It"s no secret that Microsoft wants us to use Copilot as much as possible during our work and personal workflows. We also know that the firm is building a lot of new features for the AI service to make it a more powerful companion for customers. However, the company may have become a bit overzealous lately when it began uploading confidential organizational information to Copilot, a bug that it has now fixed. Now, it is making some tall claims about the AI tool in a bid to get more people to use it.
Recently, Microsoft published a blog post in its learning center, titled "Best productivity apps in Windows for getting more done". While this could certainly be a very divisive and exhaustive list if the firm was considering all apps, it constrained this list to just focus on apps that are bundled in Windows by default.
While the list is numbered, you would think that it"s ranked, that might not be the case, because no way Copilot, Calendar, and Clock are ranked above File Explorer. Instead, it just appears to be a list of productivity apps that Microsoft wants to promote in Windows 11, with the most obvious candidate being Copilot, since it"s at the top of the list. But then again, it"s Microsoft, so anything is possible.
Microsoft claims that Copilot can help you become more efficient as it can summarize emails, draft messages, create checklists from scattered notes, and more. Users can also interact with it through the "Hey Copilot" interface for a hands-free experience. Redmond has positioned it as an AI assistant that can help customers "get things done" directly from their Windows desktop.
Other entries on this list include Microsoft To Do, Calendar, OneNote, Snipping Tool, Clock, and Sticky Notes. After that, we have File Explorer which gets just a few lines in its praise. Followed by it is Microsoft Edge, which gets the biggest section highlighting Copilot integration, vertical tabs, immersive reader, and password management capabilities. Even more interestingly, Microsoft has touted Collections, a feature that it is killing off soon.
Overall, the intent behind this promotional blog post is obvious. It spends a lot of time on the two apps that most people really aren"t a fan of, and tries to advertise them in a rather unconvincing way. Meanwhile, File Explorer only gets a few dozen words. It"s difficult to know if the marketing content will get people to sway to leveraging Copilot and Edge in their daily workflows, but even if you don"t want to use them, removing them from your machine is... difficult.