The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Wait? What? I was just cruising along the information superhighway – yes, I'm old, deal with it – when I spotted a Y Combinator story announcing, "Microsoft Office renamed to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app'." Excuse me!? I looked closer and found that, sure enough, it certainly looked like Microsoft had renamed Office to the God- …

[Calum Morrison]

It wasn't jus tme that got annoyed/confused at logging into Office online only to find I was logging into Copilot then? The first few times I had to make sure I was definitely at the right place. I can see why they're doing it (copilotification of f**ing everything), but it's a pain in the browser.

[LionelB]

It sure as hell is! As a Linux user, I am obliged (by my employer) to use MS 365 stuffs, in particular the abominable Outlook, in the browser. Outlook logs me out randomly and frequently, and then when I log back in it takes me to… a Copilot screen. Which does not have any links back to Outlook.

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook logs me out randomly and frequently,

Me too, except I don't (yet) get forwarded to copilot. What happens is that when I try to log back in, it immediately auto-logs me out again, presumably based on the same reason it logged me out before. I have to clear all the cookies, or the re-logout just keeps happening.

Well, mostly. There was a period a week or so ago when it stopped doing this, much to my relief ... except now it's started doing it again. Just ...what!?

[David Austin]

Microsoft Azure

A few years back, saying "I've licensed Microsoft Azure" could mean you've bought at least 1 of 300+ separate and distinct products; some Cloud hosted, some self hosted, and some on-premises.

The Team "Microsoft Azure" basically became confusing and meaningless.

While they've pared back and reduced the confusion there (Like Azure Active Directory becoming Microsoft Entra), Co-Pilot has already surpassed it in meaningless waffle; It may server Microsoft's objective of getting someone - anyone - to please just use it, but there's now no meaningful cohesion to the product family, and It will all but certainly come back to bite them.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Microsoft Azure

This sort of thing isn't new, or even recent, for Microsoft though. I've commented on this before, because confusing reuse of names and inconsistent branding are defining characteristics of their marketing department that go back decades.

Either they'll use- or reuse- the same name for several different things, including the examples you and the article include.

Or, conversely, they'll rename an existing product or service as something different (e.g. "Microsoft Passport" AKA ".NET Passport" AKA "Windows Live ID" AKA "Windows account" to use just one of many examples.

And often they'll mix and match these over the years to ensure maximum confusion.

[Mostly Irrelevant]

Does anyone use any of those other than GitHub Copilot? I find the other ones totally useless.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

No, and that's despite corporate IT banning any other AI tool except Microsoft Copilot for Workstations Internet edition for Business (or whatever its called by the time I hit submit)

[doublelayer]

No, partially because I don't find most LLM stuff very useful, but I think part of the problem is that I don't have a clue what the different products can do. I have had access to Office with Copilot and the generic Windows Copilot, but I don't know what things those particular Copilots can do compared to anything else, so that makes it rather hard for anyone in that position to know whether to use them.

[mobailey]

Dear Microsoft

Just call everything "Bing".

[Calum Morrison]

Re: Dear Microsoft

Cortana RIP

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dear Microsoft

Bing and you can be Friends.

[PeterM42]

Don't forget Outlook:

- Outlook Express

- Outlook - Part of the installable Office Suite

- "New" Outlook

- Outlook.com

- Outlook - part of Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) or whatever it is called at 14:20 hrs UTC on 9th January 2026.

AAAAgggghhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Tim 11]

Re: Don't forget Outlook:

don't forget hotmail has also been renamed to outlook - although you can't access it via outlook.office.com; you have to access it using outlook.live.com (I mean, outlook.office.com will let you log in with your hotmail credentials but will then tell you that you don't have an account)

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Don't forget Outlook:

Between Hotmail and Outlook the Currently Promoted Name For Microsoft Mail Service was "Live". All three are in use as email domains with multiple hotmail,TLD variations.

[Patch Wombat]

Re: Don't forget Outlook:

And it still won't run right

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't forget Outlook:

.. so clearly true to the Microsoft brand..

[Tim 11]

Worse offenders?

Also don't forget "Sharepoint groove" which was renamed to "Sharepoint offline workspace" and then renamed to "OneDrive for business" (which obviously had nothing in common with OneDrive)

I don't think those other examples like twitter or meta are even in the same ballpark as Microsoft's constant switching of product names.

Rebranding a company happens all the time and is the preserve of the marketing department - everyone says it's stupid and moves on.

