Microsoft Office is one of the most recognizable and valuable brands ever. I'm quite terrible at marketing, and even I can recognize how stupid the rebrand was.
Maybe they figured their brand was too recognizable and valuable, and had to knee-cap it to restore the cosmic balance of the Great Material Continuum.
EDIT:
There's even a rule of acquisition that could possibly apply here: #239 - Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
I thought that renaming Active Directory to Entra ID was bad. Every single tech person who ever touched a Windows server knows what AD is. Then they change to name to something that sounds like it's going to give you an anal probe. What a dumpster fire...
Thank you for this. As someone who recently had to stumble back into turning a few knobs in (what I thought would be) AD for Office 365 licensing needs, after ~10 years outside of the MS sandbox, I had no earthly idea what Entra was. Until right now.
I think there's little chance it won't be changed back. Changing the name was probably motivated by someone in management pushing the name change so that they could list it as a personal achievement as one of the "new" AI products they'd overseen the release of in the current zeitgeist.
It wasn't. It's the dumbest name ever.