I genuinely thought this was a joke when I saw the headline, and I had to double check the domain name to verify that this wasn't a parody.
Apart from being absolutely abysmal marketing, the front page alone is wildly inconsistent:
* "Welcome to Microsoft 365 Copilot"
* "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) [...]"
* "Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office 365) is a subscription service [...]"
Which is it, "Microsoft 365 Copilot", "(The) Microsoft 365 Copilot app", "(The) Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)", "Microsoft 365" or "Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office 365)"?
I think Microsoft delegated all marketing decisions to AI. Not even joking.
It wasn’t during that exact period, but at some point they even let you create @dot.net e-mail addresses. I nabbed one and was happy for the vanity of it all, but they mysteriously unplugged them maybe two or three years later.
They include the "formerly..." to hilariously try to not confuse people (not joking).
They did the same when they rebranded Azure Active Directory and moved it into the Entra family of security products. It's now fully called: Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory)
At least in writing you can use [insert double-stroke X here - which HN can’t display] to make it clear that you mean the social media service. (Unless you’re talking to mathematicians.)
And Azure Active Directory was formerly known as Active Directory Federation Services, and it was more compliant with SAML 2.0. The update broke some integrations with 3rd party SAML service providers.
Prince changed his name because a corporation had refused to give him control over the work he created, and wouldn't let him release work under the name that he was born with. (Sort of the template for "Taylor's Version" decades later.) And he then used a logo that became the most successful personal logo of all time, not a mishmash of design-by-committee.
So, basically the _opposite_ of an incoherent brand based around training on content that was gathered from creators without consent, being foisted onto employees who didn't ask for it, with an ugly logo that nobody will ever remember.
So many things have happened in the last 12 months that made reality indistinguishable from satire. This is Megaslop making their best effort to win the prize in that category.
Also, never trust a statistic you haven’t faked yourself: Now Megaslop can claim a drastic surge in the number of “Copilot” users.
"Run by an LLM" as in the LLM makes all these decisions, or as in people kneel at the altar of the sacred LLM, trying to come up with all these new ways of appeasing it? Because to me it feels like the latter, I don't think you could even finesse an LLM into coming up with this. This kind of an intentional, ideological, self-inflicted misstep feels like it could only be done by a human.
> I think Microsoft delegated all marketing decisions to AI. Not even joking.
I actually think AI would have done a better job of this. And Microsoft being atrocious at branding predates AI mass adoption by about 2 decades, arguably more.
Microsoft used to just name a lot of things for what they did... to a point where it was almost confusing by itself. "Microsoft SQL Server" being a prominent example.
Though, the everything .Net around 2000 was nearly as bad as this CoPilot rename.
I think it misses a .net in the end. Oh wait, this naming mistake they already made like 25 years ago. Funny how their learnt nothing out of their own mistakes.
Today their CEO released a statement that people should focus not on AI but on the uses of AI. So put the AI in the back and focus on the benefits. This is the exact opposite.
> Today their CEO released a statement that people should focus not on AI but on the uses of AI.
So they shouldn't focus.
AI is so bad that it is useless.
Microsoft is trying hard to destroy its user base and, maybe, with the EU pushing for local solutions, they may succeed.
2011: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion, rebrands Lync to Skype for Business, an incredible branding manoeuvre.
2012: Skype peer-to-peer nature and end-to-end encryption removed.
2017: Microsoft launches Teams, competes with own product after driving Skype into the ground for 6 years with encroaching advertising, removing features, and abandonment.
2025: Skype shut-down.
What was the point? When MS bought Skype, they already held a majority market share in the IM market with MSN, which they also shut-down. Between 2011 and 2025 they lost almost all market share for domestic users to WhatsApp and Discord.
This series of events baffles me to no end.
If I remember correctly, they had to buy Skype twice because they didn't get everything g in the first transaction. Also, the purchase was backed by the cia through one of their companies (I don't remember if it was palantir though) to remove the end-to-end encryption.
I think that was ebay. They bought skype but not the p2p tech backing it; fucked the founders on earnouts; the founders refused to reup the contract; ebay was incapable of replacing the tech; and the founders got a bunch of the business back. Presided over by Meg Whitman, who appears to be profoundly incompetent, understanding neither tech nor business.
Not quite--this predates .net. They acquired Hotmail in 1997, while it was running on Solaris mail servers and Apache on FreeBSD for the web frontend. In a highly publicized move, Microsoft ventured to port it to Exchange and IIS on Windows NT. This went on for years on end, with MS claiming to have finished the transition several times, while getting egg on their face. Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000 and a combination of their flagship products and Windows Services for Unix (the WSL of those times).
It has since been rebranded as MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail, and Outlook, likely with some 365 thrown in.
Meanwhile, they have mismanaged their once great mail user agent Outlook Express, as well as their quite useful personal information manager Microsoft Outlook, to the point where their newest offering is absolutely unusable.
What's the point? Did someone in marketing just decide that "Active Directory" is too 90s and must be tossed out based on vibes? Entra ID sounds like something completely unrelated.
IIRC one reason was that Azure Active Directory bore little technical relation to Active Directory and it was endlessly confusing to customers. Especially as AAD evolved into an identity system and away from a directory.
Trivial example is that AAD doesnt do LDAP, unlike regular AD which was built on it. It's not surprising that some PM would keep "AD" in the name of AADto make the transition to cloud seem less scary, but after a few years its actively unhelpful as the majority of customers have made the switch to cloud based auth and identity.
Actually "Azure Active Directory" was confusing in the first place, since Active Directory already existed for decades, and Azure Active Directory was not-really it's cloud-equivalent
Though some of the rest of Clippy's "friends" (Lynx the cat and Rover) came from Bob and were Bob's "friends" first. Windows 2000 added Microsoft Agent which shared some characters in 2D with Office 2000 and invented a few new 3D characters (which Office never used). Windows XP added "Search Assistant" using some of the Office characters (Rover being the default search character and Lynx still hanging around as an alternative).
The legacy of Bob lived on for a while. Also Microsoft Agent was a lot of fun to play with as a kid in High School. I built some wild PowerPoint Presentations scripting Agents from the Notes field.
From reading the other comments this happened a while ago, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
This is rather annoying and short sighted of Microsoft. If anything this change is emblematic of the rot that exists in Microsoft currently.
Microsoft Office is one of the strongest recognised brands in technology, if you’ve used a windows PC at any point in the last 30 years you will know of Microsoft Office.
Not only that but the brand name is trusted; office and the applications therein are the standard for general purpose business work (as much as I’d prefer Libreoffice etc to gain market share)
Throwing that brand away in favour of an untrusted, unwanted, undesirable name seems headstrong and foolishly iconoclastic. Not only that but their implementation of the new name is just inelegant. Which further lends credence to the idea that Microsoft cannot name products
Name recognition only matters if there are competitors. Office is profitable because it is sold in bulk licenses to companies who don't care what it's called. They aren't going to switch to Google Office or Facebook Office because of a name change, not least because migrating comms, cloud storage away from Outlook, Teams and OneDrive/Sharepoint is unthinkable.
As for consumers, those who don't want to pay a subscription for Office (they make the one-time purchase very hard to find) are probably already on Google Docs.
"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)" has got to be the worst rebrand ever. This is gonna be up there with Twitter's rebrand as a case study 20 years down the line.
I don't even know why the 365 number is so important. I mean, it probably has something to do with there being 365 days in 3 out of 4 years, but what makes that significant to a word processor or spreadsheet? It's as if Google were to rename their product "Search 60" because there are 60 minutes in an hour. So what?
Microsoft's brand names never made a whole lot of sense--they're just continuing the tradition.
