The Madness of Copilot in Windows 11 (Premium)

Someone on social media mentioned to me recently that they had found a use for Copilot in Windows, with the expectation that I’d treat this claim like a Bigfoot sighting, something to be mocked, disputed, or debunked. I found this confusing. I don’t hate Copilot, I responded. I certainly don’t resent that others find it useful. In this sense, it’s like anything else in Windows or whatever other platform.

I immediately regretted this reply. It wasn’t a lie per se, but it was incorrect.

The thing is, I do hate Copilot. I hate it so much.

No, not for the reasons you may think. I’m not an AI skeptic, doubter, or hater. I’m also not an AI cheerleader. That’s not my style. AI is a big topic, something that’s taken me time to wrap my head around, something I’m still working on. I still see AI as an MSG-like enhancer for productivity, creativity, and anything else we seek to do with personal technology, an assistant. It will be used, and in some cases abused, but the net result will be forward momentum, a positive gain. You just have to sift through the controversies, think clearly, and uses it how and where it makes sense. And pay attention, too. This is happening quickly, coming in hot. It’s a confusing time to be alive.

But I digress. The problems with Copilot are many. And more keep appearing.

Some of the issues I have with this thing are tied to my now life-long focus on Windows, this computing platform that somehow threaded the needle of good timing and the right functionality to emerge as the defining center of personal computing during an era in which I was finding my professional footing. But despite more recent shifts to web, cloud, and mobile, and the dramatic expansion of this world, Windows has endured, in my life, because it is the best place for me to get my work done. In time, I came to redefine my own work via a pithy, Michael Pollan-like phrase, “Personal technology, with a focus on productivity, mostly Microsoft.”

We all know what’s happened with Windows in recent years. As Microsoft’s focus shifted ever further away from Windows, to the point where it is now just one of many steady revenue generators but not at all the center of anything, the inmates have taken over the asylum. Windows is ignored by the decision makers at Microsoft unless it’s an embarrassing corporate moment tied to security. And that’s because the decision makers at Microsoft are hyper-focused on growth, not on good technology, an almost cancerous example writ large of the internal dynamics that have long defined this company. That is, Microsoft’s culture is not about getting it right. It’s about the next big thing. And Windows is not the next big thing. It’s so much not that, that the company is almost embarrassed by it. Indeed, some of the behaviors we see in Windows today seem designed specifically to drive customers away.

The sad decline in quality we’ve seen through the Windows 10 and 11 eras is clear to anyone who uses these products each day. And the more engaged you are on this topic, the more you care, the more obvious it is. I just reset my Surface Laptop 7 to test a few things, and I once again experienced the never-ending hell of Windows 11 silently enabling OneDrive Folder backup despite me saying no repeatedly when asked. I had upgraded the PC to Windows 11 Pro for unrelated reasons, and during the initial setup, it asked me to enable this feature, and I opted out. It asked again via a pop-up banner notification, and I declined. It asked again when I ran Windows Backup after being nagged to do so, and I declined. And then it just enabled the feature anyway. F@#k you, Paul.

That behavior, that enshittification, isn’t just a quality issue, it’s malicious. And it’s the blueprint, I think, for the behavior we see with Copilot. It’s why I hate Copilot.

And I do hate Copilot.

Microsoft’s first communicated its ChatGPT-inspired AI insanity to the world in early 2023, inexplicably choosing to launch its first offering of this new AI era under the Bing umbrella. In making this strategic mistake–Bing is one of Microsoft’s worst brands, one that is best known for its Zune-like reputation as a loser–Microsoft then kicked off what is now two years of absolute chaos. During this time, it has announced, released, rebranded, and otherwise changed an incredible collection of AI-related products and services, many of which bear the Copilot name.

So Bing chat became Copilot chat. Copilot for Windows, or Copilot in Windows, or whatever this ridiculous thing is called now, was announced in early 2023 as part of a flurry of related announcements. And it was slated to appear in 23H2, the Windows 11 feature update–a version upgrade–set for that October. There was just one problem, from Microsoft’s perspective. By making Copilot in Windows 11 part of a feature update, Microsoft was restricting which customers would get this functionality. That is, corporate customers, the biggest part of the Windows customer base, but also the most lucrative, could simply ignore 23H2 and put off the upgrade until the following year. These customers always do that. They’re not just change averse, they’re openly hostile to change. And AI is a lot of change.

