Not trying to be snarky, but its good to have a unique, memorable name. Personally, GNOME just calling their text editor "Text Editor" is annoying, since I have more than one text editor installed.
For example, my KDE application menu refers to applications using these generic description ("Web Browser" instead of Firefox, "Music Player" instead of Spotify).
- Excel, says absolutely nothing about what the product does.
- PowerPoint is only tangentially related to what the product does.
- Internet Explorer vs. Windows Explorer confuses many users.
To avoid singling out just Microsoft, look at Apple:
- Numbers basically depends upon people associating spreadsheets with any form of quantitative analysis.
- Keynote is only tangentially related to what the product does.
- Safari says absolutely nothing about what the program does.
Contrast that to the brilliantly named GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is clearly a program for enhancing photographs of gnu's! Okay, maybe it's not so brilliant. Yet it does demonstrate that naming is hard even when the name states what the program is.