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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

Try this: Google "Office 365"

The first result just says "Email". The second result says "Office 365 login"

I'm not an internet dunce, but this is just bad user-experience. Why not have a modern landing page that tells me a bit about the product, it's price and what I can expect from it?

Why is the first result a login page?

I've been using Google Docs almost exclusively for work now. I've ditched Word completely. I was willing to give Office 365 a shot, but the signup process is so infuriatingly out of date that I don't feel like bothering.

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One of the problems Microsoft has that others don't is brand confusion. They like to ride on their own coat tails so distinct and unique products that are completely unrelated are often called the same thing.

What do you call Microsoft's personal email client? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's web based personal email service? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's enterprise email client? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's web based enterprise email client? Outlook.

Google doesn't have this problem because Gmail is Gmail.

Good lord, the brand confusion.

I work with Microsoft's enterprise instant messaging/unified communications platform. It used to be called Lync, which, whatever, meh, it's a name. When Microsoft acquired Skype, they decided to rename the next iteration of Lync, Skype for Business. Skype and Skype for Business are two completely different products, running on top of different protocols that just barely inter-operate. It's absurd how much confusion this rebranding has caused.

Have you used One Drive yet? There's 2. :)

And there's Office Communicator - was that another name for Lync?

Well, technically speaking the web based ones are called Outlook Web Access. And I don't feel there is confusion. How is it different with Microsoft that Outlook is Outlook, from how with Google Apps Gmail is Gmail? Just like with Outlook there are enterprise versions of Gmail too. Is it feature parity?

If Outlook Web Access worked or even looked at all like Outlook, it would be less confusing. Features and UI are completely different, and switching between the two if needed is a huge pain.

Nope! And thanks because I forgot about OWA! OWA is the self hosted web client for Exchange. That's another completely distinct product unrelated to Outlook 365 or Outlook.com.

Things get confusing when you deal with Skype for Business, too...

Have you used One Drive? What about One Drive for Business? The should bring back A Drive and B Drive.

Is this what's happening with Skype and the upcoming Redstone 2 builds for windows? If i remember right, mobile to pc messaging was pulled from Redstone 1 and will be included in Skype later on.

In our office, one of the best decisions we made is to move to google docs. I had to push it through because most employees were used to working with MS office and emailing docs and excel files to keep everyone in the loop. I know One Drive is a thing and you can do the same thing with MS Office product as you can with google docs. But it wasn't always the case and Google Docs had better usability and easier to understand in our team.

Because Microsoft is Microsoft and everybody knows everything about Microsofts products. There is no need to explain anything, right?

How many people don't know what office is at this point?

The standalone Office suite and Office 365 are two entirely different beasts I would say.

The products are pretty much the same. The difference is just the way you pay for it and number of licenses you get.

Oh, you'd like it to be that simple wouldn't you?

Office is both a standalone product and an optional subset of Office 365.

Oh and if your Office 365 license is just standard but you have an individual license for Visio or Publisher then you can have Office installed locally with Office 365 integrate except for those individual licenses that you have install separately and aren't integrated.

And then there's client versioning because licenses could be perpetual, instance, instance or prior.

I could keep going....

All that being said, Microsoft has made efforts with 365 to fix these issues and the abolishing of the Sales Silo can only help matters.

I know Office. I have no idea what Office 365 is, how it looks and how it works.

MS hasn't made it easy for me to understand it either

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