It was supposed to be a third-party replacement, sure, but certainly not an official one. It started as a student project. It's just the prefix that tricks your brain to associate it with MS's own .NET branded applications.

▲

saghm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

To be fair, the .NET brand is already super convoluted (there's .NET framework, the .NET core, .NET runtime, the .NET desktop runtime, the .NET sdk, and I'm genuinely not even sure which if any of these might refer to the same thing), on top of it weirdly sounding like something internet related to a casual user.

▲

Sharlin 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, "Copilot" is not the first brand that MS has tried to stick to everything while being just as confused about it as (inevitably) the consumers. Although somehow they did manage to keep .NET mostly aimed at developers - besides the actual frameworks there's Visual Studio .NET and other dev tools, but I'm actually a bit surprised that they never had "Office .NET" or "Outlook .NET" or even "Windows .NET Edition" or something like that. Maybe they still had some sane people in charge of marketing and brand management back then.

	▲	xp84 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They did brand the Microsoft accounts themselves, from “Passport” to “.NET Passport” for a while. That was before they were “Windows Live IDs.”