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Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”

354 points by LeoPanthera

by ulrikrasmussen

10 subcomments

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, "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.

by nelox

10 subcomments

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. 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.

by Tsiklon

2 subcomments

From reading the other comments this happened a while ago, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
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…)

by BomberFish

5 subcomments

"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)" has got to be the worst rebrand ever. This is gonna be up there with Twitter's rebrand as a case study 20 years down the line.

by FrostKiwi

0 subcomment

No way, it's BPOS all over again [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Online_Services#Prod...

by pu_pe

4 subcomments

I would have thought the Office brand was much more valuable and recognizable than Copilot.

by bluehex

1 subcomments

Such confusing naming they can't even keep it straight in the announcement.
"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.

by smallvariance

1 subcomments

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.

by ljm

8 subcomments

I'll put money on Windows 12 being rebranded to either Windows Copilot or Copilot OS for Windows.

by passwordoops

1 subcomments

If there was no merger/takeover and you need to add "formerly" to the brand name, you should keep the original branding

by tokai

3 subcomments

This has to be to cheat the usage numbers for Copilot. Else they have truly lost the plot.

by pjmlp

2 subcomments

This is getting bizarre, worse than Balmer's Microsoft.

by Elfener

0 subcomment

It has been renamed for a while now.
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".

by sa-code

2 subcomments

In comparison, "Google Docs" is simpler and not rage inducing.
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

by nhinck3

1 subcomments

Does anyone have the video of Satya waffling on about agents following you around as he fumbles to explain the value of copilot?

by browningstreet

0 subcomment

What happened with Microsoft marketing?
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).

by rilindo

1 subcomments

Related, somewhat, but I am moving away from Microsoft Office and to Apple's Pages/Numbers/Keynote/FreeForm, mostly because they are free and they are good enough.

by lowlevel

2 subcomments

Maybe just so they can count office usage as Copilot usage.

by findthewords

0 subcomment

If Microsoft Office is an AI app then Microsoft is the #1 AI company in the world!

by ChrisArchitect

1 subcomments

News from almost a year ago now.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42831281

by monom

1 subcomments

No word in that title makes sense for an office suite.

by nunez

0 subcomment

Wow; they've officially lost the f**ing plot. 2026 is gonna be wild; I can already tell.

by whynotmaybe

0 subcomment

On a side note, Québec city's parking app is called Copilote+

by KoolKat23

0 subcomment

It's just insane.
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".

by wolvoleo

0 subcomment

Note: this already happened 6 months ago.
It's screwy and confusing but Microsoft doesn't believe in understandable branding.

by amluto

0 subcomment

I think the best part is the second FAQ:
> 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.

by epistasis

0 subcomment

This is one of the most atrocious branding and product mistakes I have ever witnessed.
> 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.

by samgranieri

2 subcomments

This rebrand will be liked less than when Gap, Cracker Barrel and Jaguar introduced new logos.
At this rate I wouldn’t put it past MSFT to rename the company and all products Copilot. Just Copilot.

by eientei95

0 subcomment

> Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app is available for Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Academic, and SMB subscribers with a work or education account. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers and free accounts can access Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com and on the Copilot mobile app
So you don't even have Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app

by kstrauser

0 subcomment

Jobs was right about Microsoft having no taste. In a saner organization, the person proposing this would have been dismissed for poor judgment.

by rhabarba

0 subcomment

It is calming to see that in the end, WordPerfect Office outlived Microsoft Office.

by ongytenes

0 subcomment

I guess Micro$oft has so much invested into their AI that they're trying to insure a return on that investment by pushing it onto everyone.
I read this morning that their AI i to provide free heating for 6,000 nearby homes with its heat waste. So to use M$ AI is to do 'your good deed' and subsidize someone's heating.

by poulpy123

0 subcomment

At one point I will believe that Satya Nadella is the anagram of Linus Thorvalds

by hagbard_c

0 subcomment

It is 2026, the year of The War of the Memes
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.

0 subcomment

by alex1138

0 subcomment

Good news: Libreoffice is still called Libreoffice

by billyp-rva

1 subcomments

Might as well go all the way and call it "Microsoft 365 Copilot: Best App for Office"

by nazgu1

1 subcomments

#microslop ;)

by anoojb

0 subcomment

A dozen or more people are going to get promoted for the "impact" associated with this project.
> "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" > -Charlie Munger

by Molitor5901

1 subcomments

Ostensibly Microsoft has a goal, and they realize that the public is adamantly opposed to the way they are going about that goal. So the calculus for Microsoft management must be either: 1) We are right, doubters be damned; 2) This will be profitable and people will go along with it whether they want to or not, we're Microsoft, what are they going to do, use Pages?; or a total uncertainty as to the future but really hoping this path pays off for a variety of reasons.
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.

by SilverElfin

0 subcomment

Bizarre and desperate

by oaiey

0 subcomment

While I agree with WTH on branding and everything, I never understood the "Office App". Excel, Powerpoint, Word .... all fine. OneDrive/Sharepoint ... absolutely. But the Office App was for me always just the app for the total noobs who do not remember how Word was called. Why would I click office app, then open a word template there. It always found pointless.
Under that spirit ... this may even make sense to rename it to Copilot app whatever.

