A lot of office applications are designed with a wide scope, incorporating a range of features so vast that almost everyone will find a tool useful enough to meet their needs.
However, such a broad focus can sometimes have the opposite effect, creating confusion, fear, uncertainty and doubt with tools that should be clear, easy to use and easy to understand.
A major example of this came about with a widely spread news story, as reported here by Forbes, that Microsoft Office is “dead”, and has been replaced with Microsoft 365 Copilot, a suite of applications named after the company’s AI chatbot, which itself created concerns about privacy and security.
Whilst this is not true and a standalone version of Office is still available, it highlights the sometimes intentionally confusing landscape of business software that IT support teams are trying their utmost to help clarify.
We can help by installing, managing and maintaining hardware and software across your computer networks, including clearing away as many unnecessary features as possible.
With that in mind, here are some of the strangest, most confusing features ever added, what happened to them, and why IT support staff may choose to remove them.
Why Was Windows Sidebar A Failure?
Ever since the early days of Microsoft Windows, widgets and other little desktop gadgets were designed to be simple tools that were customisable and personalisable to provide a user with their optimal experience.
Some of these, such as RSS feeds, weather reports and Sticky Notes, have remained relatively popular as either standalone apps or integrated into other system components, but the initial attempt to integrate widgets more closely into Windows was the now-infamous Sidebar tool integrated into Windows Vista.
Why was this? Part of the reason was that it was one of several parts of the Windows Aero desktop, alongside the tinted translucent glass windows, the Flip 3D tab manager and window previews, that would use a significant proportion of hardware resources.
This contributed to the negative perception of Vista as unacceptably slow and almost deceptive in its compatibility with older systems, and many businesses would request that Sidebar be turned off by default.
This also turned out to be the case when Windows 11 brought back the Widgets panel as a replacement for Microsoft Start, a feed of news and interests that is at best cumbersome and at worst outright distracting.
Why Was Chat By Microsoft Teams Confusing?
At one point, Microsoft had at least three first-party business-orientated communication applications, all of which were incompatible with each other and had to be set up separately.
There was Skype, there was the My People taskbar tool that integrated with various chat tools, and then there was Chat by Microsoft Teams, an integration of Microsoft’s business-focused messaging, teleconferencing and Slack-like project management software.
The problem was that Chat by Microsoft Teams was largely incompatible with both Skype (until the latter was finally discontinued in May 2025) and with the enterprise version of Microsoft Teams, which meant that tech support teams had extra work to do to ensure that the former was disabled to ensure every user knew to use the latter.
Why Is Everything Called Copilot Now?
The most recent example of a confusing, frustrating and misleading feature is the case of Microsoft Copilot, which is integrated into Microsoft Windows, the default web browser Edge, search engine Bing, Microsoft Office (with the subscription service even renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot) and as part of the developer platform Github.
This can be extremely confusing and, unlike AI chatbot ChatGPT (made by OpenAI, which Microsoft has a significant stake in), everything being known as Copilot blurs the lines between AI tools and conventional applications, something that is at least partly intentional.
A recent article by the Irish Times highlights a warning by Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella that AI will become a bubble unless it is used beyond the current core sector of major technology companies.
This is not the first speculation made about an AI bubble, which would affect Microsoft considerably, and financial expert Sebastian Mallaby wrote in the New York Times that OpenAI could run out of money over the next 18 months, amidst studies and claims that AI tools are of little benefit to many businesses.
This explains in part why so many tools were renamed in reference to Microsoft’s chatbot tool; by calling Microsoft Office’s subscription service 365 Copilot, you can claim that all of its users are suddenly now AI users, even if they avoid or even turn off these AI integrations.
What makes this worse is that in the wake of a huge number of significant errors, bugs and mandatory updates, according to Forbes, significant errors, including deleting apps, making the login window invisible, and even refusing to allow shutdowns sneak through.