Hey Cortana, It’s Time for You to Go (Premium)

This week Microsoft provided our first peek at the future of Cortana. And only one thing is clear: This brand needs to die. It’s just pointless.

And please don’t misunderstand. This isn’t like the situation with the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), where Microsoft privately communicated its intentions with the press at Build 2019 and then I just reported what it said. This one is just my opinion. In public, Microsoft has continued to claim that Cortana---as a brand, a technology, or a feature---really does have a future.

And it does, actually. But as a back-end service, not a brand. The problem here is that mainstream users not only have never heard of Cortana, they shouldn’t need to know about it at all. And as with Google, what Microsoft should be doing is making its own name, Microsoft, the wake phrase for its conversational AI capabilities. And the reasons for this are obvious: This wake phrase will be used across multiple endpoints, and unlike with Cortana, all Microsoft customers already know the word Microsoft. No training is needed.

So when you’re using Windows 10 and want to interact with the new Cortana app, what you should be doing is saying, “Hey Microsoft” and then interact with the conversational interaction features in Windows 10. When you’re saying “Hey Cortana” to Outlook Mobile to play your emails, you should just be saying “Hey Microsoft.” And when you’re configuring a briefing emailing in Outlook Mobile, neither Cortana nor Microsoft needs to come into play: This email is a feature of the app, plain and simple. Why muddle it with a brand?

And this was a long time coming.

Microsoft started down this inevitable path in early 2019, when CEO Satya Nadella signaled defeat when he said that he decided that Cortana should be a back-end service, a “valuable skill” that individuals could summon implicitly by using a popular assistant like Amazon Alexa. The next step was removing Cortana as a standalone app on Android, iOS, and Xbox One. That it remains on Windows 10 is not just inconsistent, it’s goofy. All we really need is a microphone icon in the taskbar. This thing doesn’t need a brand. It’s just part of Windows.

In other words, everything that users see that is still called Cortana needs to be rebranded or de-branded. Cortana can remain as a back-end service, since that’s all it really is now. But as a brand, this thing is dead; even Skype has better brand recognition.

And Microsoft should do the respectful thing and just admit that and move on.

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