Making sense of Microsoft’s branding. Do you have Office 365 or Microsoft 365? Are they the same or different? How did all this confusion arrive? Here are the answers.
What is Office 365?
Microsoft launched Office 365 in 2011. It has its roots in two separate earlier products.
The first one might be obvious: Microsoft Office. Introduced in 1988, Office bundled together three core productivity applications: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Later editions expanded this list to include tools like OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access.
Despite its name, however, Office 365 is not simply the Office productivity applications moved to the cloud. Office 365 does offer the Microsoft Office applications using a subscription model, constantly providing users with fixes, updates and new features, including functionality not included in the traditional desktop Office suites. But Office 365 is actually more the successor of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) — a set of enterprise products delivered as a subscription service hosted by Microsoft as part of its Online Services. Chief among those products were the 2007 versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync (which later became Skype for Business). Launched in 2008, BPOS was primarily served smaller businesses.
With Office 365, Microsoft leapt into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) world with a solution built for organizations of all sizes. Indeed, the first release of Office 365 was based on the cloud-centric 2010 versions of the enterprise products in BPOS. For example, in BPOS, SharePoint was little more than a repository for document sharing, while in Office 365, it became a true collaboration tool.
What is Microsoft 365?
Microsoft updated and enhanced its Office 365 platform dramatically over the years. For example, it ventured into social networking with Yammer; into business intelligence and data mining with Power BI; and into teamwork organization with Planner. In 2017, it launched Microsoft Teams, which has quickly become the collaboration platform of choice for organizations around the globe. It’s really no surprise that by 2017, revenue from Office 365 was exceeding conventional license sales.
It’s also no surprise that the moniker “Office 365” now seemed inadequate for the vastly expanded platform. In July 2017, Microsoft launched the brand Microsoft 365. Initially, it was little more than a marketing or licensing exercise, establishing a bundle that allowed enterprise customers to buy Office 365 Enterprise (E3 and E5); Enterprise Mobility and Security; and Windows 10 Enterprise. As that bundle gained popularity, Microsoft began applying the new brand more liberally. In particular, in 2020, Office 365 plans designed for consumer and small business use were rebranded as Microsoft 365: Office 365 Personal became Microsoft 365 Personal, Office 365 Home became Microsoft 365 Family, and so on.
Moreover, since the launch of the brand, Microsoft has transformed Microsoft 365 from a simple bundle of products into a coherent and comprehensive cloud productivity platform with not just discrete products but broader functionality like information governance, information protection and compliance. (Certain features require more expensive licensing plans.)