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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.
they are trying hard to peddle it to govt usage since they are likely a guaranteed revenue stream, things like palintir is being peddle hard by thiel to multiple countries.(including israel and defense contracting)
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.
Ayup. Why build your company on a service with a US company when they can - and have - fuck you on a whim?
With standalone installs you can keep trucking. Service as subscription? That’s going to very quickly start dying off as the world destabilises.
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.
FWIW, Office (or more accurately, everything that was part of Office) was renamed Microsoft 365 years ago, in 2020. That was long before the AI insanity.
Microsoft 365 is a worse name than Microsoft Office.
I thought it was Office 365.
Oh well, guess they doubled down on stupid names.
Shouldn’t it be called Microsoft 250? There are 250 working days in a year. As soon as I’m home I’m using Thunderbird or Libreoffice, certainly not the product formerly known as Microsoft Office.
If they could have you in the office more than 250 days they absolutely would. I bet they’re thinking 365 days is the perfect amount.
…2080 hours stateside, 260 working days…
They stopped promoting “Office” brand when they saw success with Microsoft 365 and dropped Office 365. This was quite some time ago. Now they have just renamed an “app” called “Office” which was like a homescreen for Microsoft 365. I doubt anyone really used it and no one on lemmy seems to even recognize it.
I didn’t know Microsoft 365 and Office 365 were different things. From the outside, it’s as opaque as Apple’s version names.
Microsoft 365 bundles other products too like Windows and online Exchange. Guess it was confusing to have both office only and office plus others, and hence they dropped the office only.
It’s not about the user.
(it’s about sounding innovative and cool with whichever trend to the brainless money people aka shareholders)
Some clouds are worth yelling at
Ok so there are 3 microsoft products called copilot now. Surely this won’t confuse anyone
Are you including Github Copilot in that count? Technically that’s a Microsoft product. It’s probably the only Copilot that’s actually useful.
A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.
I get the Pro version for free since I’ve worked on a few popular open-source projects. I’m using it in VS Code and it’s helped me write code for systems I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve used it to summarize the architecture of open-source projects so I understand how to contribute new features. The autocompletion can be pretty good too. I also use it to review my code.
We use Claude Code with the Opus 4.5 model at work, and it’s quite a bit better, but I don’t want to pay that much for an AI model for personal projects since I use it so infrequently.
Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use
Free private repositories, Github Actions, and Github Packages are all pretty useful though. All of those were added under Microsoft’s ownership. Actions got a head start because it was built on top of Azure DevOps infra that Microsoft had already created.
Free private repos were always available on Bitbucket (for example) before that though. The things added by Microsoft were all catch-up.
They lose money from it (people that used to pay for an account to get private repos no longer need to) which is why Github didn’t do it when they were independent.
Github actions are famously extremely trash…
Plenty of open-source projects that I use are happy with them though. I see far fewer projects using Travis CI and AppVeyor these days for example.
github also has the slowest, most unresponsive web interface ive ever used. it’s genuinely impressive how they made a web app so slow
controversial take.
Nope, I agree, and so far you get only upvotes so… we agree.
You can get a plugin to hide it
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
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
Copilot Sheets.
Copilot Docs.
Copilot Slides.
Just avoid all of them to be safe lol
Damn, our customers don’t use copilot, but we promised to reach 50% usage in 2026…
That’s it… Rename the whole thing to copilot and we achieve our goal!
Why do I feel 2026 is gonna be a fucking nightmare…?
Pattern recognition
Extrapolation from the experience of previous years
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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
I’m sorry this is happening to you all. It’s wrong and shameful.
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.
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.
because you’re not an ignorant dumbass
My LibreOffice is still called LibreOffice.
Copile of shit
Welp… Time to bring back this ol’ meme.
Gameboy
Gameboy Pocket
Gameboy Light
Super Gameboy
Gameboy Colour
Gameboy Advance
Gameboy Advance SP
Gameboy Advance SP Backlit
Gameboy Player
Gameboy Micro
Yeah but only Sega has Mega power and blast processing.
Slurs, the DS works.
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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.
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?
How drunk are these guys?
Ask the dude that renamed Twitter to X (formerly Twitter).
Does being hopped up on ketamine counts as drunk?
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.
Well on the bright side, maybe in a few years when people search for “office software” they’ll be directed to libreoffice instead of Microsoft
Or ONLYOFFICE
I would bet an absurd amount of money that Marketing people consulted Copilot.
Copilotception
Hey there, laptop, looks like you’re going to be a linux machine now.
“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.
Do what I did: vm your win machine inside linux. It’s how i solved my legacy software / game saves quandry. Just duplicated the win HDD and virtualised it.
I dislike dual booting and will go a looong way to be lazy :P
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.
They don’t just use office from the web, via Linux? You can access excel, word, …, all of that in a browser.
I would not shut down my PC and boot into windows just for office. I keep my Windows around because my wife prefers it (for now).
I’m not one of the dual booters mentioned, but the desktop version of Excel specifically has several important features that the online version flat out doesn’t support. Primarily I’m talking about creating and running data queries, which is useful for analyzing data and generating reports from remote data sources including external files like CSV and online databases. You can do all this without Excel of course, but this shows the online versions are definitely limited.
'Twas ever so. Years ago (2012) when i was still working in an office we had web MS office to use for work…i ended up bringing in my laptop with full blown office just to get the fckn data manipulation we needed out of excel
That’s fair. I’ve dealt with that before, and in my case I had to rebuild the damn thing for compatibility with the web version. When I did, I was able to use alternatives like Power Query M instead of VBA. This worked in my case, but I’m sure you’re right that some features just aren’t there in any capacity.
The external CSV thing is a PITA but you can (at least there) overcome it via adding a “landing sheet” for raw data. Nobody is going to want to deal with any of this, though.
They don’t just use office from the web, via Linux? You can access excel, word, …, all of that in a browser.
Web office has barely any features compared to the desktop thing, iirc.
+1
Yeah I think I’d be more likely to use WinBoat or something similar to run a virtual machine rather than fully boot into Windows.
office on the web sucks, lacks features, and basically defeats the purpose of using office at all
Well, IIRC there’s a flight simulator hidden somewhere in Excel
Edit: https://www.exceldemy.com/7-excel-easter-eggs-for-power-users/
Unfortunately they no longer include elaborate Easter eggs like that, since they adopted a security policy around 20 years ago that forbids them. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-no-easter-eggs
Ah! Bummer :(
I haven’t used Excel in ages, tho
I don’t know many people that still call it “Microsoft Office”… They usually refer to the individual apps they use (Word, Excel) rather than the suite as a whole.
Some people just call it “Microsoft” (“please install Microsoft on my computer”), especially if they’re on MacOS where it’s the only Microsoft software they use.
Some people assume it’s part of Windows since they’ve only ever used computers that have had it preinstalled.
It’s like they’re trying to alienate their core customer base. Windows 8 may have been salvageable but Office is not.
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
Suicidally bad naming is the one thing we can always rely on Microsoft for
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.
Maybe they hired the brand team from HBO.