And so Microsoft committed its first major sin with Copilot in Windows. It quietly added almost all of the many, many features it previously planned for the 23H2 feature update to a monthly cumulative update for Windows 11 versions 21H1 and 22H2. Corporate customers can’t skip these updates for long periods of time, as they contain security fixes. And consumers can’t skip them at all, they’re mandatory. And so Copilot was unleashed on an unsuspecting public, along with whatever mountain of other new features that 23H2 was to include. When 23H2 did finally arrive a few months later, it was less notable than a typical cumulative update. There was almost nothing to it.

This decision impacted Windows in ways that most still don’t understand. From a functional perspective, there were briefly three versions of Windows–Windows 11 versions 21H2, 22H2, and 23H2–that were identical, a situation that had never happened before. In doing this, Microsoft had quietly undermined the decision-making responsibilities of its best and biggest customers. Sure, it seemed to say, you can stick with 22H2. Don’t worry about it, you’re getting what you asked for. But it had jammed Copilot and some mostly lame other AI-based features into Windows, and fairly quickly, and had done so during a time in which its strategies for AI were changing almost week-to-week.

Copilot in Windows has been nothing but chaos from the start. This “app” started as a non-resizable pane on the right side of the desktop. Then it became resizable. Then a floating window. And now it’s changing into a native app, but not really. Its icon was pinned to the Windows 11 Taskbar, then shifted to the right of the time and date, and then shifted back again. These things all happened in less than a year. What users saw in Windows changed month to month, also unprecedented, and an affront to those who man the IT help desks to which these users turn.

And an affront to me, a person who is, in effect, an IT help desk for readers, of this site and my books. In moving that Copilot icon around several times in late 2023 and 2024, Microsoft committed what is, to me, the ultimate sin. It unnecessarily wasted my time. It forced me to retake several hundred screenshots for the Windows 11 Field Guide, requiring a lot of time and effort that would have been better spent, I don’t know, adding new content. This tool, ostensibly a productivity enhancer, but really an agent and emblem of Microsoft’s corporate strategies, became for me a productivity blocker. Great job, Microsoft.

There’s more.

I review many laptops each year, as you know, and I reviewed 20 laptops and other PCs in 2024 alone. Last year was a huge year for PC hardware, thanks in large part to the latest generation AMD Zen 5, Intel Lunar Lake, and Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip architectures. But Microsoft undermined the gains in each. It forced these companies and its PC maker partners to focus their marketing and engineering efforts on the one component that matters most to it and the least to their collective customers, the NPU. And in marketing AI PCs and then Copilot+ PCs in 2024 for the negligible real-world gains delivered by these NPUs, Microsoft undermined the adoption of products that provide meaningful advances in other areas that do matter to potential customers. Consider that mainstream laptops with integrated graphics are today so impressive that they make for credible gaming PCs.

Or don’t. Because Microsoft’s biggest contribution to the PC market this year was its forced inclusion of the unnecessary Copilot key that’s now found on every single PC I review. That this addition is unwanted by just about everyone should be obvious to just about everyone. But what might not be as obvious is that the Copilot key’s trajectory over the past year mirrors that of Copilot in Windows before it. That is, it’s been nothing but chaos.

When Microsoft announced this key in January 2024, it described it as a “significant step forward” and “the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades.” But as this key started appearing on PCs of all kinds–and not just so-called “AI PCs” and, eventually, Copilot+ PCs–I quickly saw its true impact. It was the primary driver of Copilot app launches, all of which are mistaken app launches. Thanks to its placement–required by Microsoft–to the left of the arrow keys and the right of the space bar on a typical PC keyboard, it is far too easy to tap that key inadvertently. And when you do, as I do several times a day or more, Copilot appears. Every freaking time.

This key was initially a source of humor, another example of Microsoft being perhaps a bit too cute with this Copilot nonsense. But the Copilot key was also immediately controversial. Businesses that might choose to block access to Copilot out of reasonable fears for data governance were outraged by this key. And by mid-2024, it became obvious to Microsoft via unrelenting feedback that it would need to let these businesses remap this key, a key that internally appears as the non-existent F23 function key. (PC keyboards typically top out at F12.) And so it began working internally to allow this remapping via policy and in the Settings app.

