List of Fictional Microsoft Companies | Hacker News Reader

List of Fictional Microsoft Companies

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188 pointstapoxi51 comments

My favorite stupid Google April Fools joke was when they put out a "customer" blog post bragging that Contoso had switched to Google Apps.

https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/contoso-has-gone-google...

>Since moving to Gmail, HR violations and after-hours sharing of Rebecca Black videos have gone down by 76 percent

>2011

Wait, Rebecca Black was that long ago? Feels like yesterday.

You should listen to some of the stuff she's done recently ... it's not bad (compared to other recent pop music).

Twenty years ago I contributed a chapter to a book on SQL Server and slipped in a subtle fart joke. Instead of using the then Microsoft standard sample company called “Northwind”, my example had “Southwind”.

EDITED to add link to Google Books link.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Microsoft_SQL_Server_7_...

Reminds me of this clothing brand that got lawyered into the ground by The North Face: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_South_Butt

Totally random, but apparently a rough translation of the name of the tribe that the state Kansas was named after is "People of the South Wind". I first learned about this from the song by the band Kansas of this name[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_South_Wind

I do find this mildly interesting and can see how it's interesting enough to make the HN front page.

But how is this 'culturally relevant' enough to make a Wikipedia page? That's an "I'm amused" question rather than an "I'm flabbergasted" question.

Seems like you answered your own question.

Can you explain? Just because the HN crowd finds something interesting, that doesn't automatically qualify it for a wikipedia page.

Wikipedia’s bar for culturally relevant is wildly inconsistent. In this case, though, there are tons of external references to these names so it’s easy to establish “relevance” as guidelines dictate.

There's almost certainly a large enough number of people googling "Contoso" to merit a wikipedia page on its own. Sort of a microsoft-specific (active directory training material, etc) version of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com

The page shows up as the top entry if you Google "Contoso". The second is Microsoft's own explanation of what Contoso is. I think that's the perfect explanation if you're trying to figure out what "Contoso" is in all of the random .NET and MS related examples are.

Per the flag at the top of the Wikipedia page, somebody agrees with you:

> The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. (July 2018)

As a relative outsider to the editing process who nonetheless reads a lot of Wikipedia, "notability" seems to be unevenly judged across domains.

You can search for the companies online and find interesting things, like this enterprise database schema for AdventureWorks Cycles: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=438...

Let's not forget Steve Ballmer as head of Virtucon Industries, with Bill Gates as an honorary Austin Powers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI_xuFA18m4

This is a fantastic resource of fictional companies for any modern day or near-future RPG campaign. I'm currently running Shadowrun, and can always use new corporations.

Shadowrun (videogames) is also trademarked by Microsoft. Does adding one of their fictional companies make it some twisted form of recursion? :)

I could have sworn there was a "Nile Bookstore" back in the early days of .NET (2002 - 2004).

That would be about the time this store started.

https://www.thenile.co.nz/

What if I told you there was a major online bookstore circa 2002 that was also named after a humongous river[1]?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River

That was the joke -- that and they are in the same city and some of the engineers at MSFT have beers with the AMZN engineers.

Of course! I totally got the joke right away! Might I say, I'm totally in the Nile!

Does anyone know the origin of the name "Contoso"? I bet Raymond Chen does!

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/jhoward/2005/01/27/conto...

"at the event we needed 2 companies, so someone in the product team came up with Contoso and Fabrikham, and in the BizApps events, all the integration scenarios where around these 2 companies doing business with each other. i have no idea where the names come from – i guess its like with setting up your own off-the-shelf Limited company, someone comes up with mixes of word & names. Fabrikham is a horrible name! Contoso is better, bu only just"

Duwamish Books

Also there was a pet-supplies store in there somewhere. Back when MSDN published as newsletter as a sort of newspaper-sized thing.

The Duwamish companies were used in extended examples of client-server business automation with Microsoft Office and their server products combination of SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, Message Queues; packaged as "Microsoft BackOffice" (egads).

Egads? It's a standard term, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_office

I had a similar reaction when in a business meeting and one of the company reps said he was "Opening the Kimono".

A term of art in the business world today; I moved to scientific research computing in 2000 and had not gotten the memo about open kimonos.

Egads.

This is surprising to me too, in that what I know about "kimonos" is that they are women's clothing underneath which no underwear is worn.

What's the term supposed to refer to?

It’s a metaphor for showing someone things that are typically kept hidden.

Sure, but in that case... why not "lifting up the skirt"?

That characterization would be too graphic for many corporate environments.

I had a former boss (a couple decades ago) that was also fond of the "open the kimono" saying. Ugh. WTF is wrong with saying "full openness" or "full disclosure" or something else that sounds appropriately business-like.

"Baring it all" would be a native idiom preserving even the emphatic nudity reference while not suggesting that you're taking off some other woman's clothes.

One of the things I adore about Wikipedia is the fact that someone made this list, and then other people decided to contribute to it.

Only two I've ever run into are contoso and fabrikam

I hear Fabrikam sells some wonderful shirts.[0]

[0] https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/commerce/overview/

If you search for these example domains in the network traffic logs of any largr company you'll see at least a few hits. This is a security issue because people use example code, copy pasted into prod code which mostly does nothing due to the domains not resolving or not hosting the appropriate content but if an attacker took over these domains they will expose a ton of companies to an attack.

I believe example.com or example.org exist specifically for this purpose. I hope those of you who write documentation keep this in mind,especially when your example domain has never beeb registered.

There is someone driving around Redmond with a CONTOSO license plate. I've seen it several times - too bad FABRIKAM is too long for Washington state plates.

https://twitter.com/schumatt/status/1159634050602033152

Something similiar: Much of the late 90's and early 2000's Microsoft Official Curriculum training courses used the names of real Microsoft employees in examples (along with these fictional company names). I wish I could recall some of the names right now. I remember searching for some of the names and being shocked and amused to discover they were real Microsoft employees.

I was surprised not to see Spencer Ceramics listed. They were featured prominently in MS Word for DOS manuals.

Add it! That’s the beauty of Wikipedia.

"A Datum Corporation" reminded me of Traf-O-data [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data

"A Datum Corporation" may be a nod to ADAT[1].

Someone in Microsoft makes music.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT

In company collateral we used to say, "Send an email to anyone@microsoft.com" I think that it's a real email address and is still active! LOL

Probably worth noting that some of them are not fictional companies, and Microsoft indeed registered them as legal entities!

Whenever I need to mock-up data about a list of people I use the family from Bob's Burgers

On a more serious note, you might want to consider using faker.js [1], alternatively bogus [2] if you are on the .NET stack.

[1] https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/

[2] https://github.com/bchavez/Bogus

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The best one is the kind, progressive, open Microsoft.

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