You might have noticed that Microsoft has a funny habit of rebranding its products in ways that seems purposefully designed to confuse its users. Microsoft Office became Microsoft 365 (Office) and then became Microsoft Copilot 365, complete with almost the same logo as the company's AI chatbot.
If only there were a way to keep track of what each product is and what we're supposed to be calling them. Well, someone's on it. They've created a "Microsoft Rebrand Registry" conscientiously listing the many brand permutations implemented over the years – and it even tries to predict the next changes.
Multiple Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award recipient Loryan Strant created the Rebrand Registry partly for a laugh and partly to provide a genuinely useful resource for users. His previously projects include Let Me Correct That For You, which lists the full names of Microsoft products with their varying approaches to capitalisation style, from PowerPoint to Copilot.
The new registry lists 72 surviving Microsoft products and the 158 names they’ve had to date. Eight products that have gone through three name changes, including Azure AI Search and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
There's also an analysis section providing insights into the product areas with the longest and shortest-lived brand names and some predictions on which Microsoft products are most likely to get a new name soon. This is based on the amount of time the current name has been used and the frequency with which the tech giant changes names in the same family.
Loryan suggests there's an “elevated” likelihood that the Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, Azure DevOps and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will all come in for rebrands some time soon.
