Office Is Not Dead, It Is Just Lost

Microsoft has not killed Office. It has done something more subtle and arguably more impressive: it has confused hundreds of millions of users without changing the software itself. Through relentless renaming and branding gymnastics, one of the most familiar products in computing history has become strangely hard to describe.

Office Is Not Dead, It Is Just Lost

There are companies that occasionally confuse their users. And then there is Microsoft, which has elevated confusion to a core competency.

Microsoft is now, without serious competition, the market leader in making perfectly normal people doubt their own understanding of software they have used for decades. Not because the software changed in any meaningful way, but because the names refuse to stay still long enough to be remembered.

Once upon a time, there was Microsoft Office. Word, Excel, PowerPoint. You bought it, installed it, used it. Entire generations learned what a document was inside Word and what a spreadsheet was inside Excel. Office was not a product category, it was infrastructure. It simply existed.

Then came subscriptions, and Office became Office 365. The software was still Office, but now it was also a service, a cloud promise, and a billing relationship. Still, the name survived. Users adapted, because users always do.

Then Office itself became the problem. Office 365 was renamed Microsoft 365. Not because Office disappeared, but because Office no longer sounded expansive enough. Word and Excel were still Office apps, but Office was no longer the thing you bought. It was a concept nested inside something else. This is where conversations started requiring diagrams.

To help you access your Office apps, Microsoft offered the Office app. Which was later renamed the Microsoft 365 app. This app was not Office, but it contained Office. Office lived inside something that was explicitly not called Office anymore.

And now, in the latest act of branding escalation, the Microsoft 365 app has been renamed again. This time to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Copilot, conveniently, is also the name of Microsoft’s AI assistant. Which lives inside Word, Excel, Outlook, and other Office apps. The hub is Copilot. The assistant is Copilot. Office still exists, unless it doesn’t, but everything remains unchanged, allegedly.

Predictably, the internet reacted. Headlines announced that Office was dead. Viral posts claimed hundreds of millions of users had become AI users overnight. None of this was true. The more troubling part is that it sounded plausible.

When naming becomes unstable, reality itself loses credibility. People stop asking whether something is correct and start asking whether Microsoft would do it. And the answer increasingly seems to be yes.

Microsoft rushed to clarify. Office is not dead. Word is still Word. Excel is still Excel. Only the hub was renamed. But once a clarification is needed, the damage is already done. Naming is supposed to reduce cognitive load, not require an FAQ.

Nothing fundamental changed. No forced AI usage. No silent migration. The software behaves exactly as it did before. What changed is that users now need context to answer a basic question like where to open Word.

This is not innovation. It is branding entropy.

Microsoft has not killed Office. It has achieved something more refined. It has made one of the most familiar software products in history feel unstable without touching the code.