What is the real difference between Office 365 and Microsoft 365?

Indeed what is the real difference between Office 365 and Microsoft 365? It appears these words or these two terms are remarkably used interchangeably.

Even IT professionals make such simple mistake taking one for the other.

However, here at Lensesview, we want to tell you that the mistake is not far fetched neither does it come from a complicated origin.

The mistake clearly comes from not understanding the product because the difference is very easy to define.

Apparently, the earlier is an older product initially released in 2011 while the latter introduced in 2017 is newer and encompass the other.

4 months after its release, (a superset of office 365), in November 2017 after negotiating with IS of South Africa I jumped my organization into the new services.

I was initially on Hosted Exchange embracing Exchange Online. So I might say if not the first I was the earliest subscriber to Microsoft 365 in Zambia.

But anyway for a more intuitive clarity here we are:

The differences between Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

Office 365: This is a cloud services platform that offers familiar Microsoft products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive (along with other productivity services) either online or on-premises via a subscription plan.

An example is the IT setting up an Exchange Server on-premises after purchasing volume licenses of Exchange Server and or managing subscriptions of Microsoft Office 2016 or 2019.

Microsoft 365: This is it. The all-in-one bundle includes the Office 365 suite, Windows 10 Pro, and Enterprise Mobility+Security for a complete, interconnected experience.

An example is the IT subscription to Exchange Online that is a complete configured computing power managed by Microsoft in the Azure Cloud or AWS.

More information about cloud computing is from this article What Is Azure Compute?