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Microsoft

Microsoft Office Will Become Microsoft 365 in Major Brand Overhaul (theverge.com) 95

Posted by msmash from the what's-in-a-name? dept.
Microsoft is making a major change to its Microsoft Office branding. After more than 30 years, Microsoft Office is being renamed "Microsoft 365" to mark the software giant's collection of growing productivity apps. From a report: While Office apps like Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint aren't going away, Microsoft will now mostly refer to these apps as part of Microsoft 365 instead of Microsoft Office. Microsoft has been pushing this new branding for years, after renaming Office 365 subscriptions to Microsoft 365 two years ago, but the changes go far deeper now. "In the coming months, Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows will become the Microsoft 365 app, with a new icon, a new look, and even more features," explains a FAQ from Microsoft.
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Microsoft Office Will Become Microsoft 365 in Major Brand Overhaul More

Microsoft Office Will Become Microsoft 365 in Major Brand Overhaul

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  • Wasn't it already named this like, a couple years ago? At least for anyone with the subscription package.

    • No, that was Microsoft OFFICE 365, which was to differentiate between the subscription based version and the "we begrudgingly still offer it, but you really want to look at the shiny new Office 365" perpetual license version like from days past.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drhamad ( 868567 )
        No. They changed it from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 a couple years ago.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          Yes, but also no. Office 365 is the Office web apps, Office desktop apps, exchange online, teams, and some other random "productivity" apps most people outside MS have never heard of, wrapped up in a few subscription SKUs. Microsoft 365 is a bundle of Office 365, Windows Enterprise, Azure AD premium, and a few other things, again, wrapped up in a few subscription SKUs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drhamad ( 868567 )
        Yeah, I guess you're right. Just seems like not much new at that point. You were already logging into Microsoft 365.

    • The subscription package was renamed From Office 365 to Microsoft 365. But the included software suite was called Microsoft Office. Now they're renaming the office suite itself.

    • Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @12:35PM (#62963013)
      I'll stick with Libre365.
    • It's just brand posturing. Meant to make big news and get tonnes of free advertising while at the same time offering nothing new of value. Basically the MS MO since the infamous IBM DOS scheme of 1980 when IBM paid them to make DOS, and then renamed it to sell as a Microsoft product with essentially $0 R&D cost. I mean, it's BRILLIANT and at the time IBM was "The Man" to whom the proverbial stick was applied whereas Microsoft was the plucky underduck.
  • Now Microsoft Bing.

    It isn't really news. This is just like the rest of Micro$oft's SaaS paradigm. Remove reliability. Turn everything into a webpage masquerading itself as an application. Rearrange things like the anorexic girl moving food around on her plate.

    Golly, I miss Office 2003.

  • Nomenclature Issues (Score:5, Informative)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @11:22AM (#62962719)

    ---
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
    ---
    Is Office going away entirely?

    No, as part of Microsoft 365 you will continue to get access to apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. We will also continue to offer one-time purchases of those apps to consumers and businesses via Office 2021 and Office LTSC plans.

    Additionally, there are no changes to Office 365 subscription plans.

    ---
    Subscription service = Office 365 = O365 = Microsoft 365
    Stand-alone copy = Office 2021? So it's still called Office...

    • Re:Nomenclature Issues (Score:4, Informative)

      by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @11:48AM (#62962801)

      Is Office going away entirely?

      Yes, just slowly enough that people won't notice. Microsoft's end plan is to make all of its software subscription-based, including Windows itself eventually.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Holi ( 250190 )
        Who is not going down that same route?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Is Office going away entirely?

        Yes, just slowly enough that people won't notice. Microsoft's end plan is to make all of its software subscription-based, including Windows itself eventually.

        Erm... CALs have made their OS a subscription service for decades already.

        What they want is for you to put all your sweet, sweet, juicy data online for them to farm and monetize. Hence they push towards always online office (even if the applications are locally installed).

        • CALs have made their OS a subscription service for decades already.

          CALS and Operating System as A Service are two totally different beasts. With the latter, you won't be able to even boot into Windows if your subscription isn't current.

          There will be no local Windows account. Only the Microsoft account. You will need to log into your Microsoft account to use Windows. If you're behind on your monthly or yearly Windows payments, your computer will boot only enough for you to enter your credit card information.

          Microsoft has been slowly increasing the heat on its prisoners. Eve

    • So it's still called Office...

      To the market which matters it's called Microsoft 365. Stand-alone Office is starting to become incredibly rare. I haven't seen anything other than Office 365 in about 5 years now, not with home users*, not with companies.