But with Copilot “evolving” all throughout 2024, other problems emerged. This post is about Copilot in Windows 11, but the more important Copilot-branded offering in this space is the Microsoft 365 Copilot, which also underwent several changes of its own since its introduction in early 2023. It, too, has been rebranded, twice, and it, too, is no longer exactly as first offered. Where Microsoft first presented M365 Copilot as an expensive additional monthly per-user cost, a sort-of additional SKU or tier of this service, it got enough resistance that things changed. Today, you can still pay for M365 Copilot (or the consumer version, Copilot Pro), but now Microsoft is letting customers on existing Microsoft 365 tiers access those unique features in a limited way “for free,” by which I mean as part of what they’re already paying for. Don’t worry, they’re raising prices on the Microsoft 365 tiers too. We all get to suffer.

One year ago, with the Copilot icon still moving around on the Windows 11 Taskbar like an unasked-for game of whack-a-mole, customers could sign in to the app and get whatever features were associated with their account. If they paid for Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Pro, they got those features too. Today, that’s no longer the case. Copilot in Windows 11 is now just a consumer offering that works with Microsoft accounts (and thus Copilot Pro), but you can’t sign in to it using a corporate Microsoft Work or School account (Entra ID) as before. Instead, Microsoft is taking the Microsoft 365 app that also comes with Windows 11, an app that used to be called the Office app, and rebranding that to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. And it is “evolving” that app so that those with corporate accounts can sign in and access their paid M365 Copilot features there instead.

So now there are two Copilot apps in Windows 11. Fun! This is confusing enough. But as part of this change, which is still ongoing, Microsoft also took the incredible step of alerting its business customers to uninstall Copilot for Windows 11 and remap the Copilot key to do something else. Preferably to launch that new (not new) Microsoft 365 Copilot app instead. Maybe chaos isn’t a strong enough word to describe what’s happening here.

I hate Copilot.

I hate Copilot because it’s made Microsoft nuts. I hate Copilot because it’s made Windows worse. I hate Copilot for the constant churn and chaos it’s brought to the PC, in hardware, software, and services. I hate Copilot because it doesn’t mean anything, isn’t anything other than ephemeral, ongoing change with no benefit at all. Copilot betrays that Microsoft’s strategies are not, in fact, strategies, but are just slice in time ideas about something that maybe, just maybe, this time will work. But they won’t work, and they will change again.

There was a brief period of time in mid-to-late 2024 when I experienced some peace. This was between the moment when Copilot in Windows 11 became a web app with a floating window and its more recent shift to a “native” app, where I could almost cope with Copilot in Windows 11. During this time, I would inadvertently launch Copilot all the time by errantly tapping the Copilot key that I can no longer escape on all the PCs I review. But because it was a web app, I could quickly kill the unwanted app. All I had to do was type Ctrl + W.

This was not ideal. But it was OK. I quickly developed the habit of typing Ctrl + W when this happened and then getting right back to work. It was doable.

As I type this post, however, I’m using my Surface Laptop 7. It’s enrolled in the Windows Insider Program’s Dev channel, mostly so I can test Recall. And that means I have early access to other new features that will come to Windows 11 in stable in the weeks and months ahead. And one of those features is the “new” Copilot app. The “native” Copilot app.

Folks, there’s nothing native about this app. It’s the same web app as it was before. It’s just that it’s wrapped in a native app container for some reason. And so it appears to the system as a native app, and not a web app. There could be a logical reason for this change. Perhaps there is some native app behavior or capability that this enables. I don’t know.

Here’s what I do know.

Now, I can’t type Ctrl + W to close Copilot when it launches, as it does, unwanted, several times each day or more. Ctrl + W closes a web app. But it does not close a native app. And there is no good and readily available keyboard shortcut, no quick way to kill a native app that pops up like this. I can’t whack that mole anymore.

And I hate it. I hate it so much.

Yes, the Dev channel build that I’m using has the Copilot remapping feature in Settings, but you can’t remap it to do nothing, which is what I would do if I could. You can remap it to launch Search or the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. That’s it. So I use the Keyboard Manager utility in PowerToys to remap it to the Left arrow key. That’s the key I mistype when I hit the Copilot key by mistake. So it makes sense, if you accept that anything here makes any sense at all. It solves the problem to some degree. But it doesn’t really solve the problem, right? The problem is Copilot. The problem is chaos. The problem is that this is probably going to change again and soon. The problem is that none of this makes sense and it feels like it’s never going to end.

I hate Copilot. I hate Copilot so much.