Microsoft Corp. is dropping the iconic Office branding for its suite of productivity tools after more than 30 years, renaming it Microsoft 365.

The change doesn’t mean applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint will disappear, but they will instead be lumped under the Microsoft 365 umbrella, as opposed to the Office branding.

The Microsoft 365 branding is not entirely new. The company appears to have been planning this transition for some time, having renamed Office 365 subscriptions as Microsoft 365 about two years ago.

Microsoft said the first changes will be seen in November, when the online Office apps available through Office.com will switch to the Microsoft 365 branding. Then in January 2023, the Office application built into Windows 10 and Windows 11 will be renamed, followed by the mobile Office apps for iOS and Android. The apps will be rebranded via an update and given a new logo, as seen above.

“In the coming months, Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows will become the Microsoft 365 app, with a new icon, a new look, and even more features,” Microsoft explained in an FAQ.

As such, Microsoft 365 will expand to include multiple products, including Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, Loop, Clipchamp, Stream and Microsoft’s new Designer app. The central Microsoft 365 app for mobile and desktop will include a feed of relevant meetings and colleagues, plus a hub for all documents and custom tagging to improve group and organize content.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. was critical of Microsoft’s decision to ditch the Office brand, saying that most marketing experts would cringe at the thought of tossing away such a well-defined and understood offering, only to merge it with the “hodgepodge” of services that is Microsoft 365.

“Satya Nadella may be driving product simplification a tad too hard here,” Mueller said. “Sooner or later all that will be left from Microsoft’s core brands will be Microsoft 365 and Azure. Windows is still there, of course, but one wonders for how long.”

The Microsoft Office brand won’t completely disappear, however. The company said existing Office 365 accounts aren’t being rebranded yet. In addition, Microsoft will continue to sell perpetually licensed versions of Office apps such as Word and Excel under the Office 2021 branding. In other words, Microsoft Office has been relegated to a legacy brand.

Image: Microsoft