If Copilot fizzles or is deemphasized the way Cortana was, the Copilot key could become a way to quickly date a Windows PC from the mid-2020s, the way that changes to the Windows logo date keyboards from earlier eras.
gee i wonder if this will happen. i wonder if enforcing having a dedicated hardware button for a buzzword-fueled feature will age poorly. i guess only time will tell. there's no telling what might happen
this is Office Key 2, and i can tell you from having investigated this: absolutely nobody implemented the office key. it appeared in microsoft first party keyboards only and not even all of them. you'll never see one of these.
the office key is such an unbelievably stupid concept that i actually wrote three different scripts attempting to cover it, but never produced any because the pivot of the whole thing is "the office key simply presses all the modifiers on your keyboard at once," but i was unable to conclusively prove the reason for this. namely, there is no way to actually add a new keyboard scancode.
like, you can do it, but it will forever be a second class key that most software is unable to see, because USB HID basically only believes in the PC104 set plus a handful of "reserved for later use" codes that nobody will ever be brave enough to use. and yeah, that doesn't matter for this purpose, since the only thing that's ever supposed to see the office key is the OS, but there's so little meat on the bone that i didn't know what else to say. the office key is a key that opens office. it is the ultimate expression of the inability of the executive class to come up with new ideas; they are cursed creatures, doomed to a life without imagination.
someone at microsoft in 1994 invented the "multimedia keyboard" (a good idea) and then some executive ran in and said "it needs to be Web! that's up and coming! we have to push Web!" and the engineers stared at him like a dog looking at an uncowled jet turbine, unable to parse what he'd just said. then he said it again, and wrote some ideas on a napkin like "a button that opens your mail client," and they all just sighed and implemented what he wrote verbatim, because what else can you do. and so we still have keyboards with "internet," and "mail," and calculator buttons, which have not only never been pressed by anyone (edit: i am being informed that people occasionally press these. huh! i did not know), but will never do anything else. USB HID and the win32 APIs were finalized milliseconds after this decision, so the only Special Keys we can ever have are VK_WEB and VK_MAIL and VK_CALC. yeah, you can add other shit, but it'll require a Driver, and that makes it pointless.
but you know that if it was possible to add new scancodes without Making Things Weird, they'd have been doing this every three weeks for the last 30 years. fucking cortana key. fucking onedrive key. fucking, games for windows live key. they'd have done it for every single product launch if it didn't violate other, firmer Enterprise Rules.
AI, however, is a fad like nothing we've ever seen before. it is the Great Override, the most important event in the history of Business Brain. we are on year ten of having absolutely no new products, and these people are hungry. they haven't been able to Launch anything Actually New since the fucking 2000s. they are starving men, parched in the desert, and this looks like a juicy meal and a quenching beverage. nothing will stop them. this goes on every pizza, no matter how absurd and disgusting the result is.
