Henry Ford is famous for having pursued his own vision, rather than listening to the opinions of customers. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” has been framed as the ultimate example of visionary leadership that lead to massive success in the nascent personal transportation business.

Microsoft have lately declared themselves to be The Copilot Company. While customers are still thinking about the traditional business applications their organizations rely on in daily operations, the focus of MS is on the vision of what’s to come next. Ford used automotive technology to transform transportation. Nadella wants to use generative AI to transform information work.

One major difference is that Ford didn’t have an existing customer base. He never was in the business of selling horses to people. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been selling computer software to consumers and businesses for nearly five decades already. As a result, pursuing a bold vision has a much broader impact on the customers who are riding on their trusty old workhorses - such as MS business applications.

End of Business Applications & Platforms

A few days ago, Microsoft made public their 2024 Release Wave 2 plans. Traditionally it has been split into the Dynamics 365 first party apps on one side and Power Platform on the other. That basic format was followed this time around, too, with one minor detail: product family naming. Feast your eyes on this:

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot for business functions” - who the hell came up with that catchy title? Have they learned nothing since the bad old days of this parody about MS re-designing the Apple iPod product packaging:

In this case, there is a sort-of logical explanation. The same features that are included in Dynamics 365 products are now also being sold to customers who don’t have a Dynamics 365 system in use. That’s the “Microsoft Copilot for business functions” part. If you’re using Salesforce, you can still purchase Copilot for Sales. If your helpdesk is running ServiceNow, you’re welcome to buy Copilot for Service.

Would any such customers ever find themselves browsing the detailed release wave notes for these products? Probably not. Still, what MS needs to do in any case is communicate the fact that the Copilot features in Dynamics 365 are not entirely the same as the feature set of Copilot for [insert business process]. Because when it’s “Copilot for”, you pay more.

As it turns out, there’s actually a lot more going on than what the publicly available MS websites reveal. From a report by Tom Warren on The Verge (paywall), we learn that Charles Lamanna, the CVP owning both Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, has a new title. Comparing his old and new bio text on Power Platform product blog reveals the update:

Previously Charles was the Corporate Vice President of Business Applications & Platforms (BAP). Now, he’s the CVP of Business & Industry Copilot (BIC). From the article by Tom Warren, we learn the following details about the latest MS reorg:

Does this move mean Charles is no longer in charge of business applications like CRM and ERP? No, they’re all still included in his profile text. He owns both Dynamics 365 and Power Platform - now they’re just collectively referred to as “Copilot”.

Copilot or go home

I’ve been saying for a while that the easiest way to identify Microsoft products that have no future roadmap is to check if they’re missing a Copilot today. The order in which MS prioritizes its development budget to various products is likely remarkably close to the speed at which you’ll see GenAI capabilities popping up in them. As for areas that aren’t being given the AI treatment, those are great candidates for becoming dead features.

It’s hardly a secret anymore that the ChatGPT revolution caused all the MS product backlogs to be reshuffled. Seeing how Charles Lamanna now states this in the internal memo is just a confirmation on what we already knew: “all our business apps will need to include Copilot and generative AI”.

And so it goes. Copilots will keep appearing in every imaginable UI that Microsoft is actively developing. In the case of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, every subsequent release wave appears to be more AI heavy. Rami Mounla has done a very interesting analysis of the items in 2024 release waves 1 & 2, where his statistics show the rate of AI related features going up from 17%/16% (D365/PP) to 25%/40%.

With the new organization unit name of Business & Industry Copilot now referring to all Dynamics 365 and Power Platform products, it makes me wonder whether the 2025 wave 1 would see a “reimagined” format. After all, how could Charles Lamanna be credibly leading a Copilot org without official Cowbell Copilot release wave festivities?

So, what about the customers then?

It’s plain to see Microsoft has already chosen what the solution is they want to deliver. Now it’s a matter of finding all the problems where this technology can be injected into. And, of course, selling it to the customers, using all the reality distortion fields necessary.

It’s one thing to create net new product offerings that customers can purchase licenses for, such as Copilot for Microsoft 365 or the standalone Sales/Service Copilots. Finding a way to follow the prime directive of “all products must include Copilot and GenAI” in existing product development is another journey. This latter part is where I can see trouble ahead as the users are expected to change their ways of working - because the tech vendor decided it’s time for it to change.

It’s the equivalent of inventing robots and then making them ride horses and use tools originally built for humans. Sure, from a technological development perspective it may be an exciting engineering achievement. But is the solution to an actual business problem that companies were looking for to be solved? Is it an efficient way to use technology for producing outcomes that deliver new value?

We would surely have self-driving cars everywhere by now - if only the world hadn’t already been designed and built for cars that have human drivers. Developing machines that could navigate the streets from A to B isn’t hard. It’s when both humans and machines need to both be driving and walking on the same streets simultaneously that things get hairy. Because you can’t just replace all the infrastructure overnight.

Similar conflict may be ahead when today’s IT systems designed and built for humans start to have Copilots everywhere. When a business user who has always relied on the applications to give exact and correct results is presented with a chatbot that sometimes gets things right and sometimes produces complete nonsense, what is really the expected response? Are people genuinely happy about these new LLM based machines that “sort of work”, especially when they are now responsible for checking the validity of output these AI interns who are so eager to please the user they’ll say whatever sounds most credible?

One other famous Henry Ford quote was about the Model T options: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” This lack of choice wasn’t about his vision of black being the only right color. It’s just that this constraint allowed efficient mass production of cars at a moment when it was more important to scale things up and keep costs on a level that made the product attractive. A strategy that seems to have paid off for Ford.

Today, Microsoft is saying: “customers can use our cloud services for their business processes in any way they want, as long as they are using Copilot.” It is up to the customers, partners, and investors to interpret what goal MS are pursuing with such a strategy - then consider whether it aligns with their own goals or not.