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.
Here we go with Copilot.
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)
X, may as well be 3 Xs.
Did OpenOffice or Kingsoft put them up to this?
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.
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.
Though, the everything .Net around 2000 was nearly as bad as this CoPilot rename.
There's always some pointless name change going on.
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.
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.
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.
1975: Traf-O-Data renamed Micro-Soft.
1976-11-26: Micro-Soft renamed Microsoft.
"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".
Microsoft Copilot 365 OS is the way to go.
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.
The contemporary articles are mostly gone, but eg https://archive.is/4tuRg and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/06/skype-set...
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.
The legend was that they tried and finally sticked with Freebsd, because Windows was not able to cope with the level of traffic.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/identity-a...
And yes, the latter is the complete name as seen on the web page...
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.
Although, that also makes me ask why they named it after Active Directory in the first place...
Office 97 is where Clippy came from.
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.
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…)
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.
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
Microsoft's brand names never made a whole lot of sense--they're just continuing the tradition.
And I guess they've just kept it since even though it's not really necessary any more.
HBO's was bad, but it's just the fourth place streaming service in its primary market, so the scale is pretty minor comparatively.
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.
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.
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.
You are not qualified for Microsoft marketing (now called Copilot Human Incentivizing).
"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.
The "Office app" itself was mostly just a launcher for the other apps. Now it is also/primarily an LLM chat interface.
Coca-cola 24/7 autopilot beverage (formerly sprite)The M stands for mmmmm.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This was approved by the CEO, without doubt.
Ah the 90s were great.
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".
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
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).
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".
It's screwy and confusing but Microsoft doesn't believe in understandable branding.
> 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.
At this rate I wouldn’t put it past MSFT to rename the company and all products Copilot. Just Copilot.
So you don't even have Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
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.
> "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" > -Charlie Munger
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.
Under that spirit ... this may even make sense to rename it to Copilot app whatever.
- 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.
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)".
https://web.archive.org/web/20241001025949/https://www.offic...
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
They are the definition of failing upwards. Every product is an absolute trash fire yet they persist and thrive.
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.
You could run anything plus Office.
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.
just imagine all those poor engineers who have to maintain such a junk.