Ask HN: Does Microsoft gain anything from the constant annoying rebranding?
by lr0 | 2025-08-17 09:48:27+00:00
I know no company or business in history that had the amount of rebranding that Microsoft did, initially I thought that the product manager there might have had an identity crisis, and he/she will be leave the position at some point and this it will be over. But this practice does not seem to end ever, which made me wonder if it is a company policy and it actually helps the business growth. Does any one of you know any possible business use to such intensive rebranding?

Some of you might have not dealt with many Microsoft products so you might have not experienced examples of what I am talking about, so to name a few:

* Azure Active Directory → Microsoft Entra ID (maybe the most horrible one of them) * Microsoft Threat Protection → Microsoft 365 Defender * Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection → Microsoft Defender for Endpoint * Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection → Microsoft Defender for Office 365 * Azure Advanced Threat Protection → Microsoft Defender for Identity

Office products recently:

* Office 365 Basic for Business is renamed to Microsoft 365 Apps for business * Office 365 Standard for Business is renamed to Microsoft 365 Business Basics * Office 365 Premium for Business is renamed to Microsoft 365 Business Standard * Some other tier was then renamed to be Microsoft 365 Business Premium

Other insane rebranding: * Microsoft Remote Desktop -> Windows App (???!) * Outlook for windows -> Outlook Classic

And the entire Office things after the Microsoft 365 rebranding, is now being rebranded again as Microsoft Copilot 365

Some other products do not even make any sense, like Windows OneDrive that not the same as the OneDrive you get with Office/Microsoft 365. Some other products have extremely confusing naming; XBox, Xbox360, Xbox One, Xbox One S/X, Xbox Series X/S. I can’t stop thinking that someone intentionally choose them to be that confusing, no way their review cycle could not have noticed any of that.

Another example that might be familiar for the hacker community is .NET (which is a bad name initially but disregarding that) The new name for the open source version of the .NET Framework was called “.NET Core”, back then at work we used to refer to old projects that used .NET (the closed source one) as “.NET Projects” and the new ones as “.NET Core” projects, then Microsoft decided to drop the “Core” (which was, again, a bad name initially), and referred internally to projects that used the old framework as .NET Framework projects, so now we have two frameworks, one called the “.NET” framework and other called the “.NET Framework” framework.

Thankfully I no longer have to deal with a lot of Microsoft products at work, but when I have to, I’m just astonished by how much things that are just literally the same of how I left them are having totally different names, I found out lately that a team had set up a “ubiquitous language” set that they agreed to use internally to refer to the MS products they are using to avoid confusing.

Again, my question, is there any sane reason why Microsoft keeps this insane rebranding policy? Is making people confused all the time actually help their marketing strategy and growth?