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Comment by BomberFish | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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The worst rebrand yet. We'll probably be reminiscing about the current day once they follow it up with:

Word -> Copilot 365 text app

Excel -> Copilot 365 spreadsheet app

PowerPoint -> Copilot 365 presentation app

Outlook -> Copilot 365 mail app

Windows -> Copilot system

Xbox -> Copilot gaming device

It's kinda like Microsoft became a private equity company and bought itself out.

> text

> spreadsheet

> presentation

No, it's "docs", "tables" and "slides".

I don't even know why the 365 number is so important. I mean, it probably has something to do with there being 365 days in 3 out of 4 years, but what makes that significant to a word processor or spreadsheet? It's as if Google were to rename their product "Search 60" because there are 60 minutes in an hour. So what?

Microsoft's brand names never made a whole lot of sense--they're just continuing the tradition.

It's an artifact of the transition away from year-based releases to a subscription. Customers were used to Office 95, Office 98, Office 2003, etc. 365 sort of matches that pattern, so customers aren't excessively disgruntled, while signalling that there's a "release" on every day of the year, it's constantly up to date.

And I guess they've just kept it since even though it's not really necessary any more.

> Word -> Copilot 365 text app

Microsoft Copilot 365 Subsystem For Rich Text

I still put "Max" as the second worst (after "X").

Which max?

HBO Max was renamed to just Max. They've now changed it back.

I don't know how they could look at a brand like "HBO Max" and, somehow, deduce that "Max" is the most important part of the name.

The executives in charge at that point made a lot of money on the "90 Day Fiance" "franchise", among other badly and/or dully and/or grossly named things. IP and branding wasn't exactly their strong suit.

That one I think may be the HBO rebrand.

737 wasn't the best rebrand either. RIP

It wasn't bad because of the branding. If anything, the MAX name was kind of understandable since they ran out of hundreds they'd previously used to indicate variants and revisions.

Except the whole point of the fiasco is that this was a NEW airplane, not a refresh, but it was named and regulated like a refresh. That led to people dying.

Not the Skinimax.

It might be worse for the users, but if we factor in the user base just a tiny bit.. (I don't remember watching anything branded HBO in my life, outside the US)

Max can be third, but Office is probably the second biggest computer software there is behind Chrome. Office is largely the entire reason people use Windows. Killing the brand that made you the world's biggest company for a long time is rather unprecedented.

HBO's was bad, but it's just the fourth place streaming service in its primary market, so the scale is pretty minor comparatively.

I guess no one remembers the attempted Netflix rebrand.

I don't. What (and when) was it?

In 2011 Netflix announced it would split its DVD-by-mail and streaming businesses. The DVD business would be called "Qwikster", which was mocked. Eventually they reversed the decision.

Besides the goofy name, people thought the move was premature. Netflix wanted to go all-in on streaming. The catalogue was a lot more limited back then, though, and the DVDs helped bridge the gap since a lot of movies and TV shows that were unavailable for streaming were available by DVD instead.

"IBM for i" is up there

The original "own goal" is that "Office app" was a Windows Phone 7/Windows 8 application no one used called something boring like "Preview" or "Document Hub" around the time OneDrive was still being called SkyDrive from the Windows Phone "Hub app" era. The app was basically just an MRU view of SkyDrive filtered to Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents.

Renaming that app "Office app" didn't do much to explain what it was for or what it was good at, especially with the confusion of "Office suite" and "Office app". (Some of that seemingly intentional with "Office app" trying to be a "Start Here" for Office documents.) I think that rename was worse than the new one.

With the rename to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app" there's actually new features and some idea of what the app is now for ("doing LLM things while wearing a corporate document fursona"). It's a dumb name, but a dumb name for an app that's a little less dumb.

In a similar act of marketing malfeascence they renamed their mobile Remote Desktop app to "Windows".

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