It's an artifact of the transition away from year-based releases to a subscription. Customers were used to Office 95, Office 98, Office 2003, etc. 365 sort of matches that pattern, so customers aren't excessively disgruntled, while signalling that there's a "release" on every day of the year, it's constantly up to date.
And I guess they've just kept it since even though it's not really necessary any more.
Max can be third, but Office is probably the second biggest computer software there is behind Chrome. Office is largely the entire reason people use Windows. Killing the brand that made you the world's biggest company for a long time is rather unprecedented.
HBO's was bad, but it's just the fourth place streaming service in its primary market, so the scale is pretty minor comparatively.
It might be worse for the users, but if we factor in the user base just a tiny bit.. (I don't remember watching anything branded HBO in my life, outside the US)
In 2011 Netflix announced it would split its DVD-by-mail and streaming businesses. The DVD business would be called "Qwikster", which was mocked. Eventually they reversed the decision.
Besides the goofy name, people thought the move was premature. Netflix wanted to go all-in on streaming. The catalogue was a lot more limited back then, though, and the DVDs helped bridge the gap since a lot of movies and TV shows that were unavailable for streaming were available by DVD instead.
The executives in charge at that point made a lot of money on the "90 Day Fiance" "franchise", among other badly and/or dully and/or grossly named things. IP and branding wasn't exactly their strong suit.
It wasn't bad because of the branding. If anything, the MAX name was kind of understandable since they ran out of hundreds they'd previously used to indicate variants and revisions.
Except the whole point of the fiasco is that this was a NEW airplane, not a refresh, but it was named and regulated like a refresh. That led to people dying.
The original "own goal" is that "Office app" was a Windows Phone 7/Windows 8 application no one used called something boring like "Preview" or "Document Hub" around the time OneDrive was still being called SkyDrive from the Windows Phone "Hub app" era. The app was basically just an MRU view of SkyDrive filtered to Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents.
Renaming that app "Office app" didn't do much to explain what it was for or what it was good at, especially with the confusion of "Office suite" and "Office app". (Some of that seemingly intentional with "Office app" trying to be a "Start Here" for Office documents.) I think that rename was worse than the new one.
With the rename to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app" there's actually new features and some idea of what the app is now for ("doing LLM things while wearing a corporate document fursona"). It's a dumb name, but a dumb name for an app that's a little less dumb.
Heh.. I remember when they announced this thing like 6 months ago. It was fully white and people mocked it a lot for resembling a drop of male bodily fluids.
Now it seems they fixed it in the most lazy way (changing the color) but managed to give it an awful name. "Mico" is a group of various monkey species.
Office has a monopoly and has reached the upper bound of how much more they can sell each year. The only option to force number to go up is to rebrand it and jack up the price. People know how much office suite should cost. They don't know what "AI" should cost.
Such confusing naming they can't even keep it straight in the announcement.
"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app" in the introductory paragraph.
Then there's a button "Buy Microsoft 365"
The link below is as "Download Microsoft 365 apps for MacOS"
And the file you get is:
Microsoft_365_and_Office_16~Installer.pkg
So is it the "Microsoft 365 Copilot app", or is it just "Microsoft 365" or multiple "Microsoft 365 apps"?
Above it says "formerly Office" and then the installer is named with "and Office". It's a jumble of inconsistency in just the first few lines on this landing page.
This name change is about a single "app" that was formerly called "Office app", not to be confused with the Office "suite", which in more cases than not also gets renamed, but in a subordinate brand sort of way ("the Office suite of applications, brought to you as a part of Microsoft 365").
The "Office app" itself was mostly just a launcher for the other apps. Now it is also/primarily an LLM chat interface.
Microsoft Office was a very strong brand, with decades of brand recognition and an enormous amount of value. This feels very much like throwing out the baby with the bathwater here ... while I can see the reasons for doing it, it very much seems like they're losing a lot from this name change.
Right, it's not a takeover, it's a "slip-under" without any adversarial corporate action except from inside Microsoft itself. As it becomes less relevant more effectively than an outside force calling the shots.
Another one where the users notice instantly, and also means a lot to enterprises but the Microsoft executives seem to be so insulated they don't even seem to be paying attention at all.
This is the kind of thing that Apple and Google have been taking to the bank more every time.
With all the brilliant engineers who are still there actually putting in good code, why can't that pipeline be maintained at least to the continued benefit of users, if not better than ever without some kind of Ballmerizing still getting in the way at this late date?
Looking at the fundamentals, if Microsoft itself can no longer afford to maintain separate Office and Copilot efforts, how is a less-well-funded enterprise supposed to be able to?
Instead of accepting the nonideal combination, maybe it's actually a sign that it's the right time to choose one or the other since that's the opposite direction Microsoft is going :\
At least on a per-machine basis. I don't really mind experimenting with Copilot but I don't want it at all on an established office machine.
They've (all the big guys) invested vast sums into AI. If the users don't buy into it that's a huge loss which will be a black mark on whoever directed the funding to it. Thus it must be made to succeed. If it worked there would be no need to keep trying to cram it down our throats. My Echo devices used to be well behaved, the only ads on the audio devices being stuff quite relevant to whatever I had just asked. My Show always had ads, but on a third of the screen and never in the way. Now it's getting aggressive about pushing the Alexa+ stuff, more than once I've had to get up and X off screens that didn't go away on their own.
It's a good analogy. Balmer went into the right direction (cloud), but with the wrong execution. Nadella is also going into a sensible direction (ai), but the execution is abysmal.
Instead of focusing on properly executing a handful of projects where AI could be leveraged successfully, they went all in on AI everywhere with only a very handful of useful tools.
Which I still miss, .NET Native, C++/CX, UAP/UWP, were so much better developer experience than Android, oh well.
They were also a good evolution from the Win32 model on desktop, what .NET 1.0 should have been, but Nadella's management completly messed Windows development experience as well.
You know how forums turned bad because people with good manners/communication skills can just go to a different discussion place so over time you consolidate with a toxic base of people with nowhere else to go?
Even if a company tries to get rid of the bad people, once you start doing random, the line must go up layoffs, the best people leave and then use their network within the company to poach the next down layers of good people. Current American 'layoff while spending the money on stock buybacks' is corporate suicide.
In this modern world, companies no longer need brands that consumers know, since they aren't selling products. Instead they're trying to sell the company by showing that they're a leader in so-called "AI".
In comparison, "Google Docs" is simpler and not rage inducing.
365 is a terrible name. Could you explain to your grandma what a 365 is? Likely not, and I’m not looking forward to that conversation. This is disappointing stuff
> Could you explain to your grandma what a 365 is?
Microsoft Office - Okay, this is a bundle of software relating to office work, released by Microsoft. Makes sense!
Microsoft Office 365 - This is also office software by Microsoft, but the 365 indicates it's a subscription service, because you're paying for it 365 days a year or something. This is contrasted to normal non-365 Office.
Microsoft 365 - So... This is something by Microsoft, that is also a subscription service? Okay...
Microsoft 365 Copilot - Oh! Copilot! Everyone knows Copilot, right? It's like, their one and only remaining important trademark, everyone has got to know what it means with no further explanation. So, it just makes sense, this is a Microsoft subscription service where you pay for this "Copilot", right?
The people who really live and die by these changes are the license (renewal) managers, and their legal counterparts, at big orgs. The users can’t keep up. The MS admins at each big org struggle to explain these iterations.
My own experience is that I mostly use the features I can find across each iteration and can barely use the newest frontier features exclusive to the latest version. Maybe new generations of those younger professionals entering the workforce see a different slice of things, but in my experience the graybeards still know how to use Microsoft Office better than the fresh entrants.
I actually like the Copilot interface in Office and Teams and the new start page. It serves my needs, but it’s a gateway to Office (or OneDrive and Sharepoint), not a replacement for Office (yet).
