In a truly galaxy-brained rebrand, Microsoft Office is now the 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app,' but Copilot is also still the name of the AI assistant
About a decade ago, hardware company Corsair attempted to pivot from its classic logo—a subtle trio of ship sails—to a newer, edgier look, a pair of crossed swords that gave off regrettable '2000s tribal tattoo' energy. The rebrand didn't last long: after a fierce outcry from people who correctly thought the new logo sucked, Corsair swapped to a refreshed take on the sail logo, which it's been using ever since.
Corsair was established in 1994, and made about $1.4 billion last year—which I bring up because today Microsoft, a slightly bigger company, has slipped on its own rebranding banana peel. The company is seemingly all but ditching the Office name—which it introduced four years before Corsair existed, and which drove more than $30 billion in revenue just last quarter—with a catchy new name: "Microsoft 365 Copilot app."
Copilot is, notably, a thing that already exists! But as part of the ongoing effort to juice AI assistant usage numbers by making it impossible to not use AI, Microsoft has decided to just call its whole productivity software suite Copilot, I guess.
The company had already downplayed the Office name, despite it being perhaps the most universally recognized software in existence, by renaming its cloud version of Word, Powerpoint, etc. Office 365 in 2010, then Microsoft 365 in 2017. Now when you want to open up a Word document, you can get to them by launching the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Intuitive!
As spotted by Bluesky user DodgerFanLA, going to Office.com now greets you with the following helpful explainer:
"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.*"
Never has an asterisk been more relevant to me than following the words "your favorite apps now including Copilot."
I don't really understand why Copilot should be the name for both a specific tool and the container for a whole suite of apps. Perhaps the implication is that with "Copilot Chat that supercharges productivity," the individual bits of software are barely relevant anymore, when you can simply ask the chatbot to do the work for you!
At least team Xbox can breathe a sigh of relief: the company has come up with a naming scheme worse than both "Xbox Series X" and "Xbox Game Pass for PC."
Should Microsoft just go ahead and rebrand Windows, the only piece of its arsenal more famous than Office, as Copilot, too? I do actually think we're not far off from that happening. Facebook rebranded itself "Meta" when it thought the metaverse would be the next big thing, so it seems just as plausible that Microsoft could name the next version of Windows something like "Windows with Copilot" or just "Windows AI."
I expect a lot of confusion around whatever Office is called now, and plenty more people laughing at how predictably silly this all is. But will anyone actually get mad about it, the way they did the Corsair logo? Probably not. Office may have been around for 35 years and make hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but the difference is Corsair makes stuff that people actually like to use.
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