We’re rolling with the punches today!
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Quick heads up to regular listeners of The Marketing Gateway – we’d planned and even promoted an interview episode today, and technology got in our way and ate half the interview
Unfortunately, it was the half where I wasn’t talking, so we’re working on getting that restored!
Until then… here’s a fresh new episode for today
Sorry about that!
So as you might recall, I’m often bewildered by Microsoft, a company that is so large that they can afford to make a lot of mistakes when it comes to branding, mainly because they’re essentially a legal monopoly and there aren’t any serious alternatives for a computer operating system for businesses and desktop consumer users to switch to if they’re unhappy with Microsoft
I mean, yeah, there’s Apple’s macOS and iOs, and Google’s Android and ChromeOS, and then there’s Linux… but anyhow
71% market share on desktop computers is what I’m talking about
Nobody’s threatening that right now
Along with basically owning the desktop computer market, Microsoft has over 400 million paid subscriptions to its productivity software suite popularly known as Microsoft Office
I used Microsoft Word, which is part of the suite, to write this episode, and if you’re in the corporate world, I’m sure you’ve used Word or Powerpoint or Excel or one of their other traditional Microsoft Office products too
Believe it or not, Microsoft is in second place in the global office software market with 30% market share
Google has them beat at 44%
But Microsoft’s been pushing really hard on its generative AI suite of software, formerly known as Bing Chat, but now known as Copilot
They’ve invested over $80 billion into their AI platform, and an October 2025 report they commissioned through Forrester suggests that small or mid-sized businesses who use Copilot for projects can see an ROI ranging from 132% to a staggering 353% over a three year period
I’m skeptical
But that’s why they’re pushing this Copilot stuff so hard – they’re hoping businesses will bite, because 3
7 million businesses currently use Microsoft 365
Or do they? Because there’s some news going around that Microsoft Office is no more
If you to www.office.com today, you will be greeted by a screen that says “Welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot App
” And there’s a line on the page that says, “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot
“
And so the word on the street is that it looks like Microsoft is rolling out a rebranding of its entire Office product portfolio to be not just integrated with Copilot – it’s being called Copilot
But why would Microsoft do something so obviously stupid as rebrand their historic Microsoft Office suite of products to something far more confusing?
The answer is, it actually happened back in 2020 when they renamed the subscription version of their Office Suite “Microsoft 365,” and again in April 2025 when they renamed the Microsoft 365 app “Microsoft 365 Copilot
” Nobody but tech enthusiasts and Wikipedia editors even seem to have noticed
But the more complex answer is, Microsoft really does want people to think about Copilot, and no matter what they call their productivity suite, the brand they care about going forward is the one powered by AI
I’m Sean in St Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway
OK, so let’s back up to 2022 when Microsoft decided to rebrand their Office suite in the first place
Microsoft Office has been around for a long time, first debuting on Windows 3
0 in 1990 and going through several iterations before going through new version updates that more or less kept pace with the rollout of new operating system versions
Office 95 was for Windows 95, Office XP was for Windows XP, and the versions of Office that shipped roughly every three years from then on were for the update packs for XP, Windows 7 and Windows 10
Sorry, Windows Vista
You didn’t get your own exclusive version of Office
But hey, the Macintosh, iOS and Android all have their own versions!