Office and E5 licensing are their moneymakers and they keep messing with it in a way where nobody could reasonably explain what the changes and brand names have been in the last 5 years.
They talk about Windows being an interface to agentic desktop computing, so it seems like they’re leaning towards sunsetting both the Windows brand and the Office brands for Copilot, which is a core technology they don’t build or own (in reality, or exclusively).
Related, somewhat, but I am moving away from Microsoft Office and to Apple's Pages/Numbers/Keynote/FreeForm, mostly because they are free and they are good enough.
They’re technically not “free”, they’re just bundled with new Macs. It’s a subtle distinction but if you have an old Mac you still have to pay for them.
They already do, as if you go to office.com you get redirected to copilot and have to hunt for the unintuitive link in the sidebar to actually find Office.
To throw away an iconic name like "Microsoft Office" boggles the mind.
That brand must've been worth a fortune. Strategically it also emboldens competitors, "they're all random products anyway, never heard of any of them, may as well try this or that".
> You can find your favorite apps—like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more—under the Apps section in the left navigation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot web app.
Oh, phew, you can still run Word and Excel.
Seriously, though, I think Microsoft has a handful of rather impenetrable moats that keep professional users paying for their software, and the top of the list might be Win32 (i.e. the ability to run old critical Windows software), Word, Excel, and Active Directory [0]. But here's Microsoft burying the Word and Excel lede so far that they literally need a FAQ entry to remind people that you can still buy (rent?) them.
[0] It's not like anyone likes Active Directory, but it's critical infrastructure for a whole lot of organizations.
This is one of the most atrocious branding and product mistakes I have ever witnessed.
> The Microsoft 365 Copilot app continues to serve as your everyday productivity app for work and life.
The productivity hit has been extremely negative for me. If I want to create a new spreadsheet, I have no idea where to go now. After opening the Okta tile, I'm presented with a chat box, and some nondescript tiles on the left.
If I ask the chat box to create a new document, I'm suddenly engaged with a slow-to-respond bot conversation describing what I want to do. I want a blank spreadsheet. It gives me a DOCUMENT TO DOWNLOAD rather than a document inside OneDrive. My goodness.
OK, so how do I find the prior interface? It's hidden behind "Apps". Getting a blank spreadsheet is hard enough, getting an actual slide deck from a template, that's impossible in the interface. And the bugs! SOOOOOO many bugs in the web interface.
I've finally given in and am using the desktop apps. If I need to use a template, I copy an old document manually.
It's pretty clear that Microsoft didn't even dogfood this, and that there was no iterative design cycle. Just a first-draft UI that get shoved out the door, and replaced decades of good-will about Office. Maybe "good will" is too strong, let me say not-ill-will.
> Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app is available for Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Academic, and SMB subscribers with a work or education account. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers and free accounts can access Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com and on the Copilot mobile app
So you don't even have Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
I guess Micro$oft has so much invested into their AI that they're trying to insure a return on that investment by pushing it onto everyone.
I read this morning that their AI i to provide free heating for 6,000 nearby homes with its heat waste. So to use M$ AI is to do 'your good deed' and subsidize someone's heating.
Manager who chose Microsoft over the available alternatives: Main screen turn on.
Microsoft-labelled robot: All your files are belong to us
Microsoft-labelled robot: You have no chance to survive make your time
Microsoft-labelled robot (voice changed): We are the Bot. Lower your firewalls and surrender your data. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
Microsoft-labelled robot: Freedom is irrelevant. Self determination is irrelevant. Your archaic culture is authority driven. It has been decided that a single individual will be selected to speak for us. You have been chosen to be that voice.
Manager (voice changed): I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Bot.
Ostensibly Microsoft has a goal, and they realize that the public is adamantly opposed to the way they are going about that goal. So the calculus for Microsoft management must be either: 1) We are right, doubters be damned; 2) This will be profitable and people will go along with it whether they want to or not, we're Microsoft, what are they going to do, use Pages?; or a total uncertainty as to the future but really hoping this path pays off for a variety of reasons.
I hate the future of Microsoft. I hate the future, and current iterations of Outlook and Word. I hate AI. I don't want CoPilot. What I WANT is competition in this space so Microsoft has to actually care what the consumer think.
While I agree with WTH on branding and everything, I never understood the "Office App". Excel, Powerpoint, Word .... all fine. OneDrive/Sharepoint ... absolutely. But the Office App was for me always just the app for the total noobs who do not remember how Word was called. Why would I click office app, then open a word template there. It always found pointless.
Under that spirit ... this may even make sense to rename it to Copilot app whatever.
Post title is a bit misleading. I see that Microsoft 365 still has the same name. The one-time purchases are still called Office 2024 or some such. It's just the umbrella android/iOS app where you can do all of office that's changed its name from "Microsoft Office" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot".
But still agree with the general sentiment that the branding is getting even worse than before.
office.com's title now says "Welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app", and right underneath it says "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)".
I don't think it's necessarily incompetence. If a middle manager succeeds in rebranding something they get to put that project on their resume. Their goal just isn't the long term good of Microsoft.
I'm not anti LLM, but the stock MS Copilot is just so hilariously bad. We have it at work, and based on my expectations of ChatGPT and Claude I thought it'd be able to do the following:
- fix formatting in a Word table (make fonts consistent, fix background colours according to a pattern)
- do better with email search than picking random words in my answer, then using the independently-broken Outlook search and give up
- when looking for internal webpages it can absolutely access it went to a web search, found nothing (surprise) and gave back some generic nonsense how I can ask colleagues instead
It is so, so, SO bad. And if Office is going more down this way, MS is pissing away its lockin - as these things are just unusable.
This is now worse than the "Microsoft.Net" effort to use ".Net" with everything in Microsoft as a brand term (not just the dev tooling)... it's effectively become meaningless.
Hahahahahahaha... "Back-in-the-day" we used to joke internally that Office (it's specific applications) would become things like; "SharePoint Documents", "SharePoint Spreadsheets", "SharePoint Presentations" - because when that was the "all-new-hotness", Microsoft was always trying to stuff the name into EVERYTHING...
Wow this is dumb. The reason I’m on Windows is because of Office. For my needs Office on Windows is the best—otherwise I’d be on a Mac or Linux. I use AI everyday and never found a use case for Copilot. So why rebrand Office, their best product after Copilot, their worst product?
They had Office.com, a hub website, and a desktop app called Office that was basically just a wrapper for said hub website. They also had a mobile all-in-one app called Office. As far as I can tell, those are what are being rebranded and made to default to an AI chat view on login, not Office as a whole.
Actually LibreOffice has better backward compatibility than MS Office now. If you have a MS Office 2003 file that current MS Office can't open, try LibreOffice.
Doubt what you like, but I "rescued" old MS Office documents for my grandfather with that. Also this is a common fear when leaving MS Office, so you can bet they work on that. I never had someone complain over OO-compatibitlity until now, so there is that.
When LibreOffice appeared on the stage, that was actually my first test back then: opening an existing ODT document I had written. It was already displayed incorrectly at the time.
A coworker told me about this today and I genuinely thought he was just messing around, but nope, this is real I guess.
Copilot is SUCH an overloaded term, I have no idea even what it refers to anymore.
This is not 2026 news.
Whatever's being spread around on social media today is late rage bait. Change occurred a year ago OP. And there was plenty of discussion and reporting.
I heard on some podcast that there is such a thing as: "Microsoft Excel World Championship" and someone named Diarmuid Early won it last year. I would pay $2.56 to watch an Excel battle between a slop skipper and him. Money is on him. I am team John Henry.
I genuinely thought this was a joke when I saw the headline, and I had to double check the domain name to verify that this wasn't a parody.
Apart from being absolutely abysmal marketing, the front page alone is wildly inconsistent:
* "Welcome to Microsoft 365 Copilot"
* "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) [...]"
