By Paul Thurrott
Publication Date: 2026-09-27 19:00:00
Microsoft released yet another new version of the Copilot app in Windows 11 this past Friday, and it’s a major milestone. Not because the new Copilot makes any sense after four years of chaos and enshittification, but because it marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft as we know it.
I’ve watched Microsoft like a hawk, so to speak, for over 35 years, and the company and its biggest software products have been the focus of my career and adult life. As I’ve explained, this was pragmatic, not tech enthusiast cheerleading: When I first shifted my focus to Microsoft in the early 1990s, it was still ascendant and dominated personal computing. That might have continued unabated, but Microsoft’s dominance crested and then retreated after antitrust regulators started chipping away at its illegal business practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s, opening the door for a new generation of competition.
Today, Microsoft is still one of the world’s biggest and most powerful…
