Microsoft Office is no more, company says, as it is renamed ‘Microsoft 365’

(Microsoft)

Microsoft Office will be killed off, the company has said, as it is rebranded “Microsoft 365”.

The apps that make up the suite of productivity apps will stay: Word, Excel, Powerpoint and others will stick around.

But the Office branding will be removed after 30 years, it said.

Microsoft had already been moving away from the name Office. Its online subscriptions switched from being called Office 365 to Microsoft 365 a couple of years ago, for instance.

But it will now be dropping them completely, removing the Office branding from those places it continues to exist. That includes the website Office.com, as well as its mobile and Windows apps.

Alongside that rebranding will come new icons and a new look, Microsoft said.

The changes will start arriving from November, when the website will change. The new apps will then arrive in January, Microsoft said.

The changes will apply to everyone and there is nothing people need to do in response to them, Microsoft said. The app will be automatically updated with its new look and name.

Office will stick around in some specific situations. People will still be able to buy access to the suite through one-time purchases such as Office 2021, for instance – but Microsoft will encourage people to pay for the monthly subscription to Microsoft 35 instead.

Microsoft’s long history means that it has, in recent years, been required to kill off a number of well-known brands. That includes Internet Explorer, for instance, which the company took years to actually get rid of but which has now finally been killed off.