* "Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office 365) is a subscription service [...]"
Which is it, "Microsoft 365 Copilot", "(The) Microsoft 365 Copilot app", "(The) Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)", "Microsoft 365" or "Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office 365)"?
I think Microsoft delegated all marketing decisions to AI. Not even joking.
IIRC one point Microsoft had a marketing campaign where they associated everything with ".NET" and nobody could explain exactly what ".NET" even was.
Here we go with Copilot.
Also the brief foray into "Live" https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_Live
Oh I remember. For those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
It wasn’t during that exact period, but at some point they even let you create @dot.net e-mail addresses. I nabbed one and was happy for the vanity of it all, but they mysteriously unplugged them maybe two or three years later.
dot dot net, amazing.
They include the "formerly..." to hilariously try to not confuse people (not joking).
They did the same when they rebranded Azure Active Directory and moved it into the Entra family of security products. It's now fully called: Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory)
I hope every publication uses Microsoft Copilot (formerly Office) for years, like they did for X (formerly Twitter).
Some of us are likely never going to stop referring to it as twitter.
X, may as well be 3 Xs.
I still call it Twitter... I just don't think "X" works nearly as well in conversation.
Xitter.
As in the Chinese X. Remember how their leader's name is pronounced.
I still always go on the site using twitter.com domain or search.
At least in writing you can use [insert double-stroke X here - which HN can’t display] to make it clear that you mean the social media service. (Unless you’re talking to mathematicians.)
"The office suite formerly known as Office".
Did OpenOffice or Kingsoft put them up to this?
rotting corpse, formerly microsoft.
And Azure Active Directory was formerly known as Active Directory Federation Services, and it was more compliant with SAML 2.0. The update broke some integrations with 3rd party SAML service providers.
The Artist Formerly Known as Prince
Prince changed his name because a corporation had refused to give him control over the work he created, and wouldn't let him release work under the name that he was born with. (Sort of the template for "Taylor's Version" decades later.) And he then used a logo that became the most successful personal logo of all time, not a mishmash of design-by-committee.
So, basically the _opposite_ of an incoherent brand based around training on content that was gathered from creators without consent, being foisted onto employees who didn't ask for it, with an ugly logo that nobody will ever remember.
Moral: don't come for Prince or Anil will come for you :)
Microsoft -> Microslop -> Megaslop.
So many things have happened in the last 12 months that made reality indistinguishable from satire. This is Megaslop making their best effort to win the prize in that category.
Also, never trust a statistic you haven’t faked yourself: Now Megaslop can claim a drastic surge in the number of “Copilot” users.
Microsoft™ 365™ Copilot™ App™ Home™ Business™ Edition™ Premium™
For Teams
Essentials
(sorry for the sh*tpost this naming thing is hilarious.)
For workgroups
Formerly known as Lynx
For Business
(formerly Office)
(recently filed for bankrupcy)
Microsoft might just be the first company run by an LLM. At least I couldn't tell the difference anymore. What an incredible joke.
"Run by an LLM" as in the LLM makes all these decisions, or as in people kneel at the altar of the sacred LLM, trying to come up with all these new ways of appeasing it? Because to me it feels like the latter, I don't think you could even finesse an LLM into coming up with this. This kind of an intentional, ideological, self-inflicted misstep feels like it could only be done by a human.
It is a joke. Microsoft is the joke.
> I think Microsoft delegated all marketing decisions to AI. Not even joking.
I actually think AI would have done a better job of this. And Microsoft being atrocious at branding predates AI mass adoption by about 2 decades, arguably more.
Microsoft used to just name a lot of things for what they did... to a point where it was almost confusing by itself. "Microsoft SQL Server" being a prominent example.
Though, the everything .Net around 2000 was nearly as bad as this CoPilot rename.
.net, dynamics, power, 365, azure, fabric, copilot.
There's always some pointless name change going on.
COM, OLE, ActiveX
I think it misses a .net in the end. Oh wait, this naming mistake they already made like 25 years ago. Funny how their learnt nothing out of their own mistakes.
Today their CEO released a statement that people should focus not on AI but on the uses of AI. So put the AI in the back and focus on the benefits. This is the exact opposite.
At least when it was Office.net it still had the word "Office" in it!
> Today their CEO released a statement that people should focus not on AI but on the uses of AI.
So they shouldn't focus. AI is so bad that it is useless. Microsoft is trying hard to destroy its user base and, maybe, with the EU pushing for local solutions, they may succeed.
there's even an M365 hanging around in the article :facepalm:
1975: Traf-O-Data renamed Microsoft. Traffic counting ditched. Visionary.
1985: MS-DOS released. Users typed everything. Peak convenience.
1995: Windows 95 launched. Clippy forced assistance. Users thrilled.
2012: Metro interface rolled out. Tiles everywhere. Intuitive design.
2014: Windows Azure renamed Microsoft Azure. “Windows” dropped. Bold move.
2020: Office 365 renamed Microsoft 365. Bing renamed Microsoft Bing. Defender renamed Microsoft Defender. Branding masterstroke.
2022: Office brand killed after 32 years. Portal substituted. Heartwarming farewell.
2023: Bing Chat renamed Copilot. Azure AD renamed Entra ID. Creativity unleashed.
2024: Groove Music renamed endlessly. Finally axed. Customer loyalty rewarded.
2025: Microsoft 365 renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Price hiked. Bargain.
2026: Copilot slapped on everything. Rebranding triumphs. Bugs eternal. Pure genius.
Correction:
1975: Traf-O-Data renamed Micro-Soft.
1976-11-26: Micro-Soft renamed Microsoft.
So it is indeed true that it is only Micro when it is Soft!
2026: Copilot chat boxes everywhere, Users typed everything. Peak convenience.
You type the question, Copilot tells you where to click.
"Bit higher, higher, no too far, down now, no, below the red line. The other red line. Yes this one... no the one you were just over".
Press any key to continue, or any other key to quit.
2027: microsoft windows 12 renamed to Microsoft AI OS
They are definitely going to call the next Windows version "Windows Copilot" or just.... Microsoft Copilot, just to make everything more confusing.
Microsoft Copilot Series OS
Microsoft 365 Windows+Copilot (Formerly Windows 12) (New)
Microsoft The OS Formerly Known As Windows 12
Microsoft Copilot AI Desktop
Nah, just Microsoft Copilot. No Os.
Microsoft aiOS
No, way too user-friendly and intuitive.
Microsoft Copilot 365 OS is the way to go.
2011: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion, rebrands Lync to Skype for Business, an incredible branding manoeuvre.
2012: Skype peer-to-peer nature and end-to-end encryption removed.
2017: Microsoft launches Teams, competes with own product after driving Skype into the ground for 6 years with encroaching advertising, removing features, and abandonment.
2025: Skype shut-down.
What was the point? When MS bought Skype, they already held a majority market share in the IM market with MSN, which they also shut-down. Between 2011 and 2025 they lost almost all market share for domestic users to WhatsApp and Discord. This series of events baffles me to no end.
If I remember correctly, they had to buy Skype twice because they didn't get everything g in the first transaction. Also, the purchase was backed by the cia through one of their companies (I don't remember if it was palantir though) to remove the end-to-end encryption.
I think that was ebay. They bought skype but not the p2p tech backing it; fucked the founders on earnouts; the founders refused to reup the contract; ebay was incapable of replacing the tech; and the founders got a bunch of the business back. Presided over by Meg Whitman, who appears to be profoundly incompetent, understanding neither tech nor business.
The contemporary articles are mostly gone, but eg https://archive.is/4tuRg and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/06/skype-set...
Conspiracy or not, it being CIA funded is the most plausible explanation for why they'd make such an expensive purchase and do nothing with it.
