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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.
Coca-cola 24/7 autopilot beverage (formerly sprite)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…
Office 97 is where Clippy came from.
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
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.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Do you remember when they bought the first and largest webmail platform and did nothing with it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
CEOs mostly just set direction, the workforce remains the same (sans mass-layoffs).