      *I should say "current" as well. There are plenty of home users using well outdated office apps. But I literally have never seen standalone Office past version 2016.

      • To the market which matters it's called Microsoft 365. Stand-alone Office is starting to become incredibly rare. I haven't seen anything other than Office 365 in about 5 years now, not with home users*, not with companies.

        Really?

        That's interesting. I've never known a home user that "rents" any windows apps like Word, PP, etc....they all have individual apps of those or Office.

        I've been on OSX for a long time for my home stuff...so, hadn't noticed what went on with windows much over the past decade really

        • I've never known a home user that "rents" any windows apps like Word, PP, etc....they all have individual apps of those or Office.

          I'm willing to bet you've not been paying attention. Here's a litmus test: You're an average joe. Do you

          a) go out of your way to look for an unadvertised product, then buy said product that costs over $150, on the very purchasing page which recommends *not* buying the product and getting Office 365 instead (now Microsoft 365).

          b) click "ok" when presented with a free trial when you first start your new Windows 11 machine, and then fork over the trivial amount of money for a product you're hooked into and is

          • Oh oh oh I found it. Except when I clicked "Buy now" on Office 2021 I got an error page, I kid you not "An error occurred, the product does not exist."

          • Well, probably not paying attention.

            I've not ever SEEN a Win 11 install on a machine yet.

            That's just me, I don't use windows at home for personal use...and even work computer still at Win 10 with no plans I can see to update anytime soon.

            Work has switched to 365/Cloud Office...but again, that's work.

            For home use, I've not seen it around my friends yet.

            • For home use, I've not seen it around my friends yet.

              You have good friends :-)

            • I have the misfortune of dealing with Windows 11 because it's what already came pre-installed on my wife's rig. It's very much like WinME/Vista/8, in other words, the completely shit version that everyone should skip if possible.

              Unfortunately for those of us on Win10 who refuse to upgrade to that steaming pile of crap, MS has started nagging the shit out of us via Windows Update with a big yellow warning saying an important update isn't installed (meaning Win11) without disclosing that they mean Win11.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      Subscription service = Office 365 = O365 = Microsoft 365 Stand-alone copy = Office 2021? So it's still called Office...

      Except right now Microsoft 365 is a subscription service that includes Office 365, Windows Enterprise (or Business with the Business SKUs), Azure AD Premium, and some other associated products. Soooo... WTF are they going to call THAT now?

      • Soooo... WTF are they going to call THAT now?

        Same thing. And to your point that's the whole reason to migrate Office 365 to Microsoft 365. It makes it less confusing.

        You now have just Microsoft 365. It comes in Home / Personal, Business, Enterprise (the one with the features you mention), and Education variants.

        There's a couple of subtiers in each, but it all makes far more sense now.

  • Or rather nonexistent. Calling this "major" fits nicely in with what MS has accomplished in the last decade or so...

  • When you're out of ideas for increasing the usefulness of your product, just rename it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )

      Which is stupid if it's a popular product that's basically the only serious player in corporate circles.

      This would be like if Honda decided to stop selling a car called the Civic, and renamed it to something like the Honda 158, claiming that it reflects the horsepower of the model.

      To me it sounds like Microsoft is unwilling to accept that the product doesn't really have any more room for growth. It won . But rather than accepting that it's the blue-chip of software, always providing a consistent, even pr

    • I am amazed how Microsoft keeps succeeding in selling office licenses. A lot of people will only use basic word, PowerPoint and excel functions. These have been available in office for decades. Also plenty of alternatives are available that provide those. Their 365 strategy seems to be working too. Guess they know well how to do business.

      • I wouldn't pay for office at home (especially because I'm entitled to them through my work email) but it includes 5TB of OneDrive storage. $99/year for 5TB of cloud storage is a really good deal. The office licenses just come along for free.

        On the business/enterprise end of things you also essentially get Office for free. Technically everything else is the "value add" but in reality Word and Powerpoint are the freebies tossed in.

        For instance, Microsoft 365 now includes: file storage, login authenticatio

  • Giving up one of the best known brands... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @11:38AM (#62962751)

    For the life of me, I can't imagine what would possess their marketing team to move away from one of the most well-known brands in the industry period. This would be like Adobe sidelining the Photoshop brand. FFS, "Office" is synonymous with Microsoft, not the other way around. That's a helluva marketing, branding and linguistic coup they're abandoning.

    • > I can't imagine what would possess their marketing team to ...

