garden is a platform where one company has approval authority and can charge whatever the market will bear to other companies that want to offer products or services on that platform. Microsoft has tried to create one unsuccessfully. Apple has created one in the form of the iPhone where they infamously charge vendors up to thirty percent of all revenue streams that use or pass through that platform. One of the problems with Microsoft is they try to do
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Microsoft has another type of walled garden.
MS has approval authority and can charge whatever the market will bear to other companies for Office, for example. You can't really deny that they fully control the space, and given your defn, they are a type of walled garden.
MS Infamously treaked their OS until other software wouldn't run. Deliberately. More than once. Isn't that a walled garden?
Now as far as walled gardens, there isn't one for desktop on the Apple side.
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I am not a fan of some of the things Microsoft has done especially not what they did to Digital Research, Wordperfect, and Novell by one means or another. Or practically putting Netscape and a number of other companies out of business by leveraging their near monopoly operating system position. I wouldn't call that a walled garden but they certainly threw their weight around and correctly attracted antitrust attention for what they did for about twenty years there.
I hate being right (Score:3)
The number of times I have been called "Boomer" and "out of touch", and disregarded when pointing out the disadvantages of giving away your privacy, giving away your ownership rights, and even giving away your right to control the software running on your own computer...well, I've lost count.
So I have zero sympathy for people in this situation. If they'd dug in their heels and refused to be turned into tenants on their own hardware, they wouldn't have this problem. Pay up, folks. You got exactly what you asked for.
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>"So I have zero sympathy for people in this situation. If they'd dug in their heels and refused to be turned into tenants on their own hardware, they wouldn't have this problem."
I do have compassion for non-IT professionals who really just don't understand the risks and long-term implications and that there are alternatives. For those I know, I will try to do my part and show them how they can remove MS-Windows from their computer and replace it with something that does respect their privacy and contro
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The world needs more people like you. The initial move to Linux can be daunting for those with no relevant background. Once there, it's not so bad.
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Yep, same here.
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I've seen some of your other comments here. I'm not surprised we've run into some of the same things.
Very limited help (Score:2)
First, I do not use AI. I use real I.
I know many employers want to use M$ co-pilot, but won't allow employees to use them for coding, trade secrets, etc. It's really only useful for public website, HR and C-suite boiler-plate stuff anyway.
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As far as Copilot goes, that is an easily avoidable hazard. There are many easily avoidable hazards. There are a whole lot of subtle hazards out there.
That said, as much as I agree with your attitude, as a matter of general principle, I have my doubts that you can genuinely "seal your borders" against AI.
Are you certain that even the law firm that handles your treasured IP has completely and truly locked down, say, whatever PDF readers they have on their machines so that nobody is scooping up that data to
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"Are you certain that even the law firm that handles your treasured IP has completely and truly locked down,"
What ever do you mean, law firms are all using AI now. They put all court docs into them. If your stuff is supposed to be secret maybe not put all discovery, etc., goes into a big AI machine now.
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Indeed. Data leakage via AI models is a huge, huge problem. So bad that many companies here have forbidden any use on company data and, as soon as this becomes something that is general knowledge, employers will need to give positive permission to allow it. Employees that do it without permission can be fined, sacked, made liable and may even go to prison, depending on the data they put on a non-company IT infrastructure without explicit permission. This is in Europe though.
This whole LLM crap is looking wo
It's not a right, it's a free market (Score:1)
Microsoft puts on offer what they want to offer at the price it's being offered. You can take it or leave it. The beauty of a subscription is you don't have to renew and you can cancel. Open Source alternatives are great (I personally use a ton of Open Source and donate to several projects financially) until you hit the point where you can't do the work you've been hired to do without what Microsoft has on offer. This is the basic practical experience of tech in the free world. It's not a right, but yet eve
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You are arguing for market collapse. But you are probably too dumb and uneducated to understand that.
The article is conflating two things (Score:2)
I'm sure that they are raising prices. I'm also sure that they are forcing people to use Copilot.
What is entirely not clear is that the pricing increases have anything to do with the other changes.
In fact, I would bet that they don't, and it just all got rolled into one ball of changes.
Let them try that in Europe (Score:2)
No region with working anti-trust will tolerate such crap.
Time to update the blocklists (Score:2)
Off to pihole I go. It already blocks resolution of telemetry upload URLs, we'll have to track down just who Copilot is talking to.
3 reasons (Score:2)
Free IP: Microsoft gets your source code.
Fascism: The government won't object, like it did in 1990s.