This week, some guy we hadn’t heard of made a big change to the products we all use. He renamed them. So in reality, everything keeps working as it did before. But what appears on invoices and quotes will change. We’ll take a little while to get used to these new names, and I suspect we’ll get it wrong occasionally.
The unknown guy has a name. So he’s not really unknown at all. He’s Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365. He has a smiley face on LinkedIn. He’s probably thinking about more naming strategies.
To be fair, it makes a bit of sense. Here’s his explanation :
“This is a natural evolution. Microsoft 365 began in 2017 as a licensing bundle for enterprise customers—a combination of Windows, Office, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS). It has come a long way since then. Today, we call it “the world’s productivity cloud” and it represents our vision for the future of Microsoft productivity tools—an integrated set of apps and services that puts artificial intelligence (AI) and other cutting-edge innovations to work for you. And for small and medium-sized businesses, that includes new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to help you host rich meetings and events online; cloud file storage and sharing capabilities so you can collaborate from anywhere; and security and identity solutions to safeguard your business. At a moment when businesses are facing extraordinary health and economic challenges, we are pleased to bring our consumer and small and medium-sized business customers into this growing Microsoft 365 family.”
So what’s happening to the names ?
- Office 365 Business Essentials will become Microsoft 365 Business Basic.
- Office 365 Business Premium will become Microsoft 365 Business Standard.
- Microsoft 365 Business will become Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
- Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will both become Microsoft 365 Apps. Where necessary we will use the “for business” and “for enterprise” labels to distinguish between the two.
