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Comment by bigtones | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft have never been good at product naming. Just today they renamed 'Visual Studio Online' to 'Visual Studio Team Services' because people thought it was an online version of Visual Studio.

They need a VP of Product Names, someone that actually cares what their products are called. '.Net' for example is a stupid name because it is practically un-googleable.

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This reminds me of the early 2000s when .Net was still in development and nobody knew exactly what it was because Microsoft would never admit it was just a better Java.

When everybody was confused enough, they did the next logical thing, they peppered the .Net suffix to all their brands, that way they could tell the DoJ it was an integral part of all their products.

They quickly reverted everything when they realized what a cluster fuck they actually created. They kept the stupid name though.

Recently MS announced that the package manager they're building for Windows, until then code-named OneGet, had been christened.... PackageManagement. sigh

Imagine writing that in the console everytime... why not 'pm'? :(

I searched for ".net" (without quotes) in several search engines, some of which I have never used, and the first page is only results for Microsoft .Net.

For what it's worth, .NET was chosen at the peak of the .com boom, when Microsoft was trying to hide the fact that they were late to the party -- and COM was already taken. :)

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