"We have work to do", admits Windows president after agentic fury

Microsoft's president for Windows Pavan Davuluri admits there is “work to do" on the OS after a backlash against its Windows Copilot promotions.

Davuluri’s claims that “Windows is evolving into an agentic OS,” and a flurry of poorly received Windows Copilot marketing videos triggered the response on X over the weekend – as developers hit out at the updates.

"We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences,” he posted, adding: “When we meet as a team, we discuss these paint [sic] points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows."

He was responding to Gergely Orosz, of the influential The Pragmatic Engineer, who said he would see no reason for developers to consider Windows given the "weird direction they are doubling down on".

Last Monday Davuluri (arguably foolishly, in hindsight) left open to replies an X post punting his session at the Ignite conference this week. 

More than 400 replies later – almost all of them uncomplimentary, and some at a level of aggression that might warrant a police visit in the UK – he turned off comments on the post. A similar conversation on Reddit, also involving some influential voices, didn't go well for Microsoft either.

Davuluri did not acknowledge the tone, but referred to "a lot of comments" when responding on X: “I've read through the comments and see focus on things like reliability, performance, ease of use and more," he said. 

The social media furore came a month after Microsoft added more features to Windows Copilot (“Voice”, “Copilot Vision” and “Copilot Actions”) .

Going big on Copilot

Over the course of its Ignite conference in San Francisco this week, Microsoft has more than 300 sessions involving Copilot.

That’s not counting an opening keynote where it has promised to "unveil the latest innovations driving the next wave of AI transformation" 

Microsoft has roped in lifestyle influencers to market Copilot, punting the idea that it makes life better in all kinds of ways, including as a helper in dealing with Windows.

That rather fell flat last week, when the giant Windows account on X (circa 8.5 million followers) posted a video during which Copilot fails to act agentically, then misleads the user into scaling the entire display rather than using accessibility settings to increase text size, which would better suit the pretty straight-forward request.