Microsoft 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.
Maybe they figured their brand was too recognizable and valuable, and had to knee-cap it to restore the cosmic balance of the Great Material Continuum.
EDIT:
There's even a rule of acquisition that could possibly apply here: #239 - Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
I 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...
Thank 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.
I 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.
Microsoft 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.
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.
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?
Microsoft 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.
Having 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.
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.
Yep, 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...
This 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...
Can 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:
It'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.
Think is, it's the latter lessons that are correct, because the ultimate arbiter of which marketing practices work or not is the market itself.
If anything, Marketing 101 works as a scaffolding but you learn the real lessons later on (basically like with every other vocational training wrapped in a degree, including especially computer science) - but also, and perhaps more importantly, it serves as a fig leaf. You can point to that and say, it's a Science and an Art and is Principled and done well It Is For The Good Of All Mankind, and keep the veneer of legitimacy over what's in practice a more systematized way of bringing harm to your fellow humans.
Also specifically wrt. brands - brands as quality signals mostly died out a decade or more ago; mixing them up is just a way to get their decaying corpses to trick more people for a little longer.
Yeah it’s really annoying how opaque they are about the model there. Always just ”GPT 4 based” or ”GPT 4o based” if you dig in their blog archives. Makes one unable to check it against benchmarks or see when it’s updated. Setting expectations. Is it a distill? Lower precision quant? An old revision? Who knows.