Do you remember when they bought the first and largest webmail platform and did nothing with it?
I seem to remember they spent years trying and failing to migrate it to .net.
Not quite--this predates .net. They acquired Hotmail in 1997, while it was running on Solaris mail servers and Apache on FreeBSD for the web frontend. In a highly publicized move, Microsoft ventured to port it to Exchange and IIS on Windows NT. This went on for years on end, with MS claiming to have finished the transition several times, while getting egg on their face. Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000 and a combination of their flagship products and Windows Services for Unix (the WSL of those times).
It has since been rebranded as MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail, and Outlook, likely with some 365 thrown in.
Meanwhile, they have mismanaged their once great mail user agent Outlook Express, as well as their quite useful personal information manager Microsoft Outlook, to the point where their newest offering is absolutely unusable.
> Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000
The legend was that they tried and finally sticked with Freebsd, because Windows was not able to cope with the level of traffic.
"eh"
https://www.wired.com/1999/08/hotmail-hackers-we-did-it/
Missed the renaming of Azure into... ensure? I can't remember the name even though I use it frequently and the azure links still work.
Azure Active Directory => Microsoft Entra ID (Formerly Azure Active Directory)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/identity-a...
And yes, the latter is the complete name as seen on the web page...
What's the point? Did someone in marketing just decide that "Active Directory" is too 90s and must be tossed out based on vibes? Entra ID sounds like something completely unrelated.
IIRC one reason was that Azure Active Directory bore little technical relation to Active Directory and it was endlessly confusing to customers. Especially as AAD evolved into an identity system and away from a directory.
Trivial example is that AAD doesnt do LDAP, unlike regular AD which was built on it. It's not surprising that some PM would keep "AD" in the name of AADto make the transition to cloud seem less scary, but after a few years its actively unhelpful as the majority of customers have made the switch to cloud based auth and identity.
That makes more sense then, yeah. I've never used AAD and I didn't realize it had little relation to OG Active Directory.
Although, that also makes me ask why they named it after Active Directory in the first place...
AAD also broke SAML compliance that was in Active Directory Federation Services.
Actually "Azure Active Directory" was confusing in the first place, since Active Directory already existed for decades, and Azure Active Directory was not-really it's cloud-equivalent
Yes, that service was called Azure Active Directory Domain Services (now Entra ID Domain Services)
2026 Microsoft renamed to Cope-A-Lot
You forgot the .Net renaming in the early 2000's.
Which is the exact mistake they are repeating right now. Force one brand on everything, even if it has nothing to do with it.
2035: Microsoft renamed itself to 365.
Genuine question: are you German? (I approve)
CopiLot has detected you have asked about Windows Genuine Advantage in Germany language.
No, I’m not German. But danke for the approval, I’ll take it anyway.
Missing Bob.
Office 97 is where Clippy came from.
Though some of the rest of Clippy's "friends" (Lynx the cat and Rover) came from Bob and were Bob's "friends" first. Windows 2000 added Microsoft Agent which shared some characters in 2D with Office 2000 and invented a few new 3D characters (which Office never used). Windows XP added "Search Assistant" using some of the Office characters (Rover being the default search character and Lynx still hanging around as an alternative).
The legacy of Bob lived on for a while. Also Microsoft Agent was a lot of fun to play with as a kid in High School. I built some wild PowerPoint Presentations scripting Agents from the Notes field.
From reading the other comments this happened a while ago, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
This is rather annoying and short sighted of Microsoft. If anything this change is emblematic of the rot that exists in Microsoft currently.
Microsoft Office is one of the strongest recognised brands in technology, if you’ve used a windows PC at any point in the last 30 years you will know of Microsoft Office.
Not only that but the brand name is trusted; office and the applications therein are the standard for general purpose business work (as much as I’d prefer Libreoffice etc to gain market share)
Throwing that brand away in favour of an untrusted, unwanted, undesirable name seems headstrong and foolishly iconoclastic. Not only that but their implementation of the new name is just inelegant. Which further lends credence to the idea that Microsoft cannot name products
Skype for Business
Microsoft Windows App
Xbox One (and Xbox Series…)
Name recognition only matters if there are competitors. Office is profitable because it is sold in bulk licenses to companies who don't care what it's called. They aren't going to switch to Google Office or Facebook Office because of a name change, not least because migrating comms, cloud storage away from Outlook, Teams and OneDrive/Sharepoint is unthinkable.
As for consumers, those who don't want to pay a subscription for Office (they make the one-time purchase very hard to find) are probably already on Google Docs.
I'm still happily on Office 2019. No plans to get involved in 365, copilot etc. This may confuse their customers I guess?
"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)" has got to be the worst rebrand ever. This is gonna be up there with Twitter's rebrand as a case study 20 years down the line.
The worst rebrand yet. We'll probably be reminiscing about the current day once they follow it up with:
Word -> Copilot 365 text app
Excel -> Copilot 365 spreadsheet app
PowerPoint -> Copilot 365 presentation app
Outlook -> Copilot 365 mail app
Windows -> Copilot system
Xbox -> Copilot gaming device
It's kinda like Microsoft became a private equity company and bought itself out.
> Word -> Copilot 365 text app
Microsoft Copilot 365 Subsystem For Rich Text
I don't even know why the 365 number is so important. I mean, it probably has something to do with there being 365 days in 3 out of 4 years, but what makes that significant to a word processor or spreadsheet? It's as if Google were to rename their product "Search 60" because there are 60 minutes in an hour. So what?
Microsoft's brand names never made a whole lot of sense--they're just continuing the tradition.
It's an artifact of the transition away from year-based releases to a subscription. Customers were used to Office 95, Office 98, Office 2003, etc. 365 sort of matches that pattern, so customers aren't excessively disgruntled, while signalling that there's a "release" on every day of the year, it's constantly up to date.
And I guess they've just kept it since even though it's not really necessary any more.
> text
> spreadsheet
> presentation
No, it's "docs", "tables" and "slides".
I still put "Max" as the second worst (after "X").
Max can be third, but Office is probably the second biggest computer software there is behind Chrome. Office is largely the entire reason people use Windows. Killing the brand that made you the world's biggest company for a long time is rather unprecedented.
HBO's was bad, but it's just the fourth place streaming service in its primary market, so the scale is pretty minor comparatively.
It might be worse for the users, but if we factor in the user base just a tiny bit.. (I don't remember watching anything branded HBO in my life, outside the US)
I guess no one remembers the attempted Netflix rebrand.
I don't. What (and when) was it?
In 2011 Netflix announced it would split its DVD-by-mail and streaming businesses. The DVD business would be called "Qwikster", which was mocked. Eventually they reversed the decision.
Besides the goofy name, people thought the move was premature. Netflix wanted to go all-in on streaming. The catalogue was a lot more limited back then, though, and the DVDs helped bridge the gap since a lot of movies and TV shows that were unavailable for streaming were available by DVD instead.
Which max?
HBO Max was renamed to just Max. They've now changed it back.
I don't know how they could look at a brand like "HBO Max" and, somehow, deduce that "Max" is the most important part of the name.
The executives in charge at that point made a lot of money on the "90 Day Fiance" "franchise", among other badly and/or dully and/or grossly named things. IP and branding wasn't exactly their strong suit.
737 wasn't the best rebrand either. RIP
It wasn't bad because of the branding. If anything, the MAX name was kind of understandable since they ran out of hundreds they'd previously used to indicate variants and revisions.
Except the whole point of the fiasco is that this was a NEW airplane, not a refresh, but it was named and regulated like a refresh. That led to people dying.
That one I think may be the HBO rebrand.
Not the Skinimax.
"IBM for i" is up there
The original "own goal" is that "Office app" was a Windows Phone 7/Windows 8 application no one used called something boring like "Preview" or "Document Hub" around the time OneDrive was still being called SkyDrive from the Windows Phone "Hub app" era. The app was basically just an MRU view of SkyDrive filtered to Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents.
