Copilot - Microsofts Death Toy?

Doing deep research today, I came across The Austin Magic Pistol. It was a late-1940s toy gun that fired ping-pong balls by mixing calcium carbide with water, making acetylene gas, then lighting it on fire inside the chamber. Even my best Gen-X flex can't beat kids in 1948 packing tiny chemical weapons. So I asked Copilot for a link to learn more.

Copilot sent me a Bing SERP. But not just any SERP — the top result was a sponsored link. For a ticketing site. Advertising an event about dangerous toys. And snakes. Which made me wonder: did Copilot just exit the utility race to pick up pennies?

Here's the thing. Every serious AI player right now is optimizing for utility first, revenue later. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google are spending a million thousand billions in the utility arms race (see what I did there?). Shipping a bad sponsored link is the opposite.

It also made me wonder if I was watching the MSN playbook again. Remember MSN? Real destination. Real editorial. Sometime in the early 2010s it got hollowed out into an algorithmic news page that mostly fed Bing. Microsoft was placing its bets, and they weren't on MSN.

So I ran the same Austin Magic Pistol prompt through Gemini and Claude. Tl;dr, they slapped. Gemini handed back three direct links, the chemistry, a fun aside about the gun being rebranded as a "dog training" device to dodge bans, plus a YouTube demo. Claude gave me a direct link, caught a factual error in my own description (I had plastic — it was tinplate), and pointed me to a contrarian source.

Then I asked Copilot, directly, if the SERP thing was about feeding Bing's ad business.

Nope. Safety/grounding rule, it said. Bless its heart. Convenient hallucination, if I'm being gracious.

So here's where I land. The MSN move made sense in its day. Microsoft had an existential problem in search, Bing had to win, and MSN wasn't the future and had upside-down economics. Divesting from it to feed the fight that mattered was the right call.

But Copilot isn't MSN. Copilot IS the bet. If Microsoft is pulling an MSN here, they're divesting from the existential fight to feed the legacy one. Picking up pennies, stepping over dollars. Or unholstering a Magic Pistol while the other kids are refining plutonium.

Which is why I'm rooting for them to get this right. One thing we've seen from Microsoft over the last decade is a conscience — or as close to one as a corporation gets. A good thing to have when playing with dangerous toys.