6 ms·
Whoever decided to use the same brand for different experiences should be demoted at minimum. What a way to destroy trust.
by clvx 1y ago
Whoever decided to use the same brand for different experiences should be demoted at minimum. What a way to destroy trust.
- airstrike 1y agoI suggest you never visit https://www.office.com/ https://www.office.com/
- DangitBobby 1y agoGood lord https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726
- aydyn 1y agoNext they are going to rename Windows to Microsoft Copilot.
- onemoresoop 1y agoMicrosoft is the worst offender at renaming their products and services with such bad confusing names I don't think it's helping anyone, including Microsoft.
- airstrike 1y agoImagine literally squandering the brand name "OFFICE"
- kpil 1y agoI got unreasonably triggered by this.
- tiluha 1y agoYou are not alone. It evoked a physical reaction in me
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoMicrosoft Office is one of the most recognizable and valuable brands ever. I'm quite terrible at marketing, and even I can recognize how stupid the rebrand was.
- airstrike 1y agoLiterally this. It's one of the strongest names in all of software. It really boggles the mind.
- olyjohn 1y agoI thought that renaming Active Directory to Entra ID was bad. Every single tech person who ever touched a Windows server knows what AD is. Then they change to name to something that sounds like it's going to give you an anal probe. What a dumpster fire...
- bradstewart 1y agoThank you for this. As someone who recently had to stumble back into turning a few knobs in (what I thought would be) AD for Office 365 licensing needs, after ~10 years outside of the MS sandbox, I had no earthly idea what Entra was. Until right now.
- TeaBrain 1y agoI think there's little chance it won't be changed back. Changing the name was probably motivated by someone in management pushing the name change so that they could list it as a personal achievement as one of the "new" AI products they'd overseen the release of in the current zeitgeist.
- OccamsMirror 1y agoThis is the same company that thought it would be an awesome idea to rename "Microsoft Remote Desktop" to "Windows App" on MacOS. It wasn't. It's the dumbest name ever.
- 1y ago
- paradite 1y ago"To continue, please install the Microsoft 365 Copilot app" I got this on mobile. Seems to be pretty apt.
- snickerbockers 1y agoI keep missing meetings because I foolishly confuse Teams with Teams (classic).
- darkwater 1y agoOh. My. Fucking. God. Are they aware that people will struggle to find if Office is installed and that they will keep calling it Office til the end of times (aka the next rebranding that will revert back things) anyway?
- Lutger 1y agoWait, what? Is this a joke? Did they really rebrand Office to '365 Copilot app'? I feel like I'm missing the plot, they can't be serious.
- mike_hearn 1y agoDon't worry, the other Office homepage says that it's actually been renamed to just Microsoft 365, not Microsoft 365 Copilot App: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-office https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-offi... I got there by going to office.com and clicking Products > Microsoft Office. Lol. Rofl, even. This has made my day. And we all thought calling their third generation console Xbox One was the worst possible branding decision.
- airstrike 1y agoYes, they literally did that. It's absolutely moronic. Whoever came up with this idea should be fired along with everyone else who greenlit it.
- shermantanktop 1y agoHaving established brand awareness is a double-edged sword. Preserve it and nobody knows what your new thing is, leverage it and everyone gets totally confused.
- vdfs 1y agoProbably the same one responsible for Office -> 365 naming
- DangitBobby 1y agoIt gets worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- johnebgd 1y agoMicrosoft has the worst branding in tech. Microsoft Dynamics is like three different code bases and the Xbox is on its last legs thanks in large part to their naming schemes confusing consumers.
- ackfoobar 1y agoHa. Microsoft does it all the time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419292
- dcminter 1y agoAh yes, I call this "brandfucking." IBM used to be a repeat offender. I recall trying to buy the WebSphere (Java) application server for a client and then finding out that IBM had slapped "WebSphere" on all their products including things like¹ MQ Series (a queue) and DB/2 (a database). It took me an hour to figure out the right item and it was an online purchase! ¹I might be misremembering the exact products but it was similarly absurd.
- SoftTalker 1y agoThey were sticking “Watson” on all their product names for a while too.
- dcminter 1y agoYep, and they got very overexcited about "VisualAge" for this, that, and the other at one point. "VisualAge for C++ for OS/2" being one of the more coherent examples I guess...
- wodenokoto 1y agoIt’s because in Microsoft terminology a “copilot” is a chatbot or LLM agent. So you get your copilot for m365 subscription and add copilot studio which you use to create co pilots
- tsimionescu 1y agoThis almost makes sense, but it is certainly not how Microsoft marketing did things. "Microsoft 365 Copilot app" is a suite of productivity apps, most well known for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It was formerly known as "Office". Microsoft 365 Copilot app includes Copilot as one of the apps. This is all information taken from office.com, not some joke or exaggeration...
- TeMPOraL 1y agoCan confirm - I'm looking at my Android phone now; the "Office Hub" app I knew as "Office" or "Microsoft 365" has, at some point, renamed itself to "M365 Copilot". To make things more obvious and less confusing, it's sitting right next to an app named "Copilot", which is their ChatGPT interface, and as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything copiloty with the Office suite. Looking at the two side by side in an app manager, I see: - Copilot - com.microsoft.copilot - M365 Copilot - com.microsoft.office.officehubrow And they both have identical icon, except the latter has a tiny black rectangle with tiny white "M365" label tucked in the corner.
- jerf 1y agoIt's amazing to me how too much marketing education and/or experience seems to rot the brain. You learn on like day 4 of Marketing 101 that your brands should be distinct and recognizable, and hopefully some solid tips on how to do that. Cool. Solid. Seems obvious but there's plenty of things that seem obvious in hindsight that education can help you with. Somewhere between that and a master's degree and 10 years at a prestigious marketing firm, though, apparently there's some lessons about how you should smear all your brands all over each other in some bid to, I presume, transfer any good will one may have had to all of them, but it seems to me that they could stand to send those people back to MKT101 again, because the principle of labeling what your product actually is seems to elude them after Too Much Education.