32 years in, Microsoft has decided to rebrand “Microsoft Office” | Hacker News Reader

32 years in, Microsoft has decided to rebrand “Microsoft Office”

arstechnica.com

34 pointsBrajeshwar44 comments

What are the advantages of renaming something that is this globally known/famous?

I mean, there must be deeply strategic and tactical business reasons (/s) for such a name change considering the mindshare the current branding has?

It is a different product at this point. They are officially killing the desktop application suite known as Office and migrating everyone to their brand new 365 web portal.

Which is a shame. Their web suite is better than Google's, but nowhere near the capability of their desktop applications. And it never will be.

Where does it say it's killing off the desktop application suite? There is no way Microsoft would kill off their desktop applications. Just a rename.

They’re not killing the desktop apps that users buy perpetual licenses for, but (reading the tea leaves a bit, as, AFAIK, they haven’t explicitly said so) would like to move their customers to the recurring revenues of Office 365, which has the web apps plus, for those who want or need it, native applications.

Correct would be "Office 365, which has the native applications plus, for those who want or need it, web apps.".

The only feature that i use in the web app is "Open in desktop application".

The Web apps really suck with quite lot for a number of things:

- integration with plugins such as endnote.

- section breaks.

- referencing other internal parts of the same doc.

- contents table generation.

- creating custom heading styles with custom indentations that are reflective in TOC.

- the list goes on.

It's obviously a difficult task to take 32 years of development and port it to the browser.

Exactly what I do.

I understand now. Yes, I agree. They are definitely trying to get everyone switched to a recurring subscription. Their customers LTV is unlimited at that point, no longer have to wait for people to 'upgrade' ....

Microsoft Office is a strong brand, but the product doesn’t really exist anymore. And the major components of the Office Suite are probably stronger brands by themselves (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).

That being said I don’t expect colloquial usage of the term to go away.

Is it "Microsoft Works"?

International university friend kept calling Microsoft Word, Microsoft Work which I always thought was appropriate. I like the idea of productivity suite being referred to as Works.

They discontinued Microsoft Works because it didn't. /s

TBH i heard that Microsoft Works(r) really worked, that's why it was not compatible with the rest of the products made by Microsoft.

It was free and competed with Office, so Microsoft made sure it couldn't open Office documents.

Otherwise, it was all you really needed.

It was actually $40, but I think places that sell computers could add it for cheap enough that it came nearly free.

I can't determine if you're aware that MS-Works was their original paired-back office suite often bundled with new windows PCs

No I was not aware!

Man, MS's Marketing and the PMs are just knocking it out of the park in terms of adding value!

I think the office 365 suit has been called Microsoft 365 for at least two years now.

Which is an absolutely TERRIBLE name for business software. Nobody works 365 days a year.

Half in jest but for a loose definition of work, some do. If you classify a "work day" if you have a single thought about work on that day, then it's quite easy.

If my brain was cloud compute you would still pay for those cycles.

Even worse; on leap years it will be temporarily renamed to Microsoft 366. /s

Yeah, the big change here seems to be that Microsoft has decided to also (finally) consolidate the consumer-facing brands: it's still been half "Office 365 for Home" and half "Microsoft 365 Home" for those same years depending on which website or application you were looking at. The biggest news in the article seems to be that the under-powered "Office" app bundled in Windows 10 and 11 that is mostly an ad for Microsoft 365 Home or a mostly useless "launcher" if you are a Microsoft 365 Home user is itself getting renamed "Microsoft 365" and getting a fancy new "Visual Studio Ribbon O" [†] logo. (No mention if it will be any less of a useless ad/launcher, just fancy new logo.)

[†] This is part that confuses me most about the new logo change: it's very much using the design language of Visual Studio projects and I don't think that is intentional to accidentally break the walls between Visual Studio branding and Office product branding, but I don't like it. It's nice having clearly different branding between developer tools and "productivity" tools.

In 1password I had to name the entry "Microsoft 360 365" because I couldn't remember that it was 365.

Wonder how they plan to avoid what made Intel transition to names like Pentium from 80586, the impossibility of trademarking numbers.

I heard that the transition to "Pentium" had a different reason. /s

if they're dropping "office" because no one goes to them anymore, can we also make this the epoch that a 3.5" floppy disk (a bit firmer than 5.25) is no longer the save icon?

What would you consider a good replacement?

stone tablets :)

I dont actually know, I'm sure some designer has an excellent blog post about it though

Cool lets see how long I can ride out my Office Home & Student 20...17(?) edition install.

Vive la LibraOfficé!

Soon to be renamed 365 Libre

Nooooooooo! Why?!

Step 1. Download Linux distro with KDE

Step 2. Use Breeze Dark theme

Step 3. Open LibreOffice

Step 4. Horrors ensue

Step 1. Let go of Linux obsessions

Step 2. Discover FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, *BSD

Step 3. Convert to agnosticism.

Step 4. Attain enlightenment.

Last time I tried BSD I tried to install a desktop environment and after looking back at my laptop in 30 minutes it was compiling the X server

You must unlearn what you have learned. An admin's strength flows from the source. Use the source. make install, not war. Wars not make one great.

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/349/

Mandatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/456/

Installing the `libreoffice-kde` package instead gives me proper theming

WPS Office is a lot better than LibreOffice, and it's free too.

Not sure I care, but both have features missing in the other, so what makes WPS Office a lot better? Closed source? Subscription model?

Faster, leaner, better compatibility with Microsoft Office files. Just try it.

The only reason I still keep a LibreOffice installation around is LibreOffice Base: WPS Office does not provide a Microsoft Access equivalent.

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