While Office is not a terribly exciting product to talk about from a glitz and glamor point of view, the most evolutionary change in the suite in the 21st century was in Office 2007, where Microsoft ditched the traditional drop-down menus and icon bars you still see in other competing software like Google Workspace or LibreOffice and replaced it with this graphical ribbon that’s needlessly complex and which people really hated when it first launched, but we’ve had about 20 years to get used to
Up until the last 10 years or so, Office was generally sold as a standalone product
You’d go to the store, buy a boxed copy of the software, put the floppy disc or CD-ROM or DVD-ROM into your drive and install it with a license key that was yours to keep forever
But Microsoft really wanted to turn Office into an annual subscription service as opposed to a piece of software that cheapskates could keep using until the heat death of the universe, and so they made a diverging product originally called Office Web Apps that launched in 2008 and went through many different name changes as Microsoft tried to figure out how to make it work online
The most recent name from 2014-2019 was “Office Online,” and it was part of a broader umbrella of services called “Windows Live
”
But there was this other parallel product within Microsoft’s portfolio called Office 365
It was launched in 2010 and was mainly focused on the corporate market
And Microsoft confusingly had a different service geared at enterprise customers called Microsoft 365 that was introduced in 2017 and which bundled together the operating system, Office 365 and security features
In Spring of 2020, right at the beginning of the global pandemic, Microsoft decided to rebrand Office 365 as Microsoft 365, reserving the Office 365 brand for institutional and enterprise users
But then in 2022, they announced they were phasing out the Microsoft Office brand for everything except for legacy products and that going forward, the entire suite would be called Microsoft 365
Except there’s still a non-subscription version of the software called Microsoft Office 2024 that includes software like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook for a one-time purchase
Is your head spinning yet? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Microsoft absolutely stinks at branding
They make things so needlessly confusing
OK, so that brings us to their current controversy
The internet started buzzing on January 5th that on Microsoft’s Office
com website – which remember, they haven’t been using to market Microsoft Office 365 as a product since 2022 – the site now appears to be suggesting that Microsoft 365 is being renamed The Microsoft 365 Copilot App
Now, unlike the hyperbole you might be seeing on the internet, Microsoft is not changing the brand name of “Microsoft Office” to “Microsoft Copilot App 365” this year
That is factually incorrect
The truth is it happened gradually over the last 5 years and no one even noticed
As I mentioned earlier, that change actually did take place last year in April when Microsoft decided to rename its Microsoft 365 App
And Copilot was still a relatively new brand even then – it was adopted to replace the earlier name of Bing Chat in late 2023 – and by the way, do you remember when Microsoft was trying to get us to “Bing” everything a few years ago? Good grief, Microsoft
Nobody wanted that
So anyway, then Microsoft started selling premium access to Copilot in January 2024 and gradually integrated it into the Microsoft 365 software so that it became “Microsoft 365 With Copilot
”
And Microsoft also launched a new version of Windows for certain hardware that runs Copilot in the background to optimize processes and they’ve also since pivoted to making every Windows 11 PC include built-in integration with Copilot
Like I said, Microsoft stinks at branding
It’s confusing to know what software you’re buying and what you’re running
But if you read their Windows Experience Blog post from October of 2025, they really want you to interact with your PC by talking to Copilot the same way you might talk to Siri or Google Assistant on your phone
Or Cortana on Windows, but Windows got rid of that AI assistant in 2023 and replaced it with Copilot
Geez, Microsoft, you really love to confuse the heck out of people
So, what we’re ultimately heading towards is that Microsoft wants you to think about Windows 11 when you think operating system, Microsoft 365 when you think about buying subscription services and Copilot when you think about sitting down to your computer and doing any work
Which means, effectively, they really have killed the Office brand in favor of Copilot
And the real question is… why?
