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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."

Surely you mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot"?

(I am not making this up. That is what it is called now.)

Realistically, though, I think pretty much _all_ office suites have been called [Something] Office, for about the last 30 years. The Google one ("Google Workplace", formerly "Google Apps") is the only exception I can think of, and I wouldn't necessarily take Google's lead in software branding (honestly, until I looked it up for this post, I thought it was still called Google Apps, and I use the damn thing every day).

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That isn't true, but I don't blame anyone for not understanding what Microsoft marketing is doing in terms of branding.

See for example: https://www.theverge.com/tech/856149/microsoft-365-office-re... or https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/11/office-is...

Microsoft Office still exists, the current version being Microsoft Office 2024 for Mac & Windows. But THIS Office is the the non-subscription version of Office, this is not the cloud-connected Apps being offered via Microsoft 365. This version of Office doesn't get all the latest cloud features and stuff happening in the subscription versions.

The cloud version of Office meanwhile is being renamed left and right. The office.com homepage now redirects to Copilot and is rebranded as Microsoft 365 Copilot just like you said. If you have any M365 business or enterprise plan Office is actually called "Microsoft 365 apps for business/enterprise".

Now why the Microsoft marketing team is adamant on changing and mucking about with such a long standing brand as "Microsoft Office" nobody understands.

Well iWork too. Before that, AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, but yeah, there's things like OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/LibreOffice/NeoOffice which are pretty much all the same lineage (StarOffice and its derivatives). Zoho's is Zoho Office Suite, which at least adds an extra word.

"Work/Works" tended to be used for specifically integrated office suites (AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, and then Microsoft Works). Though iWork is _not_ one, granted.

I think integrated office suites have now entirely died out.

Isn't LibreOffice still an integrated office suite like OpenOffice.org was? I never bothered installing it, so I'm genuinely asking about that one.

But Google Workspace would probably count as a fully integrated suite.

LibreOffice is like Office a collection of intercompatible apps. Microsoft Works was a single application offering Word/Excel/Outlook-like functionality.

And, oddly, a terminal emulator.

1980s office suites very commonly included terminal emulators, because they were in high-demand back then

Most large enterprises, you’d have core business applications running on a mainframe or minicomputer or Unix host, and you’d need a terminal emulator to access them from your PC/microcomputer. A lot of places used mainframe/minicomputer-based email/calendar (e.g. IBM PROFS, DISOSS, SNADS, Office/36, OfficeVision; DEC ALL-IN-ONE; DataGeneral CEO; HPMAIL; etc) and centrally hosted word processing systems (e.g. IBM DisplayWriter) were commonly used for document/content management. And then added to that you had services like CompuServe and BBS systems

It is likely the Microsoft Works developers dogfooded its terminal emulator a lot, since at the time Microsoft ran its business on Xenix servers, until they eventually migrated to Windows NT in the first half of the 1990s

In fact, MS-DOS was initially developed on mainframe/micros and targeted the IBM PC via cross compilation and link cable, they weren't doing it directly.

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