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Microsoft 365 sees 43% price hike thanks to Copilot — existing customers safe until renewal
(www.tomshardware.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn't add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it's almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
It's not for you. It's for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
And then what? Also, that won't be legal in the EU.
I mean, you take billions of dollars to develop an AI to put into a product you already have, making it less competitive in the process to ... develop a slightly better AI maybe?
Where exactly is the return on investment here?
I don't disagree [with your comment (I absolutely disagree with what ms is doing)].
However, like with all technology in the past, where the civilian market received the obsolete military technologies (think, internet, cellphones, gps, and wifi), the consumer facing LLM/AI capabilities are likely nowhere near what the bleeding edge is in the military sector. The consumer facing Copilot is a product to make it "legal enough" to harvest your data, and the EULA people agreed to without reading is the nail on the coffin in that defense. The end product has nothing to do with copilot, office, or even us civilians. We're just the vehicle.
[Edit in brackets]