After 32 years, Microsoft has begun to kill off the Microsoft Office brand, with plans to rebrand its Office.com and Office cloud-based apps to Microsoft 365 in the near future.
Microsoft Office was first released in 1990, with Microsoft bundling its popular Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications under a one-time purchase productivity suite. Later versions introduced additional programs, such as Outlook, Access, and OneNote.
In 2017, Microsoft started offering Office applications under a subscription model called Office 365, which included additional cloud-based features, integrations, and applications.
In 2020, Microsoft rebranded Office 365 to Microsoft 365 and started to heavily push the subscription-based productivity suite to both the enterprise and consumers.
Microsoft Office is rebranding to Microsoft 365
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that all their cloud-based Microsoft Office apps and the office.com site would be rebranding to Microsoft 365 soon.
The rebrand would start with Office.com in November 2022, followed by Microsoft’s free cloud-based versions, the Office app on Windows and Office mobile app, in January 2023.
However, this does not mean that the Microsoft Office brand is going away completely.
Microsoft says they will continue offering the one-time purchase license via Microsoft Office 2021 and Office LTSC.
“No, as part of Microsoft 365 you will continue to get access to apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook,” explained Microsoft in FAQ on the rebranding.
“We will also continue to offer one-time purchases of those apps to consumers and businesses via Office 2021 and Office LTSC plans.”
This means, for now, it’s just another name change and will not affect the products or your use of them.
If you use the standalone Microsoft Office, it will continue to use that name for the time being, and nothing has changed for existing Microsoft 365 users.
However, the mobile apps and free Microsoft Store cloud-based versions will now be renamed to Microsoft 365.
