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nelox

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.

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Correction:

1975: Traf-O-Data renamed Micro-Soft.

1976-11-26: Micro-Soft renamed Microsoft.

So it is indeed true that it is only Micro when it is Soft!

2026: Copilot chat boxes everywhere, Users typed everything. Peak convenience.

You type the question, Copilot tells you where to click.

"Bit higher, higher, no too far, down now, no, below the red line. The other red line. Yes this one... no the one you were just over".

Press any key to continue, or any other key to quit.

2027: microsoft windows 12 renamed to Microsoft AI OS

They are definitely going to call the next Windows version "Windows Copilot" or just.... Microsoft Copilot, just to make everything more confusing.

Microsoft Copilot Series OS

Microsoft The OS Formerly Known As Windows 12

Microsoft Copilot AI Desktop

Microsoft 365 Windows+Copilot (Formerly Windows 12) (New)

Nah, just Microsoft Copilot. No Os.

Microsoft aiOS

No, way too user-friendly and intuitive.

Microsoft Copilot 365 OS is the way to go.

2011: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion, rebrands Lync to Skype for Business, an incredible branding manoeuvre.

2012: Skype peer-to-peer nature and end-to-end encryption removed.

2017: Microsoft launches Teams, competes with own product after driving Skype into the ground for 6 years with encroaching advertising, removing features, and abandonment.

2025: Skype shut-down.

What was the point? When MS bought Skype, they already held a majority market share in the IM market with MSN, which they also shut-down. Between 2011 and 2025 they lost almost all market share for domestic users to WhatsApp and Discord. This series of events baffles me to no end.

If I remember correctly, they had to buy Skype twice because they didn't get everything g in the first transaction. Also, the purchase was backed by the cia through one of their companies (I don't remember if it was palantir though) to remove the end-to-end encryption.

I think that was ebay. They bought skype but not the p2p tech backing it; fucked the founders on earnouts; the founders refused to reup the contract; ebay was incapable of replacing the tech; and the founders got a bunch of the business back. Presided over by Meg Whitman, who appears to be profoundly incompetent, understanding neither tech nor business.

The contemporary articles are mostly gone, but eg https://archive.is/4tuRg and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/06/skype-set...

Conspiracy or not, it being CIA funded is the most plausible explanation for why they'd make such an expensive purchase and do nothing with it.

Do you remember when they bought the first and largest webmail platform and did nothing with it?

I seem to remember they spent years trying and failing to migrate it to .net.

Not quite--this predates .net. They acquired Hotmail in 1997, while it was running on Solaris mail servers and Apache on FreeBSD for the web frontend. In a highly publicized move, Microsoft ventured to port it to Exchange and IIS on Windows NT. This went on for years on end, with MS claiming to have finished the transition several times, while getting egg on their face. Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000 and a combination of their flagship products and Windows Services for Unix (the WSL of those times).

It has since been rebranded as MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail, and Outlook, likely with some 365 thrown in.

Meanwhile, they have mismanaged their once great mail user agent Outlook Express, as well as their quite useful personal information manager Microsoft Outlook, to the point where their newest offering is absolutely unusable.

> Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000

The legend was that they tried and finally sticked with Freebsd, because Windows was not able to cope with the level of traffic.

"eh"

https://www.wired.com/1999/08/hotmail-hackers-we-did-it/

Missed the renaming of Azure into... ensure? I can't remember the name even though I use it frequently and the azure links still work.

Azure Active Directory => Microsoft Entra ID (Formerly Azure Active Directory)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/identity-a...

And yes, the latter is the complete name as seen on the web page...

What's the point? Did someone in marketing just decide that "Active Directory" is too 90s and must be tossed out based on vibes? Entra ID sounds like something completely unrelated.

IIRC one reason was that Azure Active Directory bore little technical relation to Active Directory and it was endlessly confusing to customers. Especially as AAD evolved into an identity system and away from a directory.

Trivial example is that AAD doesnt do LDAP, unlike regular AD which was built on it. It's not surprising that some PM would keep "AD" in the name of AADto make the transition to cloud seem less scary, but after a few years its actively unhelpful as the majority of customers have made the switch to cloud based auth and identity.

That makes more sense then, yeah. I've never used AAD and I didn't realize it had little relation to OG Active Directory.

Although, that also makes me ask why they named it after Active Directory in the first place...

AAD also broke SAML compliance that was in Active Directory Federation Services.

Actually "Azure Active Directory" was confusing in the first place, since Active Directory already existed for decades, and Azure Active Directory was not-really it's cloud-equivalent

Yes, that service was called Azure Active Directory Domain Services (now Entra ID Domain Services)

2026 Microsoft renamed to Cope-A-Lot

You forgot the .Net renaming in the early 2000's.

Which is the exact mistake they are repeating right now. Force one brand on everything, even if it has nothing to do with it.

2035: Microsoft renamed itself to 365.

Genuine question: are you German? (I approve)

CopiLot has detected you have asked about Windows Genuine Advantage in Germany language.

No, I’m not German. But danke for the approval, I’ll take it anyway.

Missing Bob.

Office 97 is where Clippy came from.

Though some of the rest of Clippy's "friends" (Lynx the cat and Rover) came from Bob and were Bob's "friends" first. Windows 2000 added Microsoft Agent which shared some characters in 2D with Office 2000 and invented a few new 3D characters (which Office never used). Windows XP added "Search Assistant" using some of the Office characters (Rover being the default search character and Lynx still hanging around as an alternative).

The legacy of Bob lived on for a while. Also Microsoft Agent was a lot of fun to play with as a kid in High School. I built some wild PowerPoint Presentations scripting Agents from the Notes field.

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