Dear Microsoft: Stop It with Copilot, Already

Until recently, one of the easiest ways to get “into” Microsoft 365 was to go to Office.com. I’ll readily admit that I never spent any time on the page, mainly because most of my time in Microsoft 365 is spent building sites, pages, libraries, etc.

But Microsoft’s stated intent – stated many times, in fact – was to help you get right back to your work by going to Office.com’s home page. It showed the Office apps for which you were licensed, and more importantly to many people, the files with which you’d recently been working.

These days, we are redirected to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/, shown below. (It’s multiple redirects to get there, and in Edge it frequently fails for me, requiring a reload.) This is what it looks like with no Copilot license at all.

When you have a Copilot license, it looks, well, almost the same, but with a few additions. Can you spot them?

This has been bugging me since it happened, and today, I piled onto a LinkedIn post from Sympraxian Julie Turner (@julieturner.net on Bluesky) about it.

The fact that Microsoft is now forcing people to a page focused on Copilot shows a disconnect from a large portion of their user base. There are several important considerations here.

• First, many organizations simply aren’t ready to do anything with AI or Copilot. Putting Copilot front & center when they haven’t subscribed to Copilot at all is not useful for them.
• Second, this is a significant change to a landing page which Microsoft has touted for years as “the place to start your day”. That use case has been removed totally from the page. No recent documents, no apps, no waffle, etc. Sure, there’s an Apps link to the left, but it adds an unnecessary extra click to go where we want to go.
• Third, the only way to go from that page to something we’ve recently worked on is to search – encouraging people to use search where the Microsoft Graph was actually being useful before by showing recent work – or by asking Copilot. See my first point.
• Finally, by forcing agents on people, we are going to get yet another ungoverned mess. Plus, if you don’t have Copilot licensing or pay-as-you-go enabled, you very quickly hit a dead end with agents. It’s a solution begging for use to invest in it – which is NOT a good look for Microsoft. Forcing people into buying licenses to make a page useful was not the ethos we expected historically from them.

This change to Office.com just one example of Copilot being rammed down the throats of people who may not want it at all, while taking away features people actually used.

There are some good things happening with the way Microsoft is marketing Copilot. On our Ask Sympraxis session after the recent Microsoft 365 Conference in Las Vega$, we mentioned that – rather than selling Copilot as FOMO (“FOMO is NOT a business requirement”), we’re starting to see them market specific ways we can solve business problems, like with the Researcher or Analyst agents. It’s less “everyone has to have Copilot” and more” here’s how you can solve a problem”. But how does that translate into the changes above?

But it simply can’t be all Copilot all the time. Sure, AI like Copilot is transformational. Even an old curmudgeon like me can see that. I truly believe the world is about to change in ways we can’t even comprehend – unless we’ve read a LOT of science fiction (so I guess I can see it!).

But enough already. Let people decide when they decide whether Copilot is for them. Stop banging the drum so loudly that dogs in the next county are waking up to bark in the middle of the night. Stop tying Microsoft employee’s KPIs to Copilot and only Copilot: there SO MUCH work to be done to improve the Microsoft 365 platform, and to be honest, to make the platform just plain work the way it’s supposed to work. (Meaning bugs, unfinished functionality, etc.)

With the Copilot juggernaut, it feels like Microsoft has lost connection with the very people who use Microsoft 365 the most – to a larger degree than they already had. We have seen a litany of functionality which has launched in the last few years and deprecated or just plain been turned off because people just couldn’t find a use for it. Listening to the market is at least as important as making the market.

So, here’s my ask, in case it’s not clear: stop it with Copilot already, Microsoft. Sure, it’s important and may change the world, but it’s only ONE concept on top of a platform which has tens of thousands of important features, many of which are eroding. Not to mention the fact that your customer based is frequently giving you top notch feature requests – or even more importantly, bug reports – in your very own Feedback Hub which you seem to ignore for years on end. Listen to your biggest advocates and everyday users.