[TeMPOraL]

Can confirm - I'm looking at my Android phone now; the "Office Hub" app I knew as "Office" or "Microsoft 365" has, at some point, renamed itself to "M365 Copilot". To make things more obvious and less confusing, it's sitting right next to an app named "Copilot", which is their ChatGPT interface, and as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything copiloty with the Office suite.

Looking at the two side by side in an app manager, I see:

- Copilot - com.microsoft.copilot

- M365 Copilot - com.microsoft.office.officehubrow

And they both have identical icon, except the latter has a tiny black rectangle with tiny white "M365" label tucked in the corner.

[jerf]

It's amazing to me how too much marketing education and/or experience seems to rot the brain. You learn on like day 4 of Marketing 101 that your brands should be distinct and recognizable, and hopefully some solid tips on how to do that. Cool. Solid. Seems obvious but there's plenty of things that seem obvious in hindsight that education can help you with.

Somewhere between that and a master's degree and 10 years at a prestigious marketing firm, though, apparently there's some lessons about how you should smear all your brands all over each other in some bid to, I presume, transfer any good will one may have had to all of them, but it seems to me that they could stand to send those people back to MKT101 again, because the principle of labeling what your product actually is seems to elude them after Too Much Education.

[TeMPOraL]

Think is, it's the latter lessons that are correct, because the ultimate arbiter of which marketing practices work or not is the market itself.

If anything, Marketing 101 works as a scaffolding but you learn the real lessons later on (basically like with every other vocational training wrapped in a degree, including especially computer science) - but also, and perhaps more importantly, it serves as a fig leaf. You can point to that and say, it's a Science and an Art and is Principled and done well It Is For The Good Of All Mankind, and keep the veneer of legitimacy over what's in practice a more systematized way of bringing harm to your fellow humans.

Also specifically wrt. brands - brands as quality signals mostly died out a decade or more ago; mixing them up is just a way to get their decaying corpses to trick more people for a little longer.