The latest monthly Windows update, March 11th, has led to a flurry of comments and shared euphoria online after the update unintentionally uninstalled Microsoft’s Copilot AI application on Windows 11 devices.
According to users who shared the news online, the newly rolled-out update to the Windows OS came with a bug that unpinned Copilot from the taskbar and uninstalled it from users’ computers.
On its end, Microsoft admitted to this bug in a support document it released for the update, stating that it was working on a fix for the issue, and that affected users may manually reinstall Copilot from the App Store and pin it to the taskbar in the meantime.
Even more recently, the tech giant has again come out to state that impacted devices “are being returned to their original state” in an update to its support website —ending what some thought was a deserved momentary break from the AI assistant.
In this article, we will quickly chronicle the rise of Copilot and look at why the euphoria that followed its unintentional uninstall from Windows devices is an indictment of Microsoft’s hyper-aggressive marketing strategy over the past decade.
Origin
After Microsoft killed off its long obsolete manual AI assistant —Cortana, due to its struggle to find optimal use case despite the investment of time and effort on Microsoft’s end, the tech giant knew to get on the brewing train of more advanced ‘technical’ AI assistance that is now becoming mainstay at the end of 2022 thanks to the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
And get on the train, it did!
By the turn of the new year, in March 2023, Microsoft had announced that it had started testing a new AI-powered assistance called Copilot.
Copilot release represented a significant advancement in Microsoft’s AI technology, offering more practical and powerful assistance for developers and professionals built on the now popular proprietary large language model (LLM) from OpenAI.
The swift transition from Cortana to Copilot also reflects Microsoft’s intent to shift towards leveraging AI to enhance productivity and streamline complex tasks for Windows users, as stated in September 2023 during its official announcement of the “everyday AI companion”.
Copilot’s Rise & OpenAI’s Model
Needless to say, Microsoft’s decision to invest in as well as ride on the coattails of OpenAI’s language model propelled its AI assistant to fame relative to other commercially available options like Gemini and Claude.
Prior to the launch of GPT-3o in November 2022, the duo had announced that Microsoft was “investing $1 billion in OpenAI to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI)”
Microsoft recently announced it has evolved its relationship with
OpenAI with the intent to drive the next phase of AI. The duo’s partnership started in 2019 and
extended in 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
According to the press release on the OpenAI’s website, the partnership —which has now led to Microsoft having access to OpenAI’s model 2 years later for use in Copilot, was struck to jointly ‘develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies’ as well as make Microsoft an exclusive cloud provider with which OpenAI will be ‘working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.’
In addition to this, Microsoft’s other decision to rebrand the Bing chat feature as Copilot on its search website together with integrating it as a button in the user interface of its Edge browser are widely considered by various tech insiders the genius acts that gave it the needed edge since it lost the dominant search engine race to Google.
Today, these decisions account for why Copilot holds nearly 15% of the AI market share as the second most popular application, according to a 2025 report by FirstPageSage.
We’ll further expand on this topic of top generative AI applications in later articles in our blog.
Why Users Are Happy About The Recent Update
To the crux of this article, although Copilot has been more successful than Cortana and any of its contemporary rivals, ironically, the same aggressive strategy of forced integration that has allowed it this success is the same now bringing it infamy.
On Microsoft’s practice of forced integration, a user on Reddit noted of Cortana a pattern that has largely carried on to this day:
…Cortana really did become shittier over time. I used Cortana very, very little, and her becoming a stand-alone app was a very stupid decision and the last straw for me ever using her again. Not only did the app make it a large inconvenience, she stopped responding to many questions you could ask her before, and it always nagged you to sign in with your MS account despite already being signed in via Windows… very annoying and not useful at the end of her life. Good riddance Cortana.
With Windows users, there are complaints of how Microsoft shoves Copilot into every one of its products without the option to decide to install and uninstall it at will.
For instance, the native Copilot app for Windows cannot be uninstalled by users if they so wish, and this is the case with some of the other Microsoft products, such as the Edge browser.
In addition to this, Windows users also often report having difficulty using non-proprietary applications in Windows with acts such as the Chrome browser getting unusually bloated and being prompted to set Edge as preferred browser even after repeated dismissal.
The following is the comment of a user’s frustration about Cortana that, again, still rings true and shows Microsoft’s lasting difficulty with moderately integrating features.
I hid [the] search bar and Cortana button on every install of Win10 I came across. It was absolutely useless in every sense of the word.
Edit: I also still don’t understand the point of the search bar when hitting the Windows Key and typing serves literally the same purpose. Why do I need a button dedicated to this right next to the button that does the same thing? And on laptops the three finger tap gesture is set to open the search function by default, which you have to type into so once again why wouldn’t I just hit the windows key and save a step??
To this end, it becomes less ridiculous as to why some users are happy about Windows 11’s new bug.
Regardless, although Microsoft has several shortcomings, I guess you could say one of the most encouraging things about its Copilot AI is that it’s designed to help you do your job or run your life and not to replace you like some of its other competitors.
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