Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it, an awkward figure that landed alongside Microsoft’s $37.5 billion quarterly AI splurge and its insistence that the payoff is coming.
That single percentage stat undermines the company’s carefully polished Copilot success story. On its Q2 FY26 earnings call, Microsoft repeatedly cited “record” AI momentum, telling investors it now has 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, with seat growth up more than 160 percent year-over-year. Satya Nadella described Copilot as “becoming a true daily habit,” claiming daily active users are up tenfold year-over-year and that average conversations per user have doubled.
What Microsoft did not articulate is how small that paid footprint looks against the vast base of Microsoft 365 users experimenting with Copilot Chat for free, as highlighted by Directions on Microsoft analyst Mary Jo Foley.
Part of the problem is when you don’t want to touch Copilot and Microsoft shoves it in your face at every opportunity: maybe you might have given it a spin out of curiosity at some point. But like anything overly intrusive, what you develop instead is a deep rejection of the thing being forced unto you.
Let’s hope that this feeling of deep rejection comes soon and drives people to alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. People don’t have to immediately abandon all of microslop if they really don’t want to (yet), any small step is a win!
I’m definitely spreading the propaganda among some unhappy co-workers. Managed to get one to switch already and he’s not unhappy with his choice even if he needs more time to properly get used to the different UI.
BTW: OpenOffice is effectively dead.
Yeah, Oracle gave it away to Apache Foundation, but it was too late, and at that point everyone switched to LibreOffice.
LibreOffice has more users, is more actively developed. I actually thought OpenOffice already gave up as last version that I saw previously was in December 2023, but checked right now and looks like they released a new version last November. Though it is just security and bug fixes.
That’s probably why they gave it away: they gave up on monetizing it after all the users already left.
I tried it in VScode and writing prompts for some basic JS took longer thank just searching Stack Overflow. I am canceling the 30 day trial. Copilot is a scam.
Copilot is absolute garbage. If you want a coding LLM that badly, give Claude a spin; it’s the least bad.
The settings in Copilot allow me to choose the model and yes, Cloude was the less shit but the more I used it, the slower it got unless I started buying more tokens.
I completely ignore and disable every butthole logo I see.
At least they are somewhat honest with their logos.
“Everything from this app is shit or hot air”
google has been trying to do it to, although on a less severe extent than MS. i think govt is thier only stable client for AI, mostly for right wing propaganda and surveillance.