by dramm

0 subcomment

I missed that Microsoft had been acquired by The Onion.

by sometimes_all

1 subcomments

Post title is a bit misleading. I see that Microsoft 365 still has the same name. The one-time purchases are still called Office 2024 or some such. It's just the umbrella android/iOS app where you can do all of office that's changed its name from "Microsoft Office" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot".
But still agree with the general sentiment that the branding is getting even worse than before.

by zulban

1 subcomments

As a fan of Linux and open source, I rejoice when Microsoft trashes its brands pointlessly so middle managers can get promoted.

by Semaphor

0 subcomment

Who'd have thought that entity framework naming would eventually seem like one of Microsoft's least bad naming decisions?
https://blog.oneunicorn.com/2020/03/26/numbersarehard/

by rich_sasha

0 subcomment

I'm not anti LLM, but the stock MS Copilot is just so hilariously bad. We have it at work, and based on my expectations of ChatGPT and Claude I thought it'd be able to do the following:
- 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.

by r0ckarong

0 subcomment

Someone please remove the self-serve paint thinner fountain from their cafeteria. It's beyond ridiculous.

0 subcomment

by lr0

0 subcomment

I wrote a very relevant post here couple of months ago about Microsoft's approach of (re)branding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44930297

by resumenext

0 subcomment

Satya Nadella is the Steve Jobs of our time. This is what true innovation looks like.

by devinprater

0 subcomment

No way. There's just no way.

by user____name

0 subcomment

For a company that likes branding so much, they sure suck at it.

by lylo

0 subcomment

Are they going to redirect office.com to microsoft365copilotapp.com while they're at it?

by sorokod

0 subcomment

The drowning will instinctively try to surface for air. They will drown you to achieve that.

by TiredOfLife

0 subcomment

This is not the first case of at least a year old news being reported as something new.

by fuckinpuppers

0 subcomment

Microsoft keeps messing up branding so bad over and over and over.

by bicepjai

0 subcomment

At this pace, they might rename Microsoft to Copilot App :)

by nephihaha

0 subcomment

Poe's Law in action.

by tw1984

0 subcomment

when you have been selling the same junk for decades, you can always rename it and keep selling the same junk.
just imagine all those poor engineers who have to maintain such a junk.

by andrewstuart

0 subcomment

Ballmer would turn in his grave except he’s alive and well.

by COMMENT___

1 subcomments

So how do I call Word now? Microsoft Copilot app Word?

by gloosx

0 subcomment

Would be funny if they renamed Windows to Copilots

by d4rkp4ttern

0 subcomment

Nice , this is only the 37’th Copilot product from M$FT

by jdongsu

0 subcomment

How about leap year?

by tracker1

0 subcomment

This is now worse than the "Microsoft.Net" effort to use ".Net" with everything in Microsoft as a brand term (not just the dev tooling)... it's effectively become meaningless.

by baxuz

0 subcomment

Microslop

by jjkaczor

0 subcomment

Hahahahahahaha... "Back-in-the-day" we used to joke internally that Office (it's specific applications) would become things like; "SharePoint Documents", "SharePoint Spreadsheets", "SharePoint Presentations" - because when that was the "all-new-hotness", Microsoft was always trying to stuff the name into EVERYTHING...

0 subcomment

by nottorp

0 subcomment

It's April 1 right?

by yoyohello13

0 subcomment

It makes me so angry that Microsoft is simultaneously one of the most profitable and most obnoxiously incompetent companies in the world.
They are the definition of failing upwards. Every product is an absolute trash fire yet they persist and thrive.

by barney54

2 subcomments

Wow this is dumb. The reason I’m on Windows is because of Office. For my needs Office on Windows is the best—otherwise I’d be on a Mac or Linux. I use AI everyday and never found a use case for Copilot. So why rebrand Office, their best product after Copilot, their worst product?

0 subcomment

by daviesgeek

0 subcomment

A coworker told me about this today and I genuinely thought he was just messing around, but nope, this is real I guess. Copilot is SUCH an overloaded term, I have no idea even what it refers to anymore.

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

This is not 2026 news. Whatever's being spread around on social media today is late rage bait. Change occurred a year ago OP. And there was plenty of discussion and reporting.

by shafmanzur

0 subcomment

Microslop

by mapt

1 subcomments

Marketing got high off AI delusions again.

by tessierashpool9

0 subcomment

I don't even know what to say anymore ... is their kool aid tainted with lead or something?

by techbrovanguard

0 subcomment

microslop

by worldsavior

0 subcomment

I think this belongs in another dimension where today is April fools day.

by Tistel

0 subcomment

I heard on some podcast that there is such a thing as: "Microsoft Excel World Championship" and someone named Diarmuid Early won it last year. I would pay $2.56 to watch an Excel battle between a slop skipper and him. Money is on him. I am team John Henry.

by thedudeabides5

0 subcomment

by zazazx

0 subcomment

Cool! One more app icon to delete across my platforms.

by nkotov

0 subcomment

Who is responsible at the end of the day for these renames? Marketing or someone higher?

by josefritzishere

0 subcomment

That is so clunky. What the heck are they thinking?

by follower

0 subcomment

"The Office Formerly Known as 365"

by jhjkjkljkl

2 subcomments

[flagged]