Microsoft isn’t exactly known for “good” branding, at least generally.
Indeed, “hit and miss” is how I’d ultimately describe Microsoft’s ability to actually name things. Xbox is cool, but Xbox One, Series X|S, Xbox 360? It all began to get a bit confusing. “Surface” is cool too, but somewhere along the way, Microsoft stopped giving them numbers, so now we have the Surface Pro “11th Edition” instead of simply the Surface Pro 11 (which is what most people search for anyway). I quite like the Microsoft Edge branding too. Then there’s Windows itself, which is perhaps among the most recognizable brands and products in history.
Synonymous with Windows, for the past several decades, is its suite of productivity tools known to the vast majority of the globe as “Microsoft Office.” At least, it used to be. A couple of years ago, Microsoft inexplicably rebranded it to “Microsoft 365,” throwing away decades of brand recognition and removing the actual function of the product from its name. It’s so dumb that Microsoft itself acknowledges the dumbness, having to list Microsoft 365 as “Microsoft 365 (Office)” on various app stores, because they know how much confusion they’ve created with their misguided name change.
But wait, it gets worse. Say hi to “Microsoft 365 Copilot.” Yep.
The rebrand was so dumb that Microsoft itself knew it was dumb, hence why Microsoft 365 is still called Microsoft 365 (Office) on app stores like Android. (Image credit: Windows Central)
Sigh. Where to start with this one.
Microsoft is so desperate to push its ChatGPT container “Microsoft Copilot ” that it has attached it to one of its only popular consumer products like some kind of vestigial limb. With this update, apps like Word, Excel, and more gain Copilot “integration,” although so far, the results aren’t exactly great. The ability for Copilot to actually interact with your documents in Excel is quite limited. I asked it to remove mentions of a date range I mistakenly copy and pasted in one of my spreadsheets, and it basically returned with a guide on how to press delete to remove data from cells. Word is a similar story. You can highlight text and click a button to get Copilot to re-write things for you … but I’m not sure exactly when this would be useful.
Copilot has its uses for sure, just as ChatGPT does. I think Microsoft’s current implementations of Copilot are underwhelming, but we’re not here to review Copilot right now. What we are debating is the virtue of attaching the branding of a platform that consumers have, thus far, shown very little interest in, onto a product that is designed for very specific tasks. It would be like naming Office “Microsoft Office Clippy” back when that feature was invented and implemented.
Microsoft 365 itself was an absurdist idea, throwing away decades of cultural muscle memory for what feels like an ideological effort rather than one based on good sense. Calling it Microsoft 365 Copilot, before Copilot is even really a thing, again strikes me as completely odd. It comes from the same corporate overthinking as the “Copilot+ PC” branding, which so far, consumers have wholesale rejected . It comes from the same pointless exercise as rebranding globally-recognized news aggregate “MSN” over to “Microsoft Start,” only to revert back after a few months.
Who, or what is driving these crazy branding choices?
40 years of brand recognition thrown away for literally no reason. (Image credit: Windows Central)
Copilot isn’t ready for the prime time in my view, operating as a basic web wrapper for ChatGPT with painfully limited system-level integration, features, and capabilities. By rushing ahead and putting a spotlight on Copilot today, Microsoft risks “Copilot” becoming synonymous with uselessness much like Bing itself, while spreading the pain onto products and services that are otherwise actually good .
I’m sure that some day Microsoft Copilot might actually be a thing people actively care about, but it hardly offers any differentiation from ChatGPT today, owing to a lack of innovation from Microsoft itself. There’s no real reason to use Microsoft Copilot over ChatGPT today, and Microsoft has so far struggled to address that. Copilot’s integration into Word and Excel are underwhelming, and Copilot+ PC features like Windows Recall had to be recalled , as Microsoft trips over itself trying to keep pace with competitor platforms.
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The rebrand of Microsoft Office was dumb to start with, trampling on a legacy spanning decades. The second rebrand attaching Copilot is even more dumb, and follows the Copilot+ PC thought process of firmly putting the cart several miles before the horse. Copilot hasn’t earned the right to be showcased alongside a technological cultural milestones like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word. At least today, it doesn’t do anything that ChatGPT doesn’t do, save for having slightly more censorship. The only rebrand to Copilot that might make sense is dropping it onto Bing. Bing is synonymous with low quality now, rebranding the search engine to “Copilot.com” would align more with what Microsoft is doing with search anyway potentially. “Ask Copilot” has a better ring to it than “Bing it.” Bing has nothing to lose in terms of consumer trust, but attaching Copilot to existing globally recognized and globally loved existing brands just feels like a fool’s errand.
Microsoft’s penchant for rushing ahead with frequent and thoughtless branding exercises risks creating negative connotations while painting itself as a company that has no clue what it’s actually doing. As of writing, “Office 365” still has double the amount of search traffic as “Microsoft 365.” Microsoft 365 Copilot has virtually none.
