Microsoft 365 XP Copilot 3.11 for Workgroups Office 2024 app

No, Microsoft didn’t rebrand Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft’s Office website is confusing the internet

The VergeTom Warren

Undoubtedly knowing my longstanding love of all things Microsoft branding, several people pinged me about the notion that the company was seemingly rebranding 'Office' to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app'. Yes, seriously, the main landing page on office.com says exactly this right up top:

I love everything about this page, from the peachy tones and 2020-style ombré to the simple asterisk footnote denoter.¹ Mainly I love that it's confusing as fuck. It's perhaps the most Microsoftian branding exercise yet! Because Microsoft is not actually rebranding Office to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app' – at least not the Office you're thinking about. As Tom Warren explains:

As much as Microsoft loves to shove its Copilot branding everywhere, Office hasn’t been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app.”

The confusion comes from Microsoft’s own Office.com domain, which for the past year has acted as a way to push businesses and consumers to use the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. This app is a hub app that provides access to Copilot, as well as all the Office apps. Microsoft used to call this app simply Office, before the company rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022.

First and foremost, 'Office' is a great brand and name for a product suite. I'm not being flippant – it's up there with 'Windows' for perhaps the only good bit of branding that Microsoft has ever done.² Equally impressive is the office.com domain – a killer domain that's super simple to remember, assuming you're using it to direct people to said Office suite of products online...

But no, apparently you're not. Because you decided that everything which AI touches within Microsoft needs to be rebranded as "Copilot", even, and perhaps especially when it makes no sense. Juice that usage, baby. And so the great office.com domain became the hub for the Microsoft 365 Copilot app,³ which itself is a hub for both Copilot (which you're undoubtedly not looking for) and the Office suite of apps (which you're undoubtedly looking for).

That mention of “formerly Office” is Microsoft referring to the very old Office app that launched in 2019 as a way to try and convince people to use online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Until a year ago it used to be called the Microsoft 365 app. Microsoft then announced it was rebranding its Microsoft 365 app in November 2024 to a Copilot one, which I and everyone else were very confused at. The new app icon and name — Microsoft 365 Copilot — then rolled out on January 15th last year to Windows, iOS, and Android users.

So yes, that beyond confusing statement is just meant to say that the online version of Office, which used to be called 'Office' but stopped being called 'Office' in the push to use the '365' branding ahead of the push to use the 'Copilot' branding, now uses both '365' and 'Copilot' in its branding – also 'app' lol – which actually happened about a year ago, but no one knows why.⁴ You could do a whole George Washington SNL skit about such decisions.

All of this still resides on office.com, mind you. Perhaps microsoft365copilotapp.com was taken.⁵ There's always .net though.

¹ That footnote, by the way, reads: "Copilot Chat in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app is available for Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Academic, SMB, Personal and Family subscribers with a work, education, or personal account. It is available in these supported languages: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/supported-languages." Nearly absolute repetitive gibberish. ↩

² Though shout-out to the OG heavy metal logo that rocked, hard. ↩

³ Special shout-out to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app logo, which looks like a motorway sign: "M365". ↩

⁴ Odds that Microsoft pivots from the 'Copilot' branding, at least for consumers, in 2026? Pretty high, I think. ↩

⁵ We see you, Satya. ↩