Comment by jukkan
11 days ago
Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.
The product naming is completely insane. In the span of a year my corporate portal changed name from portal dot office dot com, to Microsoft 365 dot com, and now its copilot something or other dot com.
The portal completely changed in design and the former portal functionality is hidden in a tiny search icon in a knock off chatgpt interface.
The average non-technical corporate user must be so confused.
The confusing nature of product naming is I think pretty typical of MS. It’s just like with personal accounts, where there is no Outlook or Hotmail domain for logging in, it’s still live dot com, and Windows Live hasn’t been a thing for at least 13 years.
And then they have differerent versions of copilot. The consumer one at copilot.microsoft.com, the office one at really hard to remember m365.cloud.microsoft/chat etc. It's really annoying.
And it used to be better. Copilot.microsoft.com would just redirect to the best version you had access to. But they dropped that for whatever reason.
Microsoft did this same thing with Teams and OneDrive back in the day. It took quite a while before they straightened that mess out.
Not to mention ton when they renamed Lync to Skype…
Sharepoint has been a complete mess ever since its inception. It lacked any data organisation features so unless you had really strict processes and oversight it turned into a shitheap within months. This is still really the case.
Even now it's mostly useful as a teams backend. But even that doesn't solve the shitheap problem, as any team you create in teams, or every yammer group automatically creates sharepoint sites which are not very useful as a sharepoint site and clutter up search results.
Users often don't understand that when they share something in teams there is an actual sharepoint behind it and sometimes people fiddle with permissions there and then other people don't understand why they're not allowed to do X or Y because the controls aren't fully exposed in the Teams interface. It's such a mess.
And .NET Core to .NET, not to be confused with .NET Framework
.NET was always a clusterfuck of naming, as in the early 2000s Microsoft was slapping the .NET label everywhere. .NET Passport (now known as Microsoft accounts), .NET My Services, Visual Studio .NET (which was the same as regular VS, just with support for building C# and VB.NET apps added), .NET Server 2003 (Windows Server 2003), et weary cetera.
In this respect, as in many others related to .NET, Microsoft was inspired by Java. In the late 90s, Java wasn't just a language, it was a VM, runtime environment, enterprise platform (Java EE, now Jakarta EE), smartcard technology, remoting protocol, operating system, desktop environment, floor wax, dessert topping...
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