      Is that the same marketing team responsible for naming Windows?

      Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 3.2
      Windows 95
      Windows 98
      Windows 98 SE
      Windows 2000
      Windows XP
      Windows Vista
      Windows 7
      Windows 8
      Windows 10
      Windows 11

      or the Xbox console?

      Xbox
      Xbox 360
      Xbox One
      Xbox Series X

      Maybe they should hire the Sony team :-)

      PlayStation 1
      PlayStation 2
      PlayStation 3
      PlayStation 4
      PlayStation 5

    • Re:Giving up one of the best known brands... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @12:19PM (#62962921)

      For the life of me, I can't imagine what would possess their marketing team to move away from one of the most well-known brands in the industry period.

      What is office these days? It still represents a standalone program that Microsoft hasn't considered stand-alone for a long time. No seriously when was the last time Microsoft advertised any office feature that wasn't shown in a browser or within Teams? Even the most recent Microsoft article here on Slashdot https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org] about Edge Workspaces exists to show an Edge window with Onenote, Powerpoint, Excel, and Word.

      FFS, "Office" is synonymous with Microsoft

      Poor choice of words. If what you're saying is correct then there's no point to have the Office brand anymore since it is synonymous. That's entirely the point here. Microsoft has abandoned Office as it's own concept a long time ago, offering it as a standalone program to those few companies refusing to go to the Microsoft Cloud. There's only Microsoft left. Heck go to outlook.office365.com, login, and I challenge you to find the "Office" brand anywhere. It basically hasn't really been a marketing thing for about 5 years now.

    • For the life of me, I can't imagine what would possess their marketing team to move away from one of the most well-known brands in the industry period. This would be like Adobe sidelining the Photoshop brand. FFS, "Office" is synonymous with Microsoft, not the other way around. That's a helluva marketing, branding and linguistic coup they're abandoning.

      Just speaking for myself the "Office" brand does feel stagnant, especially since COVID when the cloud became so important and even the physical office started to seem obsolete.

      That being said I'm not sure "365" is a great replacement, "Office" told me this was for handling all the docs in an office, "word" was for text, "powerpoint" and "excel" were made up words that created their own meaning, "365" tells me it's... available all year round?

      Though it should also be noted that my longest ever continuous int

    • Well, marketing gets to create this new mess so they can clean it up in a few years time. Easy job security there.
    • Rakuten bought the coveted 3-letter domain buy.com.

      Not only is it short, which is coveted, but you already know what to expect just from the domain name.
      During the last decade, they renamed it to Rakuten and redirected the website to rakuten.com. Presumably because they have a boner for their own name.

      They wound up shutting down the entire marketplace two years ago. What a shame, as we used to get plenty of sales there when customers didn't have to ask "What is a Rakuten?"..

  • Why did they drop the name "Office"? (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @11:38AM (#62962753)

    Because the product doesn't run in your office anymore. It's now a piece of crap SaaS that runs on Microsoft's cloud.

    • It's now a piece of crap SaaS that runs on Microsoft's cloud.

      That's not true. It's still an application installed on your computer. But you can run it as a web app as well.

    • Just because something is SaaS doesn't mean it runs in the Cloud. Those are two different concepts and you'd do well not to confuse them.

  • Because I have zero choice there. And that's mostly confined to Outlook. For all other use cases, I have been consuming LibreOffice for years and haven't felt like I was missing out on any functionality that matters to me.

    Best,

    • Soon to be renamed Libre365?

      • Nah it will be "Libre Cloud." You'll need to login to use it, offline mode is limited, security is questionable and that menu item that you use every day and depend on to do your job will be removed someday unexpectedly without explanation.

        But the good news is you'll be able to use it on any mobile device even though you rarely leave the house and don't take your work with you when you do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      As somebody that uses both LibreOffice (when not using LaTeX) and MS Office (I am forced to in some contexts), the only thing MS Office does better is raising your blood-pressure. I am usually not even 5 minutes in before I wish death and eternal torture on the cretins that designed MS Office. LibreOffice, on the other hand, causes the occasional slight annoyance and generally just works.

      • Right. For one thing, the Libreoffice folks make a diligent effort to arrange the many controls and options so that you can find them mainly by intuition. Whereas Microsoft seems determined to randomize them, hide them, and pointlessly rearrange everything whenever they need to pretend to be developing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Indeed. It is like they intentionally waste your time to make you use their software longer to accomplish the same task. The other thing that totally sucks is the spell-check. Not only changes it language arbitrarily back to English (most of what I write in MS Word is German), it insists to auto-detect language _despite_ that being explicitly disabled and it seems to completely ignore the default spellchecking language. At one time it though I was writing Swedish.