Renaming that app "Office app" didn't do much to explain what it was for or what it was good at, especially with the confusion of "Office suite" and "Office app". (Some of that seemingly intentional with "Office app" trying to be a "Start Here" for Office documents.) I think that rename was worse than the new one.
With the rename to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app" there's actually new features and some idea of what the app is now for ("doing LLM things while wearing a corporate document fursona"). It's a dumb name, but a dumb name for an app that's a little less dumb.
In a similar act of marketing malfeascence they renamed their mobile Remote Desktop app to "Windows".
[flagged]
I would have thought the Office brand was much more valuable and recognizable than Copilot.
Yeah, but that was a problem. Now they fixed it and Copilot immediately has 36286162% higher adoption rate.
Expect Clippy in Notepad, VS Code, and Github soon is my bet, along with suggestions to spend money on a "today only" subscription offer.
Even worse, meet Mico (as in “Mi”crosoft “Co”pilot).
https://copilot.microsoft.com/labs/experiments/mico
Heh.. I remember when they announced this thing like 6 months ago. It was fully white and people mocked it a lot for resembling a drop of male bodily fluids.
Now it seems they fixed it in the most lazy way (changing the color) but managed to give it an awful name. "Mico" is a group of various monkey species.
Office has a monopoly and has reached the upper bound of how much more they can sell each year. The only option to force number to go up is to rebrand it and jack up the price. People know how much office suite should cost. They don't know what "AI" should cost.
Office not so much I think. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook ... totally. But Office is just a packaging name no one uses day to day.
First problem: you thought.
You are not qualified for Microsoft marketing (now called Copilot Human Incentivizing).
Such confusing naming they can't even keep it straight in the announcement.
"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app" in the introductory paragraph. Then there's a button "Buy Microsoft 365" The link below is as "Download Microsoft 365 apps for MacOS"
And the file you get is: Microsoft_365_and_Office_16~Installer.pkg
So is it the "Microsoft 365 Copilot app", or is it just "Microsoft 365" or multiple "Microsoft 365 apps"?
Above it says "formerly Office" and then the installer is named with "and Office". It's a jumble of inconsistency in just the first few lines on this landing page.
I'm struggling to determine whether it is a singular "app" or multiple apps for various "Microsoft 365" functions, or both.
This name change is about a single "app" that was formerly called "Office app", not to be confused with the Office "suite", which in more cases than not also gets renamed, but in a subordinate brand sort of way ("the Office suite of applications, brought to you as a part of Microsoft 365").
The "Office app" itself was mostly just a launcher for the other apps. Now it is also/primarily an LLM chat interface.
No way, it's BPOS all over again [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Online_Services#Prod...
Microsoft Office was a very strong brand, with decades of brand recognition and an enormous amount of value. This feels very much like throwing out the baby with the bathwater here ... while I can see the reasons for doing it, it very much seems like they're losing a lot from this name change.
Dunno if I can see the reasons for doing it. Imagine this in another product:
"yo dude, I need me a sip of that ice cold M (formerly known as Coca-Cola)!"
The M stands for mmmmm.
I'll put money on Windows 12 being rebranded to either Windows Copilot or Copilot OS for Windows.
The concept of Windows and operating systems is so 90s. The next version will be Copilot Portal, your access point to the Copilot ecosystem.
How long until the marketing geniuses at Microsoft launch “Copilot Copilot for Copilot?”
I think it’ll be called “Copilot Substem for Linux” or something incomprehensible like that.
It's okay, you have to use cloud copilot anyway since you'll barely have enough RAM for your browser moving forward.
Windows 13 is sure to be another avoided version (like Windows 9 was skipped).
The marketers will want to rename 12 with the argument it has to change before 13 anyways.
Then again Apple are just as annoying, releasing 26 in 2025.
Windows 14 will just be called Pilot, where the user just sits back and watches the computer “do its thing.”
Microsoft Restarting would be more fitting
Microsoft Copilot Recall Ai Pro.
Microsoft Windows X Copilot One Series Y
If there was no merger/takeover and you need to add "formerly" to the brand name, you should keep the original branding
Right, it's not a takeover, it's a "slip-under" without any adversarial corporate action except from inside Microsoft itself. As it becomes less relevant more effectively than an outside force calling the shots.
Another one where the users notice instantly, and also means a lot to enterprises but the Microsoft executives seem to be so insulated they don't even seem to be paying attention at all.
This is the kind of thing that Apple and Google have been taking to the bank more every time.
With all the brilliant engineers who are still there actually putting in good code, why can't that pipeline be maintained at least to the continued benefit of users, if not better than ever without some kind of Ballmerizing still getting in the way at this late date?
Looking at the fundamentals, if Microsoft itself can no longer afford to maintain separate Office and Copilot efforts, how is a less-well-funded enterprise supposed to be able to?
Instead of accepting the nonideal combination, maybe it's actually a sign that it's the right time to choose one or the other since that's the opposite direction Microsoft is going :\
At least on a per-machine basis. I don't really mind experimenting with Copilot but I don't want it at all on an established office machine.
This has to be to cheat the usage numbers for Copilot. Else they have truly lost the plot.
They've (all the big guys) invested vast sums into AI. If the users don't buy into it that's a huge loss which will be a black mark on whoever directed the funding to it. Thus it must be made to succeed. If it worked there would be no need to keep trying to cram it down our throats. My Echo devices used to be well behaved, the only ads on the audio devices being stuff quite relevant to whatever I had just asked. My Show always had ads, but on a third of the screen and never in the way. Now it's getting aggressive about pushing the Alexa+ stuff, more than once I've had to get up and X off screens that didn't go away on their own.
I think it's intended to discourage people from switching to 365 Classic, which has the Office suite but does not include Copilot.
You say that like it's mutually exclusive.
This is getting bizarre, worse than Balmer's Microsoft.
It's a good analogy. Balmer went into the right direction (cloud), but with the wrong execution. Nadella is also going into a sensible direction (ai), but the execution is abysmal.
Instead of focusing on properly executing a handful of projects where AI could be leveraged successfully, they went all in on AI everywhere with only a very handful of useful tools.
AFAIK it was Nadella who went all-in on cloud. Ballmer was more into now irrelevant stuff like windows phones
Which I still miss, .NET Native, C++/CX, UAP/UWP, were so much better developer experience than Android, oh well.
They were also a good evolution from the Win32 model on desktop, what .NET 1.0 should have been, but Nadella's management completly messed Windows development experience as well.
Unfortunely it has also landed on DevDiv experience, see AI on Windows Terminal, Aspire Dashboard,...
I guess I haven’t updated my terminal in a while. I haven’t seen the forced ai there yet.
Here, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/github-copilot-in...
But I thought Microsoft was a forward-thinking innovator!
Sad days. Windows terminal was so good.
CEOs mostly just set direction, the workforce remains the same (sans mass-layoffs).
I’d wager that mass layoffs only crystallize the essence of a company, removing everyone who isn’t willing to conform 100%, for better or worse.
A giant machine sheds all that slows down its drive (to somewhere), even by thinking too much, and, at a certain size, it may actually be an advantage
You know how forums turned bad because people with good manners/communication skills can just go to a different discussion place so over time you consolidate with a toxic base of people with nowhere else to go?
Even if a company tries to get rid of the bad people, once you start doing random, the line must go up layoffs, the best people leave and then use their network within the company to poach the next down layers of good people. Current American 'layoff while spending the money on stock buybacks' is corporate suicide.
Yes, and it's clear that the direction is "shove ai everywhere".
Yeah the direction is down the shitter, and you can blame the CEO Satya Nadella for that.
