Microsoft will launch a single super app for Copilot

Microsoft’s quarterly results, released Wednesday, already gave analysts plenty to discuss, with $90 billion in revenue and 18% growth. Yet it is a remark by Satya Nadella, slipped in during the investor conference, that has caught attention.Copilot is evolving from chat to Cowork and then to Autopilot agents, and all these experiences, code included, will be brought together “in a super app covering consumer and professional use cases”. The boss promises details soon, which is welcome, as there is currently no precise date, pricing, or list of platforms.

Lost among the Copilots? Microsoft too

The company’s own lineup had come to resemble a treasure hunt: the consumer Copilot grew out of 2023’s Bing Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot handles Word, Excel, and Teams for businesses, and GitHub Copilot serves developers. Copilot Cowork sets agents to work on employees’ files, while Autopilots carry out entire tasks without human intervention. Five areas, a single brand, and boundaries that no one knows how to draw anymore, including (we suspect) in Redmond.

The unification project has been circulating internally for months under the rallying cry of a single Copilot, with a planned switch between personal and professional profiles within the same application. The public confirmation mostly provides a timeline, however vague it may be: the integration work is taking place this quarter, for a launch expected by the end of the year. The rest (pricing, licensing, management by IT departments) remains a complete mystery, leaving subscribers free to speculate about the bill.The consumer Copilot now coexists with a paid Pro subscription and per-seat enterprise licenses, meaning that three pricing models will need to be reconciled within a single app.

OpenAI has just paid the price in its stead

The maneuver has a very recent precedent, and it does not make a case for haste. OpenAI has merged ChatGPT and its coding tool Codex into a common application. Its president Greg Brockman admitted this week that the result was “a bit of a mess”, and promises a tab-free interface by the end of the year. The admission does not condemn the idea, however: Codex usage doubled after the merger, rising from 5 to 10 million users. Bringing things together attracts people, even when the integration is creaky. Microsoft’s bet is that a long-prepared integration will spare it the aforementioned creaks.

Brussels will watch the integration with particular interest, because Microsoft has only just come out of a tying case. The European Commission made its commitments to offer Office 365 and Microsoft 365 without Teams legally binding on 12 September last year. Seven years of oversight lie ahead, following complaints from Slack and alfaview. Bringing five products together under a single service desk, potentially showcased in Windows, risks reopening precisely this kind of discussion.The company knows better than anyone, since it was the one facing up to 10% of its global revenue in the Teams case.

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Source: Gizmodo