  • At long last Microsoft has fixed the last remaining problem with its productivity suite.

  • Leap years (Score:4, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @11:52AM (#62962823)

    Good, at least we will get a one day break from Microsoft once every four years.

    • No, they'll just come out with a brand new subscription called Microsoft 366. It only includes one extra day, but costs 50% more.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        Then they'll go to Microsoft 360, where they completely change market direction and you've got to buy an entirely different site license as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Teun ( 17872 )
      Hehe, just my thought :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmccue ( 834797 )
      I was thinking Microsoft Office will Fail to work on Leap Years. Or maybe on Leap Years, everyone in the world can access your Office Documents.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        Maybe it will crash on February 29th.

        Or to make it more interesting, on Leap Years it will crash on the Tuesday after November 1st

      • Haha exactly .. knowing Microsoft, it's bound to have a bug that bricks your computer on a leap year. They already have a track record of that, anyone remember the Zune bug? After it happened, they said they weren't going to fix it because it won't happen for another 4 years. Reference: https://www.engadget.com/2008-... [engadget.com]

  • Microsoft loves to change branding just to feign progress. They have a decades-long history of doing just that.

    In fact, it is amazing that Office escaped that particular Marketing Neurosis as long as it did.

    In Redmond, it is what passes as "Innovation".

    • Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows!

      A few years later:
      Windows 11 is coming. It's the same thing except we centered the start bar for some reason, mostly to hate on accessibility users who rely on corner mouse positioning.

      • Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows!

        A few years later:
        Windows 11 is coming. It's the same thing except we centered the start bar for some reason, mostly to hate on accessibility users who rely on corner mouse positioning.

        That is but one in a myriad of Uselessly Useless and typically User Hostile Changes-For-Change's-Sake that are the hallmark of Redmond's braindead Marketing and Ux Teams!

  • So their product won't work on Feb 29 amirite?

  • Despite being "supported" until some time 2013? Looks like MS has launched its customary sabotage a tad premature by accident...

  • How about leap years? (Score:3)

    by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @12:40PM (#62963049)

    While Microsoft 365 is comprehensive in regular years, in leap years, it's only 99.7% complete.

    Then again, maybe 365 is a reminder of how many days each year that the user has to pay for the subscription. In that case, leap years give a free day to the user!

  • Well that should get interesting in the Business Subscription market since currently an Office 365 E1, E3, or E5 subscription is for office products and a Microsoft 365 E1, E3, or E5 license is for the Enterprise version of the Operating System plus other features (including Office 365). I wonder if this is a move toward incorporating all licensing into the Microsoft 365 realm so you are effectively buying a subscription for both the OS features as well as the Office Product features combined instead of sep

  • 365: Four syllables
    Office: Two syllables

    Double the syllables = Half the intelligence. This inverse relationship makes sense to me.

  • why cant they just combine/allow a work/school account to sign into a non PRO pc or Office. Why separate them in such ways that you cant tell if you are signing into one vs the other easily.

  • They really should call it what it is, Microsoft 363. Because there will be a couple of day where it just does not work at all.

  • What happens on leap years ? (Score:3)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @02:39PM (#62963619)
    Do we have to upgradde to Office 366 ?!?

  • Microsoft sucks so much at naming things. My workplace also requires Office support and it's confusing to no end. The things people want to do are office things, not microsoft things.

    However, this happened years ago in in-app texts, splash screens, doc and help pages like this,
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
    and anywhere I look

  • What about leap years? (Score:3)

    by geckoFeet ( 139137 ) <gecko@dustyfeet.com> on Thursday October 13, 2022 @03:48PM (#62963981)

    Can we expect a system crash every four years, then?

    • I hope so. It would be an improvement over what we have now.

      *I legit lost 3 hours of work today due to a simultaneous crash of Excel (which was autosaving to Onedrive) and a crash of Onedrive which corrupted the stored version to the point where I couldn't pull up the history.

      And it's not the fucking 29th of February!

  • "we've changed things to make it easier to understand" always a sign of someone trying to justify their pay by making everything worse.

  • Arh yes, a new icon for the app. This is what we all were waiting for.

    Let me know when the online versions no longer requires a local application installed too, in order to perform basic operations on the standard office documents.

  • What happens in leap years?

    Do we have to use Google Workspace for those years?

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