Copilot everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s not the sequel, bur rather what Microsoft presented us recently! Could easily be the plot for world dominance, again, but it’s just a simple, rather intuitive assistant that everyone will have, right after Clipper, to help on every mundane tasks on our operating system…. applications, data…. and even life…But hopefully without any hotdog fingers… And now, about this…

Lets go back to what Microsoft recently announced, shall we? The event was about their Surface devices and then the AI part of the event, announcing the 365 Copilot on most of the productivity applications like Outlook, Excel, OneNote and OneDrive, but also a chat capability that is basically your own google and spotlight (for those that use Mac) that will search across all your information, including emails, meetings, chats, documents and obviously, the web. Copilot is basically Microsoft’s new assistant (goodbye Cortana!) that will understand you, your job, your priorities and your organization, assisting you on all your tedious tasks.

Sounds good, right? This Windows 11 integration with Copilot, doing all of those good things, for free! Imagine that! Something really useful, for free, from Microsoft. But the devil is in the details, right? I mean, it will be good to use paint, word, edge, with background removal, imagine creation, text creation and resumes, doing enhanced search…

The devil here is the cost for you, as individual, being stuck to such tool. Like everyone was in the dark ages to the Internet Explorer, remember that? During that antitrust dark age period… Where vendor lock-in was a thing and people were worried about giving too much information to one company. Oh wait… We’re at it again!

Jokes aside, this new feature is going to be problematic because it’s very good, very dependable, easily consumable, with big advantages and great results. That’s due to the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft, creating a new company, new services, new dependencies, more vendor lock-in for users. Having one do-it-all operating system is as good as it sounds, terrible. Mostly because it will require lots of your information, access to everything to perform properly and the ‘crunching’ will not be made securely on your machine, but rather on someone’s else servers. It creates not only a massive amount of data, reliance and dependency for your work and tasks, that will be very hard for others to compete with, integrate that well and provide other solutions. And I still remembered how this played out decades ago.

LLM’s are just a gratified version of information compression and autocomplete made right. Microsoft just got a big edge over MacOS with this Copilot. But creates another bond for having something that is constantly sending telemetry, data and a lot of personal identifiable information. But hey, it’s free right?

Don’t take me wrong, I love LLMs and this new Windows 11 feature is quite amazing. But it’s not local, it requires server processing and if everyone uses it, soon won’t be free because it has a huge cost. Sot if we look closely, the Copilot is indeed also a glorified version of Bing – basically a wrapper that calls Bing, which then calls its own ChatGPT. 

Bottom line: the biggest update for Windows 11 is a web wrapper that will be a tough one to remove – like Internet Explorer was back then. It’s a big thing, yes, it’s an amazing tool, of course, but is going to be an issue for regulators and probably opening antitrust cases again. On the other hand, we’ve seen what Adobe is doing with Regenerative AI, and then charging for it. It’s the first step for Microsoft to have another source of direct revenue and control. Kudos to them and to the good old memories of vendor lock-in.