Hacker News Reader

Microsoft does this with their products like SQL Server. Which is confusing and can cause name collisions . Due to their dominance it’s not hard to search for but smaller products would have that problem .

View on HN

Depending on what you're googling for, it usually provides enough context to know the phrase means the MS server.

Plus, even in colloquial language, we don't ever call a database server an SQL server. They're referred to as databases, or by their names.

In the absence of Microsoft's product, 'SQL server' may very well have become a generic term for an RDBMS instance. We cannot know.

That may be the case for other products, but in this case, they acquired the "Sybase SQL Server" product and simply renamed it "Microsoft SQL Server".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com