Microsoft Is Rebranding Its Office Online Services To Office

Popularly known by their names, Word Online, Excel Online and Powerpoint Online, these web-apps were designed to take on the likes of Google Docs. Today, Microsoft is rebranding and renaming these suite of apps from Office Online to just “Office”. The software maker is using the new terminology “relatively soon” after it finalizes all of the changes to its marketing and technical content. “Because our offerings have evolved to provide access to apps on more than one platform, it no longer makes sense to use any platform-specific sub-brands,” explains Bill Doll, senior product marketing officer at Microsoft. Microsoft is also discontinuing the use of “Word Online” or “Excel Online,” so all the web apps are simply Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Microsoft says it may refer to this as “Office for the web” in the future, but that this is just to differentiate between Office on Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android and the web. Microsoft’s stated reason for the change: “Because our offerings have evolved to provide access to apps on more than one platform, it no longer makes sense to use any platform-specific sub-brands.” “We have already made these changes across most of our in-product experiences, communications, and marketing and technical content and expect to complete the remaining updates relatively soon,” officials noted in a blog post on July 24.
Microsoft’s Office ecosystem is a little too ‘busy’. There is Office 365, there’s Microsoft Office Professional Plus, there’s also a student version of these applications, all on top of the web apps. For the average consumer that just needs to get a copy of Microsoft Office, all these can prove a little confusing. We shall dive deeper into this whole mess in a later post but for now, stick to the version of Office that’s running on your PC. Featured Image courtesy of ZDNet