No, they also approve major decisions that affect that directional change.
This was approved by the CEO, without doubt.
Artificial Intelligence! Artificial Intelligence! Artificial Intelligence!
Ah the 90s were great.
Hi, I'm Clippy! It looks like you're trying to exterminate all humans. Would you like to invite The Doctor?
It has been renamed for a while now.
In this modern world, companies no longer need brands that consumers know, since they aren't selling products. Instead they're trying to sell the company by showing that they're a leader in so-called "AI".
In comparison, "Google Docs" is simpler and not rage inducing.
365 is a terrible name. Could you explain to your grandma what a 365 is? Likely not, and I’m not looking forward to that conversation. This is disappointing stuff
> Could you explain to your grandma what a 365 is?
Microsoft Office - Okay, this is a bundle of software relating to office work, released by Microsoft. Makes sense!
Microsoft Office 365 - This is also office software by Microsoft, but the 365 indicates it's a subscription service, because you're paying for it 365 days a year or something. This is contrasted to normal non-365 Office.
Microsoft 365 - So... This is something by Microsoft, that is also a subscription service? Okay...
Microsoft 365 Copilot - Oh! Copilot! Everyone knows Copilot, right? It's like, their one and only remaining important trademark, everyone has got to know what it means with no further explanation. So, it just makes sense, this is a Microsoft subscription service where you pay for this "Copilot", right?
Because it will make you turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Watch out! a 365-degree turn might very well leave you on a direct collision course with your grandma
You’d be 5 degrees off technically
175 degrees if you insist on being pedantic.
Does anyone have the video of Satya waffling on about agents following you around as he fumbles to explain the value of copilot?
The beatings will continue until the stock price goes down.
What happened with Microsoft marketing?
The people who really live and die by these changes are the license (renewal) managers, and their legal counterparts, at big orgs. The users can’t keep up. The MS admins at each big org struggle to explain these iterations.
My own experience is that I mostly use the features I can find across each iteration and can barely use the newest frontier features exclusive to the latest version. Maybe new generations of those younger professionals entering the workforce see a different slice of things, but in my experience the graybeards still know how to use Microsoft Office better than the fresh entrants.
I actually like the Copilot interface in Office and Teams and the new start page. It serves my needs, but it’s a gateway to Office (or OneDrive and Sharepoint), not a replacement for Office (yet).
Office and E5 licensing are their moneymakers and they keep messing with it in a way where nobody could reasonably explain what the changes and brand names have been in the last 5 years.
They talk about Windows being an interface to agentic desktop computing, so it seems like they’re leaning towards sunsetting both the Windows brand and the Office brands for Copilot, which is a core technology they don’t build or own (in reality, or exclusively).
Related, somewhat, but I am moving away from Microsoft Office and to Apple's Pages/Numbers/Keynote/FreeForm, mostly because they are free and they are good enough.
They’re technically not “free”, they’re just bundled with new Macs. It’s a subtle distinction but if you have an old Mac you still have to pay for them.
Maybe just so they can count office usage as Copilot usage.
They already do, as if you go to office.com you get redirected to copilot and have to hunt for the unintuitive link in the sidebar to actually find Office.
Sorry, I install MS Office from massgrave.
This makes the most sense
If Microsoft Office is an AI app then Microsoft is the #1 AI company in the world!
News from almost a year ago now.
Some discussion last January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726
And the bigger discussion shortly after, setting a tone somewhat for the rest of the year:
The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42831281
I think this is a different, new rename? It was renamed last year, but I don't recall seeing office in it's entirety being called "The Copilot App"?
Nope, that was the change last January (to the web text and elsewhere in the apps, causing confusion etc etc.)
No word in that title makes sense for an office suite.
Especially not "Microsoft".
Wow; they've officially lost the f**ing plot. 2026 is gonna be wild; I can already tell.
On a side note, Québec city's parking app is called Copilote+
It's just insane.
To throw away an iconic name like "Microsoft Office" boggles the mind.
That brand must've been worth a fortune. Strategically it also emboldens competitors, "they're all random products anyway, never heard of any of them, may as well try this or that".
Note: this already happened 6 months ago.
It's screwy and confusing but Microsoft doesn't believe in understandable branding.
I think the best part is the second FAQ:
> Your favorite apps are still here
> You can find your favorite apps—like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more—under the Apps section in the left navigation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot web app.
Oh, phew, you can still run Word and Excel.
Seriously, though, I think Microsoft has a handful of rather impenetrable moats that keep professional users paying for their software, and the top of the list might be Win32 (i.e. the ability to run old critical Windows software), Word, Excel, and Active Directory [0]. But here's Microsoft burying the Word and Excel lede so far that they literally need a FAQ entry to remind people that you can still buy (rent?) them.
[0] It's not like anyone likes Active Directory, but it's critical infrastructure for a whole lot of organizations.
This is one of the most atrocious branding and product mistakes I have ever witnessed.
> The Microsoft 365 Copilot app continues to serve as your everyday productivity app for work and life.
The productivity hit has been extremely negative for me. If I want to create a new spreadsheet, I have no idea where to go now. After opening the Okta tile, I'm presented with a chat box, and some nondescript tiles on the left.
If I ask the chat box to create a new document, I'm suddenly engaged with a slow-to-respond bot conversation describing what I want to do. I want a blank spreadsheet. It gives me a DOCUMENT TO DOWNLOAD rather than a document inside OneDrive. My goodness.
OK, so how do I find the prior interface? It's hidden behind "Apps". Getting a blank spreadsheet is hard enough, getting an actual slide deck from a template, that's impossible in the interface. And the bugs! SOOOOOO many bugs in the web interface.
I've finally given in and am using the desktop apps. If I need to use a template, I copy an old document manually.
It's pretty clear that Microsoft didn't even dogfood this, and that there was no iterative design cycle. Just a first-draft UI that get shoved out the door, and replaced decades of good-will about Office. Maybe "good will" is too strong, let me say not-ill-will.
This rebrand will be liked less than when Gap, Cracker Barrel and Jaguar introduced new logos.
At this rate I wouldn’t put it past MSFT to rename the company and all products Copilot. Just Copilot.
Facebook renaming itself to Meta Platforms wasn't any better.
> Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app is available for Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Academic, and SMB subscribers with a work or education account. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers and free accounts can access Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com and on the Copilot mobile app
So you don't even have Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
Jobs was right about Microsoft having no taste. In a saner organization, the person proposing this would have been dismissed for poor judgment.
It is calming to see that in the end, WordPerfect Office outlived Microsoft Office.
I guess Micro$oft has so much invested into their AI that they're trying to insure a return on that investment by pushing it onto everyone.
I read this morning that their AI i to provide free heating for 6,000 nearby homes with its heat waste. So to use M$ AI is to do 'your good deed' and subsidize someone's heating.
At one point I will believe that Satya Nadella is the anagram of Linus Thorvalds
It is 2026, the year of The War of the Memes
Office worker: Somebody set us up the bomb.
Manager who chose Microsoft over the available alternatives: Main screen turn on.
Microsoft-labelled robot: All your files are belong to us
Microsoft-labelled robot: You have no chance to survive make your time
Microsoft-labelled robot (voice changed): We are the Bot. Lower your firewalls and surrender your data. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
Microsoft-labelled robot: Freedom is irrelevant. Self determination is irrelevant. Your archaic culture is authority driven. It has been decided that a single individual will be selected to speak for us. You have been chosen to be that voice.
Manager (voice changed): I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Bot.
Good news: Libreoffice is still called Libreoffice
Might as well go all the way and call it "Microsoft 365 Copilot: Best App for Office"
"Microsoft 365 Copilot Best App for Office FREE 2026 New AI Word Text Letter Writer Not Pages"
#microslop ;)
Copislop
Someone else suggested "Microslop Coslopit with Slopfice 365"
Waiting for Adobe to rename Photoslop.
