Why?
Why is every company right now making it impossible to understand what their app does?
I swear to fucking god, I’ve been looking for SAAS products at work to fill a role, they’re all branded as AI and not what the companies actually fucking do.
Office has like a 40 year plus reputation as THE office suite. What the fuck us copilot? That cheap knockoff OpenAI they debuted before it was really?
Because AI on its own doesn’t actually make a return, but by conflating the AI investment with a genuine productivity tool that’s making money, you can start to hide your poor choices.
*Ding!*
Wow, you are right. This is a way for them to pump the bubble and their stock price up even more.
Pre AI: Hey, we have 5 billion subscribers to our office suite!
Start of AI: Hey, we have 5 billion subscribers to our office suite and 3 subscribers to our AI offering (currently in their free testing period, plans already precancelled)
Now: Hey, we have 5 billion subscribers to our AI services (that also features an office suite)
It’s almost like theyre desperate for a return on investment not realizing they got scammed by Altman.
It’s because when so much money/power has pushed so long for people to make decisions based on money and not logic, we’ve now arrived at the point where even “the emperor’s new clothes” type moments can’t rein in the insanity; executives are bonused off this garbage and most employees who do know better–thanks to orgs’ own internal propaganda and structures–have given up caring and just publish the garbage and clock out(as they should).
I assume it’s for the CEO benefit. “Look boss, we’re pushing AI like you wanted”
I think I know why. Microsoft Office was a product. Their new strategy is Services. They want you to lease their services and have vendor lock-in forever. It takes a long time for businesses to migrate.
This has MBA written all over it. The idea that AI can just do whatever the client needs means that you can say your service does it all!
It is a scam.
I think I know why. Microsoft Office was a product. Their new strategy is Services. They want you to lease their services and have vendor lock-in forever. It takes a long time for businesses to migrate.
They already did/do that and it’s called Office 365 and already have vendor lock-in with Windows, SSO services, Azure, etc
Yeah but this is an AI service. See it’s different! /s
It’s worth $30 more per year. Aka it’s a subscription rate hike.
They hiked up all of the subscriptions. Then made it confusing as fuck to subscribe back to the one that you had.
Oh my god! Let me get my checkbook
It’s going to fall apart and the industries using the tools are going to adopt a Unix philosophy of dedicated tools that do a specific job well. May take a Butlerian Jihad, but it will happen.
It’s already happening, in part because of this and in part because of the unstable, unpredictable US government.
Several European countries are looking towards investing in open source as a way to get away from American big tech because they’re suddenly considering US sanctions against them a real possibility, or at least a real threat.
I’ve seen people mention it elsewhere in this thread. But what is MBA? I get nothing relevant when I search for it.
Masters in Business Administration. The model by which all businesses have been run over the last century. The guide to late stage capitalism.
Gotcha, thanks.
Copilot is love, copilot is life. It’s okay friend - these are copilot times, but I still copilot you.
You forgot, “Copilot is mother, Copilot is father”. I suppose it’s an obscure reference now.
Did you copilot my wife!?
Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.
It’s not about the user.
(it’s about sounding innovative and cool with whichever trend to the brainless money people aka shareholders)
Why do I feel 2026 is gonna be a fucking nightmare…?
Pattern recognition
Extrapolation from the experience of previous years
As a south american, it’s already being a nightmare. I’ve been enduring a heat index of about 44 to 46ºC, and now the tension from the us invasion in a neighbor country
Because it already is.
because you’re not an ignorant dumbass
I had that feeling just before new year.
These are actually my predictions for 2026 :
- More stupid AI integration into products, because money.
- More stupid geopolitcs and war.
On the bright side, this change has been around for 9 months at least because they had already changed it when I was doing IT stuff at my last job and it was impossible to find where to actually download the office suite.
Ok so there are 3 microsoft products called copilot now. Surely this won’t confuse anyone
How the hell else are PMs going to get positive reviews this quarter? Waiting for Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Windows to all be called Copilot
Here’s a list of types of Slopilot available for businesses https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/which-copilot-for-your-organization
It’s tradition. I think they have 4-5 different Teams now, too.
