>Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?
Have you seen the new Xbox names? Microsoft still loves to tack on Office on everything.
Have you seen the new Xbox names? Microsoft still loves to tack on Office on everything.
Sony: PS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5
Microsoft: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X
There just _has_ to be some monetary reason for this, it’s too insane and has gone on too long for there to not be money involved somehow. Or maybe it truly is just insanity?!
Like, everyone's argument made sense from a certain perspective, and the "common sense" ideas weren't perfect, but the compromise solutions that resulted had bigger problems. Problems which the media or public noticed more quickly than the people who had finally signed off on them internally...
My speculation for the early Xbox names would be that part of it was someone insisting that you don't want to be trying to sell Xbox 2 against PS3 - you're one behind! - and then 360 is a fun way to get a "3" in there... but then what next, you have the same problem again, 460 is nonsensical (Xbox 420 would've been fun...!), etc...
Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10
I mean that sort of goes up as a general pattern, but only generally.
* Windows 1/2/3.0/3.1/3.11/WFW3.11 - 16-bit (with 32-bit extensions as win32s), ran on DOS
* Concurrently, NT 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51 were marketed for servers instead of home users. They were fully 32 bit and separate from DOS.
* Windows 95/97/98 started naming after the year. This line eliminated DOS (from the user's perspective) and was 32-bit without the need for installing extensions.
* Concurrent with Windows 95 was NT4 which had 95's new interface based on Cairo
* At this point it was clear NT was the future for the desktop, so keeping with the year naming came Windows 2000 (which was really NT 5.0, but desktop users were by now used to year naming). But there was one more release of "old" Windows, as Millennium Edition (ME)
* The two names that dont fit are XP and Vista; these are NT 5.1 and 6.0, respectively. And now Windows 7 and 8 make more sense; we are back to the versioning we had starting with NT 3.1
* To make things more confusing, the server versions now started getting named after the year when previously that was the desktops. So we've got Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2011, and so on.
* Windows 10 is the oddball, skipping 9. I like to think someone at MS was poking fun at Apple, which skipped OS 9 to go straight to OS X, which two years later got the version 10.0. Mac OS 9 came after OS X but before OS X 10.0. I recall reading that 8.5 was originally supposed to be end of the line for classic mac os, but I don't have a source. So now there's 8.5, X 1.0, 9.0, and X 10.0, and everyone seems to think the X is a 10.
As for why they skipped 9, I believe I did hear a good reason for that one: people sometimes tested for Windows 95/98 by seeing if the version started with a 9, and they didn't want to clash with that. So this weirdness is simply an unintended side effect of their inconsistency in naming/versioning scheme.
For later versions of Windows, programmers applied other tests, but none of those tests stepped on the "does it start with 9" test for 95/98. Using 9 for the version after 8.1 would have done so.
As in, the brand-new New 3DS! New! Buy it today!
Consumers were confused.
It doesn't always work.
I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft "loses" this generation, with their confusing name losing sales from parents and non-hardcore gamers that don't know this is a new console.
Nintendo is just as bad at naming things as Microsoft. And they are very anti-gamer with all of their ludicrous attacks against fan content (most recently, their attack against the competitive melee scene)
Their attacks on fans are so nonsensical. It goes beyond copyright protection. Look at how Sega treats Sonic fans. It's night and day.
I suppose you can call the Q superfluous, and then point to BMW if you want another company that just names cars by number, but at least there's a well-understood history and progression between the 3 series and the 5 series and the 7 series, but I have no idea what makes a Q60 (big number!) a sporty coupe that used to be a G35/G37 and now the QX30 is a small SUV-like-thing, that's, I guess, the size of older G35s but that means the Q60 somehow jumped 3 places in the tens column for no apparent reason.