Slopilot
A dozen or more people are going to get promoted for the "impact" associated with this project.
> "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" > -Charlie Munger
Ostensibly Microsoft has a goal, and they realize that the public is adamantly opposed to the way they are going about that goal. So the calculus for Microsoft management must be either: 1) We are right, doubters be damned; 2) This will be profitable and people will go along with it whether they want to or not, we're Microsoft, what are they going to do, use Pages?; or a total uncertainty as to the future but really hoping this path pays off for a variety of reasons.
I hate the future of Microsoft. I hate the future, and current iterations of Outlook and Word. I hate AI. I don't want CoPilot. What I WANT is competition in this space so Microsoft has to actually care what the consumer think.
Microsoft may actually manage the near-impossible feat of pissing off so many people they break their monopoly.
Bizarre and desperate
While I agree with WTH on branding and everything, I never understood the "Office App". Excel, Powerpoint, Word .... all fine. OneDrive/Sharepoint ... absolutely. But the Office App was for me always just the app for the total noobs who do not remember how Word was called. Why would I click office app, then open a word template there. It always found pointless.
Under that spirit ... this may even make sense to rename it to Copilot app whatever.
I missed that Microsoft had been acquired by The Onion.
Post title is a bit misleading. I see that Microsoft 365 still has the same name. The one-time purchases are still called Office 2024 or some such. It's just the umbrella android/iOS app where you can do all of office that's changed its name from "Microsoft Office" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot".
But still agree with the general sentiment that the branding is getting even worse than before.
If that's the case it is not obvious
office.com's title now says "Welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app", and right underneath it says "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)".
What’s not obvious? It went from “Microsoft 365” (the dumb but old rebrand) to “Microsoft 365 Copilot”.
”Formerly Office” suggests Office is no more.
”Formerly Office” happened in october 2024
https://web.archive.org/web/20241001025949/https://www.offic...
So it’s obvious for those who can piece together the long term marketing narrative.
As a fan of Linux and open source, I rejoice when Microsoft trashes its brands pointlessly so middle managers can get promoted.
The good thing about enshittification is seeing brands just self-destruct out of sheer incompetence.
I don't think it's necessarily incompetence. If a middle manager succeeds in rebranding something they get to put that project on their resume. Their goal just isn't the long term good of Microsoft.
Who'd have thought that entity framework naming would eventually seem like one of Microsoft's least bad naming decisions?
https://blog.oneunicorn.com/2020/03/26/numbersarehard/
I'm not anti LLM, but the stock MS Copilot is just so hilariously bad. We have it at work, and based on my expectations of ChatGPT and Claude I thought it'd be able to do the following:
- fix formatting in a Word table (make fonts consistent, fix background colours according to a pattern)
- do better with email search than picking random words in my answer, then using the independently-broken Outlook search and give up
- when looking for internal webpages it can absolutely access it went to a web search, found nothing (surprise) and gave back some generic nonsense how I can ask colleagues instead
It is so, so, SO bad. And if Office is going more down this way, MS is pissing away its lockin - as these things are just unusable.
Someone please remove the self-serve paint thinner fountain from their cafeteria. It's beyond ridiculous.
I wrote a very relevant post here couple of months ago about Microsoft's approach of (re)branding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930297
Satya Nadella is the Steve Jobs of our time. This is what true innovation looks like.
No way. There's just no way.
For a company that likes branding so much, they sure suck at it.
Are they going to redirect office.com to microsoft365copilotapp.com while they're at it?
The drowning will instinctively try to surface for air. They will drown you to achieve that.
This is not the first case of at least a year old news being reported as something new.
Microsoft keeps messing up branding so bad over and over and over.
At this pace, they might rename Microsoft to Copilot App :)
Poe's Law in action.
when you have been selling the same junk for decades, you can always rename it and keep selling the same junk.
just imagine all those poor engineers who have to maintain such a junk.
Ballmer would turn in his grave except he’s alive and well.
So how do I call Word now? Microsoft Copilot app Word?
Microsoft 365 Copilot Prompt
Would be funny if they renamed Windows to Copilots
Nice , this is only the 37’th Copilot product from M$FT
How about leap year?
This is now worse than the "Microsoft.Net" effort to use ".Net" with everything in Microsoft as a brand term (not just the dev tooling)... it's effectively become meaningless.
Microslop
Hahahahahahaha... "Back-in-the-day" we used to joke internally that Office (it's specific applications) would become things like; "SharePoint Documents", "SharePoint Spreadsheets", "SharePoint Presentations" - because when that was the "all-new-hotness", Microsoft was always trying to stuff the name into EVERYTHING...
It's April 1 right?
It makes me so angry that Microsoft is simultaneously one of the most profitable and most obnoxiously incompetent companies in the world.
They are the definition of failing upwards. Every product is an absolute trash fire yet they persist and thrive.
Wow this is dumb. The reason I’m on Windows is because of Office. For my needs Office on Windows is the best—otherwise I’d be on a Mac or Linux. I use AI everyday and never found a use case for Copilot. So why rebrand Office, their best product after Copilot, their worst product?
They're not rebranding Office, the app suite.
They had Office.com, a hub website, and a desktop app called Office that was basically just a wrapper for said hub website. They also had a mobile all-in-one app called Office. As far as I can tell, those are what are being rebranded and made to default to an AI chat view on login, not Office as a whole.
Didn't they put Office in the cloud? If so, why is Windows needed?
You could run anything plus Office.
The web version is a complete reimplementation with about as many backward compatibility problems as LibreOffice.
Actually LibreOffice has better backward compatibility than MS Office now. If you have a MS Office 2003 file that current MS Office can't open, try LibreOffice.
Maybe Office 2003, but modern .docx files often don't work right in the web version of Office or in LibreOffice.
But that wouldn't be backward-compatibility? Also when the MS-pushed web versions can't get it right, does it matter?
LibreOffice can't properly render ODT files created with OpenOffice-before-Oracle. I highly doubt their DOCX support is any better.
Doubt what you like, but I "rescued" old MS Office documents for my grandfather with that. Also this is a common fear when leaving MS Office, so you can bet they work on that. I never had someone complain over OO-compatibitlity until now, so there is that.
When LibreOffice appeared on the stage, that was actually my first test back then: opening an existing ODT document I had written. It was already displayed incorrectly at the time.
Are there test files downloadable somewhere, so I can check that myself?
"I don't like X, so I'm guessing Y is bad."
Which is now piece by piece becoming the Desktop version by wrapping it in some WebView junk.
A coworker told me about this today and I genuinely thought he was just messing around, but nope, this is real I guess. Copilot is SUCH an overloaded term, I have no idea even what it refers to anymore.
This is not 2026 news. Whatever's being spread around on social media today is late rage bait. Change occurred a year ago OP. And there was plenty of discussion and reporting.
Microslop
Marketing got high off AI delusions again.
Marketing is absolutely right though, according to MS Copilot for Marketing
I don't even know what to say anymore ... is their kool aid tainted with lead or something?
microslop
I think this belongs in another dimension where today is April fools day.
I heard on some podcast that there is such a thing as: "Microsoft Excel World Championship" and someone named Diarmuid Early won it last year. I would pay $2.56 to watch an Excel battle between a slop skipper and him. Money is on him. I am team John Henry.
ugh
Cool! One more app icon to delete across my platforms.
Who is responsible at the end of the day for these renames? Marketing or someone higher?
That is so clunky. What the heck are they thinking?
"The Office Formerly Known as 365"
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Or Linux, being an American product.
Linux is an international effort?
Trademarked in USA, maintained by US citizens, mostly distributed by US companies who add US software like GNU and systemd.
It's not a "product" so there is that at least
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