Microsoft is reporting over 600 MILLION user growth on copilot, basically overnight! Wow, very impressive Mr Nadella. You’ve truly pushed AI adoption forward. Someone get this man a bonus!
It’s been named “Microsoft Office” since 1990. Way to piss 35 years of brand recognition up a wall.
How drunk are these guys?
I would bet an absurd amount of money that Marketing people consulted Copilot.
What’s funny is their attempts to rebrand Office have just fallen completely flat. Kind of reminds me of when Willis Group bought the naming rights to Sears Tower and all the Chicagoan’s were just collectively like, “Yeah, No. We’re still going to call it ‘Sears Tower’.” Hell, nobody that I know of calls it “Willis Tower.” Nobody calls Microsoft Office “Office 365”. Nobody is going to call it “Microsoft 365 Copilot.” This is just a huge waste of effort by a tech firm that has long since run out of ways to be innovative.
“Let’s take the most recognizable software package name and make it something totally divorced from what the software is supposed to be for.”
There are probably people for whom Microsoft Office is the only desktop software that they use. There are probably many people in procurement that are going to scratch their heads and think twice about signing off on something that sounds like a flight simulator.
This is an opportunity for alternate office suites.
Its is almost universally the main reason that even a lot of Linux daily-drivers still have a windows install available to them. They fuck up Office enough and there isn’t a reason to even have Windows for most users.
That’s why they want you to put all your stuff in their dumb cloud, because its the only reason people would keep using this garbage, because they can hold your work ransom in their shitty ecosystem.
That is the whole business model of tech now. Stealing your shit and selling it back to you. That is it.
Who the fuck is dual booting for Office? You just made that up.
Literally everyone I know that runs a Linux desktop and also has a job.
Well, IIRC there’s a flight simulator hidden somewhere in Excel
Edit: https://www.exceldemy.com/7-excel-easter-eggs-for-power-users/
For business, they’re locked into Excel, there is no substitute. I can see MS blowing out the remaining home users though.
Office is the last good branding Microsoft have and they’re just getting rid of it, I can’t believe it
Good?
It’s godawful, to the point of being barely functional
My company runs on office and I write everything in Google drive, then export it to a word document and import it into office because working on office web is just a joke.
Seriously.
Sometimes it just randomly and quietly deletes some text I just typed
Sometimes it just changes layouts on other pages where I’m not even working
Sometimes it says it saved the work and it saved didly squat
I see Microsoft office as something that only “enterprise” level customers would be stupid enough to use and to pay actual money for.
They didn’t say it was a good product
yeah office used to just work (mostly, and ignoring the quirks), but this past year it’s been doing weird shit and generally been unreliable because of cloud sync behaviour for me
I’ve been writing a long work, using Office for web editing. Every so often in proofreading, I find spots where it looks like words were just missing. Now I feel like I may have some explanation…
Apparently word online will just st random drop pieces of text during saving.
Why?
Microsoft. That’s why
Suicidally bad naming is the one thing we can always rely on Microsoft for
Introducing Microsoft Sepukku.
Maybe they hired the brand team from HBO.
you mean HBO Max? wait it’s Max now? No, it’s HBO. No, Max. No, HBO Max. The real seahorse emoji is…
C Suite is in a cult.
Tons of Microsoft senior engineers have been resigning over this kinda shit.
Not getting fired or laid off, though that’s happening too… resigning.
Bill Gates himself has expressed significant dissapointment with where the company has gone and is going, thinks AI needs to be optional, its clearly not ready.
… Everyone hates this other than C Suite, who are either psychotically delusional, in an actual AI worshipping cult (you’d be surprised how many tech high ups are in one), or, they simply hate us and want us to die, want to be the overlords of whatever is left after they basically destroy modern civilization.
Peak Business Idiot behavior. They’re too fucking stupid and caught up in the hype to notice that everything is on fire and their businesses are failing. The Line may be going up, but the companies are going DOWN.
