That was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription service.
My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't.
30 years of owning the term "Office", having almost every single person who ever touched a computer know that Office is the Microsoft office productivity suite, then deciding that a sort of working, but yet to be 100% defined LLM is more important. The fact that no one stopped this or that shareholders aren't pissed tells you something about how absolutely broken modern computing is.
I feel like there has to be some weird cultural problem at Microsoft where nobody wants to speak up about obviously bad ideas.
They destroyed the entire Xbox brand overnight and hampered any chance at recovery with a stupid confusing naming scheme... now it seems like they've learned nothing from that?
Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?
But seriously, I do think it's still one of the most hilariously stupid product names EVER in the history of products, to name the third thing in a series "xbox one". They'll have that idiocy forever bahahahahahah!!!!
>Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?
Seriously, I have an xbox one and couldn't tell you which model it is, even after looking at pictures of them. I know there is a newer better model out now that looks similar and has a similar name. If I wanted to spend the $600 or whatever to upgrade tomorrow, I wouldn't know which one to buy.
I worked at a company a couple years ago that was running on Active Directory, Outlook, and good old fashioned Windows and Microsoft Office licenses. They wanted to "modernize" and so I was to learn about Teams/M365/Azure/Entra/Copilot/etc, and report on some options for what licenses we could get and which products we could use. It was bananas how difficult it was for me to understand what their product offerings were, due to frequent name changes and multitude of overlapping products/licenses. It was my job to figure out what software we wanted to pay them for, and Microsoft made it as difficult as possible - what they actually wanted was for us to get on calls with their sales staff, so they could tell us what we should pay them for.
Because Microsoft just pissed away their biggest brand after Windows and maybe Microsoft. Brand recognition holds value, a lot of value.
Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max, arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because pretty much everyone who needs it already have their subscription.
Imagine killing the globally recognized Twitter brand for a single generic letter.
The common denominator is ego. Office may be a globally recognized brand, but it was defined by someone else, and the person making the decision needs to mark their territory.
That's okay because everyone just calls it twitter anyway. there will be kids on twitter, calling it twitter, who were never alive when it was still named twitter
Literally everyone I know calls it "Coke Zero" - in fact, the "Zero" pattern has spread to the various soda companies to reflect the particular style of zero sugar.
I only just now noticed it changed in the US, which apparently happened in 2022. I remember seeing "Coca-Cola sin azúcar" and "Coca-Cola sans sucre" in foreign markets before, I feel like I saw that pre-2022. I don't recall ever seeing a "Coca-Cola cero", for instance. Kind of feels like it was more aligning the brands internationally but maybe I'm just misremembering.
I'm a shareholder and I have a problem with it. It's a bad focus and product strategy over-dosing on AI hype which I think will hurt them in the future.
As a user of Teams on Windows, I was so glad to find out I can map each Channel's files to a folder on my computer and edit files using LibreOffice rather than the "will it load?" crapshoot of using the web version Office that runs inside the Teams app.
I only started using MS cloud stuff last year. This whole Onedrive/SharePoint split confuses the hell out of me.
I don't really know what SharePoint is. It seems like kind of an online site builder/file sharing platform? I'm not sure why those would go together. In any case, I get the impression it's kind of deprecated and Onedrive seems much easier to understand.
Sharepoint is like a big umbrella intranet/collaboration enterprise product. It's old, has a million sub-products, is heavily customizable, and is not really intended for normal users to actively do too much with beyond swap files. Onedrive is just microsoft branded dropbox or google drive. Since it's more focused and is a consumer-facing product, not really surprising that users prefer it. While I wouldn't call sharepoint deprecated per se, MS will probably continue to encourage larger and larger companies to just work out of onedrive.
Hey, be proud. The executive who pitched this gets a second mansion! Everyone wins, right?
Nothing will change until there's actual skin in the game for leadership. Leadership screws up and at worst they get some 7 figure exit package and still have no issues finding a job.
let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator the main brand instead
certainly a courageous decision