Houston, Microsoft Has a Problem

I have two Outlooks and neither works; Copilot is officially a clown show

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much she knows
Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Outlook’s dead in space; Copilot is entertainment only

Microsoft’s drive down the road to irrelevance went full throttle this week with Outlook’s interplanetary failure and a flurry of stories about Copilot’s updated Terms of Use:

• Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.

Yes, the bold is in the original.

Great advice! Because when I think of entertainment, my thoughts immediately go to Microsoft Office. Let’s boot up Excel and have fun!

Said no one ever.

The problem for Microsoft is that Redmond has bet its future on Copilot, investing tens of billions of dollars and jamming it into every product: Windows, Word, Excel, Teams, Copilot summaries on Bing searches…

And everyone hates it.

Despite all those billions and Microsoft’s enormous base of established applications, Copilot’s active users actually fell 39 percent from July to January to 33 million active monthly paid users. Google’s Gemini, meanwhile, jumped 237 percent to 650 million users. And ChatGPT dwarfs all the competitors combined, up 200 percent to 900 million active weekly users and 55.2 percent of the paid subscriber market.

It’s so bad that Wall Street analysts have marked Copilot adaptation as “early stage” — a moniker usually reserved for products from no-name startups, not bundled into a billion copies of Windows 11.

And that’s Microsoft’s real problem. A billion copies of Windows 11 sounds like a big number. And it is. But whereas 20 years ago Windows XP ruled the computing world, these days Windows 11 is a distant third to 1.5 billion iOS users and 3.9 billion Android errors. And it’s only getting worse for Microsoft; PC sales are projected to drop more than 10 percent this year.

Meanwhile competition is heating up. Apple has introduced the $599 Macbook Neo. And Google is close to releasing Aluminum, a new OS combining Android and Chrome OS.

Microsoft’s Copilot investment is a Hail Mary attempt to stay relevant as the world moves away from desktops and laptops. But for some reason users don’t respond well to abuse. Having Copilot jammed into every application without asking, interfering with everyone’s work, Copilot Can Help pop ups covering up and interrupting actual work. Take Microsoft 365 and OneDrive; the admin functions are now buried in Copilot menus. Oh, and making Copilot part of the application so you cannot even uninstall it.

Microsoft’s Copilot sales drive isn’t working, and it’s ruining Redmond’s bread-and-butter products. Indeed, when Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman called Houston Mission Control to say “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working…”

The universal reaction was Why are you using Microsoft Outlook in space?

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, April 1-7, 2026

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Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

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