It’s happening at a lot of companies. Last year our C-suite cancelled some big IR&D projects (where we were designing real products that could actually be built and sold) in order to dump $300k/mo into renting a cloud AI infrastructure that none of the employees want or use.
The other day, my mother approached me about Office alternatives. Before she retired, she daily drove Office, but feels like it’s changed so much that learning a new program isn’t any more friction than keeping up with AI bullshit.
For consumer use, I don’t see much difference in Office and LibreOffice. For business, Excel is the killer app, can’t do without it, but individuals can adapt pretty easy.
Load LibreOffice on her machine and let her try it! Leave the defaults to open docs with Office so it doesn’t frustrate her.
Last time I used Excel extensively was in high school, and after using Google Sheets for many years, going back to Excel feels like nightmare. I don’t know how to explain it, but last time I needed it for something, it felt very frustrating to use.
My LibreOffice is still called LibreOffice.
Why couldn’t they just stick with Office… It’s 100% explanatory, short, and to the point.
365 never made sense to me. Is it supposed to represent the year? Like available 24/7 but instead it’s there for you 365 days of the year? And if that’s the case why the fuck would I care? It’s software, of course it’s available to me whenever I want. It’s not a 7/11 hotdog rotisserie.
I think it has to do with how often you pay for it. With Office, you just buy it, then you own it. With Office 365, you have to pay for it 365 days a year. You just never stop paying for it.
Then it should be renamed to Microsoft office -1 because I never started paying for for it.
Thank you, I’m saving this
No problem lol
We’re…never going to say any of that. It’s Microsoft 365, or 365 for short. Even that sounds stupid. Office is what people understand, 365 always requires explaining.
MS is so exhausting.
I’m still pissed off about Entra, what the hell does that mean?
Microsoft need to spend a less time renaming products with confusing names and more time fixing their applications so they actually run.
Entra is derived from the Latin intrare, meaning “to enter”, which makes sense for access management/id verification software tbh.
I’m guessing you typoed, but it is intrare
Intro intras intrat
I did.
I don’t talk to people about MS Office or do not know anyone particular who primarily works in it. But when talks touches writing an essay, spreadsheets or presentation - nobody says “In 365 I do this”. It is always Word, Excel, Power Point. Nobody even unifies all these programs as 365. It always is Office. Baffles me why MS haven’t figured out that literally no one calls it 365.
This is the same culture that decided that X was a better name than Twitter. These people are so far removed from regular society that this idiotic shit actually makes sense to them
They don’t care what the peasants have to say.
No wait, we are the farm animals, not the peasants.
They care even less about what the animals have to make sounds about.
Once again proving that while AI can’t do a programmer’s job, a tech writer’s job, an artist’s job, a composer’s job, a doctor’s job, or any other job involving thinking and understanding – it can easily do a CEO’s job and probably better than the CEO.
Inspired by your comment, I polled ChatGPT 5 direct and Copilot itself, and ChatGPT was smarter than the executive by saying it was a bad idea, while Copilot itself said it might be a bad idea, but it’s aligned with Microsoft’s vision, which may be more important, but ultimately seemed to have no idea if it was a good idea or bad idea…
So I guess ChatGPT at least is smarter than the MS CEO. Of course Copilot seemed primed to try to favor and vindicate Microsoft’s decision. I tried a more aggressive statement that it was stupid to try to get that ‘I agree with you by default’ and it still tried to soften the perspective in favor of Microsoft.
As a bonus, I asked if it would be a good idea to rename LibreOffice to LibreSidekick. It looked more like the ChatGPT 5 answer for Office to Copilot, saying it’s a dumb idea, until the end when it said unless it has an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot, then it would be a good idea…
Ok, now tell us what your magic 8 ball said.
Outlook not so good… nailed that one too.
Nice.
This feels like it’ll go the HBO Max, wait Max, no HBO Max, dibocal route
There was also HBO Now and HBO Go, so there’s even more runway for Microsoft to spend years floundering on their naming before they catch up.
It will be probably just Netflix now, since they bought it.
sigh NetMax? /s
MaxFix
