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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

I suggest you never visit https://www.office.com/

Microsoft Office is one of the most recognizable and valuable brands ever. I'm quite terrible at marketing, and even I can recognize how stupid the rebrand was.

Literally this. It's one of the strongest names in all of software. It really boggles the mind.

I thought that renaming Active Directory to Entra ID was bad. Every single tech person who ever touched a Windows server knows what AD is. Then they change to name to something that sounds like it's going to give you an anal probe. What a dumpster fire...

Thank you for this. As someone who recently had to stumble back into turning a few knobs in (what I thought would be) AD for Office 365 licensing needs, after ~10 years outside of the MS sandbox, I had no earthly idea what Entra was. Until right now.

I think there's little chance it won't be changed back. Changing the name was probably motivated by someone in management pushing the name change so that they could list it as a personal achievement as one of the "new" AI products they'd overseen the release of in the current zeitgeist.

This is the same company that thought it would be an awesome idea to rename "Microsoft Remote Desktop" to "Windows App" on MacOS.

It wasn't. It's the dumbest name ever.

Don't forget Windows Mail->Outlook (New), replacing Outlook with Outlook (Classic). Same with "Teams (Classic)" and "Teams (New)"

Or the Teams download page that had two different versions - Teams for Home and Teams for Work/School.

Or .NET->.NET Core & .NET Framework->Back to .NET again.

Maybe they figured their brand was too recognizable and valuable, and had to knee-cap it to restore the cosmic balance of the Great Material Continuum.

EDIT:

There's even a rule of acquisition that could possibly apply here: #239 - Never be afraid to mislabel a product.

Good lord

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726

Microsoft is the worst offender at renaming their products and services with such bad confusing names I don't think it's helping anyone, including Microsoft.

Imagine literally squandering the brand name "OFFICE"

Next they are going to rename Windows to Microsoft Copilot.

I keep missing meetings because I foolishly confuse Teams with Teams (classic).

I got unreasonably triggered by this.

You are not alone. It evoked a physical reaction in me

"To continue, please install the Microsoft 365 Copilot app"

I got this on mobile. Seems to be pretty apt.

Wait, what? Is this a joke? Did they really rebrand Office to '365 Copilot app'? I feel like I'm missing the plot, they can't be serious.

Don't worry, the other Office homepage says that it's actually been renamed to just Microsoft 365, not Microsoft 365 Copilot App:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-offi...

I got there by going to office.com and clicking Products > Microsoft Office. Lol. Rofl, even. This has made my day. And we all thought calling their third generation console Xbox One was the worst possible branding decision.

Yes, they literally did that. It's absolutely moronic. Whoever came up with this idea should be fired along with everyone else who greenlit it.

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

Are they aware that people will struggle to find if Office is installed and that they will keep calling it Office til the end of times (aka the next rebranding that will revert back things) anyway?

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