Renaming products so that two distinct product sets with different features are now called the same thing causes massive difficulty for users and IT staff, especially when you quietly withdraw one of them.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Worse offenders?

It very likely results in people buying subscribing to something they already have which I suspect is its prime purpose.

[Mr Dogshit]

AWS

With their Route 66 Elastic Beansprout

[Anonymous Coward]

Article needs updating to include the clusterfuck that was Server 2003 and .net passport.

Following Server 2000, Microsoft tried to rebrand the entire NT/Server line (including releasing early preview versions) as ".NET Sever", it was briefly just ".NET Server" then they went with ".NET Server 2003". It was pointed out frequently during this stage by end users that having a server version containing a commonly in use TLD was a nightmare (whenever you searched for anything, you'd just end up with loads of results from websites ending in .net - particularly problematic in trying to troubleshoot). They eventually dumped it and went with the imaginative title of Server 2003.

You can still see screenshots of ".net server 2003" in google images.

Also - the Microsoft Account, the thing they try to enforce you to use in Windows 11/Xbox/etc - that was originally called ".NET Passport".

And people say innovation is dead!

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Then and Now

Then - Steve Ballmer

"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

Now - Satya Nadella

"Marketing! Marketing! Marketing!"

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Then and Now

Isn't it now "Al!Al!AI!"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Then and Now

I should have trademarked that from the days I worked with large hammers..

:)

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Microsoft CEOs

William/Bill Gates

Steve Ballmer

Satya Nadella

All 3 have double 'L' in either first or last name, with Bill Gates being the odd one out with the double 'L' appearing in the first name

With the other two, double 'L' is in the last name. Their first names begin with the letter 'S', and the last names are both 7 characters in length

If you take the shorted form of Steven, then, both SB and SN have same number of characters in their first names

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Microsoft CEOs

and codswallop, bollocks, pillocks and hell all sport double ll·s too. The whole boiling might be consigned to the last location with no regrets.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Microsoft CEOs

Well, Bill is trying hard to avoid the last location with his philanthropy

[Grey Bird]

The HBO part didn't even mention the how by dropping the HBO from HBO Max made it Max, which was frequently confused with Cinemax so people were thinking it was a completely different company on top of dropping the reputationally known HBO.

[SuLegato]

I've had to keep notes to differentiate which support product I'm administrating for Windows native antivirus

Historical Names:

Microsoft AntiSpyware (Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003) - rebranded GIANT AntiSpyware

Microsoft Defender Antivirus (Windows XP, Vista, 7) - Windows Security Center (Control Panel dashboard viewer)

Microsoft Security Essentials (Windows 8) - Windows Security Center (Control Panel dashboard viewer)

Windows Defender (Windows 10, 11) Windows Defender Security Center (Control Panel dashboard viewer)

Microsoft Defender ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) (Mac, Android, iOS, Cloud-based Win10)

Recent offerings:

Microsoft 365 Defender

Microsoft Defender Antivirus on Windows Servers

Microsoft Defender for Business (solution)

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Microsoft Defender for Office 365

Microsoft Defender for Identity

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management

Microsoft Defender for Threat Intelligence

[ecofeco]

You are doing a yeoman's job there.

I've lost track of all of M$ schizophrenic name changes over the decades. It's just reason 12,743 why I hate M$.

[blu3b3rry]

Don't forget the multiple "Windows Apps" including the one that was an attempt to replace Remote Desktop.

And Microsoft Teams, which can mean the crappy chat/videocalling software, or Microsoft Team which is some kind of business-oriented SharePoint thing. Or did it replace SharePoint? Or was that OneDrive CoPilot for Business?

It sounds like even MS themselves don't fscking know.

[Anonymous Coward]

Teams...

Ahh... Teams... that time when there was three different apps called Teams installed in Windows which would randomly either accept your personal or business logins or both or neither. Some how you had to tell the difference by if it was purple on white icon or white on purple or some other combination. Argh.

And as mentioned above. Outlook being 17,000 different things making it impossible to discuss with a technophobe on the phone...

Just love the fact it is called "OneDrive" meaning you can have multiple versions as a contractor. One for personal, and one more for each company you work for.... "one" drive it certainly ain't.

I do say I still love the fact that now and then in the URLs for Teams you still see the old echoes of the "waffle" name they used in development that seems to have stuck deep in the system somewhere.