Let’s look at another tech company that competes with Microsoft – Google
So about 10 years ago, there were all these panicked headlines that Google was changing its name to Alphabet, Inc
And yep, that happened
But what it really involved was a restructuring of the corporation so that Google and all its other businesses would operate under a holding company
This made a lot of sense because Google was invested in a lot of other ventures and needed to reorganize so that multiple CEOs could run those businesses without Google being directly tied to them
So, that rebranding happened, and Google is still operating as Google
And while Google has done a number of confusing and outright stupid things over the year when it comes to branding, they aren’t messing with their core products
Gmail is still Gmail, even when it’s a part of Google Workspace
Google the search engine is still just called Google
Youtube is still very much its own thing
And Gemini, their recent AI program, is being touted as its own platform, not a replacement for Google
On the other hand, we saw Facebook go through a pretty silly rebrand when Mark Zuckerberg decided to re-organize under the name Meta
His big dream at the time was to build the Metaverse, an online virtual reality platform that resembles the futuristic, highly personal, anything goes internet you commonly see in science fiction and cyberpunk stories
Meta has sunk around $50 billion into trying to make the Metaverse a thing, launching several iterations in their VR headset line, putting out AI-powered Ray-Ban sunglasses and pushing hard for people to use this silly VR platform called Horizon that even regular VR users like myself think is pretty stupid and pointless
Meta was an example of a terrible rebrand for a tech company, but it didn’t impact Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp too much
They all still operate under their successful brand names
Microsoft has never been a name that people have liked very much
It’s always seemed too cold and corporate
In the 1990s, when Star Trek: The Next Generation was still a big deal, Microsoft was often humorously compared to the cybernetic hive-mind known as the Borg who traveled around the galaxy in ugly giant mechanical cubes instead of sleekly designed starships – “We are Microsoft
We will assimilate you
”
Copilot is also a really nebulous brand name because it’s essentially a frontend for a variant of ChatGPT
People know what ChatGPT is, but Copilot seems like the generic brand
That it’s being integrated with boring old Office software doesn’t make it sexy or interesting; it makes it seem like the ribbon forced on users in Office 2007 – you’re going to have to learn to like it because it’s really hard to operate the software without it
So, yeah, Copilot is Microsoft’s way of saying, “you don’t need Office anymore
Our AI assistant will take care of all that boring document creation and data analysis and deck building for you
You just need to tell it what to do
”
As far as I can tell, the only people who want to do that are the people working at Microsoft
Most of us don’t want to talk to our computers when we’re working, and we sure as heck don’t want Copilot messing up our work by trying to do things for us, but badly
I know I would rather spend a few hours writing a script for The Marketing Gateway than asking Copilot to do it and then spending all day fixing its mistakes
No matter how loud the AI hype gets, the proof is in the results – AI tools are really lousy at producing useful, reliable output that goes beyond a very basic level of helpfulness but are incredibly adept at churning out useless, soulless garbage
And Microsoft? You guys have more money than almost any entity in the world
Would it be such a terrible thing to hire a marketing team that can just settle on a few product names and keep them that way? The rest of the world would love if it you could do that
I’m Sean in St Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway
See ya next time!
PLUG
Today’s plug is for being adaptable
We had to do it today when our plans for an episode fell through, and it’s pretty much how I have to live my life every day with teenagers in the house and cats waking me up at 2 in the morning to let me know that my toes suddenly look like exciting little toys they’d love to play with!
I was listening to Margaret Atwood’s book The Penelopiad recently
Penelope is, of course, the clever wife of the ancient Greek hero Odysseus, and she has to outthink several situations she finds herself in while her husband’s away
In Atwood’s novel, Penelope is the daughter of a Naiad, which is a water nymph
And her mother tells her this
“Water does not resist
Water flows
When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress
Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you
But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it
Water is patient
Dripping water wears away a stone
Remember that, my child
Remember you are half water
If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it
Water does
”
That’s great advice
That’s what being adaptable is
When the world puts you in a position where you have to change, it’s much easier if you adapt and flow around the obstacle than to try to work against it
But I also like the idea that in being adaptable, we also have to be patient
That’s exactly where we are today, waiting for a technology platform to fix a problem so we can release the episode we intended to put out
And I’m hopeful we’ll have that for you tomorrow
But in the meantime, we’ll continue to be adaptable here at The Marketing Gateway! It’s far better than being frustrated
SOURCES:
https://electroiq.com/stats/microsoft-365-statistics
https://expertinsights.com/email-security/microsoft-365-usage-and-security-statistics-for-2024
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/10/16/making-every-windows-11-pc-an-ai-pc
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