[david 12]

Windows Explorer -- Internet Explorer

What do you call that thing? Always a support tangle ... "Open your file window"

REM: we have a Java App. Can we convert it to Javascript?

[Mage]

Windows itself!

Windows NT 3.x was nothing like Window 3.x except in appearance.

Windows CE.

Windows Phone Edition

Unrelated versions to each other of Windows Embedded.

Windows on ARM originally didn't run Windows 86 programs.

Windows Millennium Edition (really a broken Windows 9x) is a completely different thing to Windows 2000 (Really NT 5.0)

Original Windows XP 64 bit was for Itanium. DIdn't run on x86-64 CPUs. Quite short lived,

All the stupid versions of Windows for desktop, when there should only be a Workstation and a Server edition. Don't buy a "Home" edition of anything by MS. Professional editions of MS Office have stuff no-one professional should use (MS Access and MS Powerpoint).

Windows 9x should only have been packaged with games console hardware, never sold to businesses. It killed the Pentium Pro.

Explorer as a desktop shell, a file Manager and also Internet Explorer. Stupid naming overload. Only the filemanager should have been called Explorer. Also on Win9x the IE6.0 integrates to File Explorer and "breaks" delete. Solution is to roll back to IE 5.5.

Intel naming went mad with Pentium & Celeron & Atom. Or i3, i5, i7 etc.

DELL repeating model names for unrelated models and then search is unable to return the stuff for older ones, such as Inspirion 7500

Lenovo and Samsung model names.

All copying the stupidity of car makers. See Escort, Cortina (Ford) or Golf, Polo (VW).

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

I have an issue with your conclusion that selecting a brand name has to "inform the user" what your product is. I think you've got it backwards - building the brand's reputation is what associates it with a product or service.

If that weren't the case, Apple would have near zero market share because the brand name has absolutely nothing to do with computers in and of itself.

[Bebu sa Ware]

This isn't the first time Microsoft has confounded loyal users.

and incontestably nowhere near the last.

I liked the first comment noting Microsoft's "coprolithication^† of f**ing everything" — ok copilotification but I will stick with my misreading.

_{† coprolith — a mass of hard fecal matter in the intestine. coprolithication — process of forming the same. Basically tough shit if you are a Microsoft customer.}

[Anonymous IV]

Nobody has yet said that AI would solve the problem...

... of the variation in names described in the article and the comments - and also "Acronym/Initialism Duplication".

[sarusa]

Microslop Copilot

I kind of like Elmo rebranding Twitter to X, because it has a couple advantages (just not for X):

- We call it xitter, the posts are xits, the white supremacists still using it are xitheads, and Elmo is the chief xithead. X is pronounced 'sh' here, which is linguistically quite valid.

- Twitter is dead and at least we can have some fond memories of it, RIP. Yes, it was really bad in some ways, but now X makes that look like rainbows and milk and honey.

Also, the other big rebranding for 2025, though not voluntarily: Microsoft is now Microslop. I will never call it anything else ever again (unless Nadella ever pulls his head out of his ass, which seems highly unlikely).

[Anonymous Coward]

Call everything CoPilot and you can show the stockmarket how successful your "AI" strategy has been - look, all of our customers are using our LLM products.

Also this extra special feature ( which it must be since everybody is using it ) provides another excuse for raising prices, which you need to do to cover your LLM running costs plus start getting some return on all that investment.

[anthonyhegedus]

confusion is their middle name

And Teams. There was Teams, Teams and Teams (Classic), which became Teams. One worked for personal account (aka "Microsoft accounts"), one worked with business accounts (aka "Microsoft accounts" (sometimes)) and then they both became Teams, but there are still some new PCs that start this Classic teams that refuses to work, takes you to a page that says to download the new one, and then does nothing when you click the link.

This is from a company who knows they've got the market by the short and curlies and thinks they can keep us that way by confusing us. One day it'll all crash and burn.

[Rivalroger]

MS and rebranding

I wonder if they will have a brainwave and try rebranding it to "First Officer"?

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Re: MS and rebranding

If only MS Copilot was like the one in "Airplane", then you could just let the air out of it & watch it slowly deflate, never to bother you again.

[X5-332960073452]

Three Words

Rearranging the deckchairs

[David Hicklin]

Stand Alone Office

I think the last true stand alone office was 2010...maybe the version before it. Everything since has many links to online stuff and was forever nagging you to log onto microslop. Even 2010 help complains about not being connected to office.com...