Please, call a spade a spade

Given that Microsoft still has a boatload of money, market share, and deep-profit products, you have to really give them props for realizing that doesn't really mean that much to the future. Their product lineup has always been confusing, they've been pimping that awful "Windows Live" brand for years, and their branding has been a mess. Worse yet, for a long time their products were not up to standards.

You can love Microsoft products or hat em but it's hard to argue that they aren't taking on all of these issues head first. Xbox is probably the premier home entertainment product on the market, Windows Phone is actually really good now, and much of the problems with Windows from horrible security to poor performance have really been improved.

No one should underestimate how hard it is to admit your company kind of sucks, especially when you are still raking in billions. They deserve a lot of credit.

I'm kind of sad that everyone here seems to think overcomplicated names like "Windows Live Messenger" and "Microsoft Office Word" have been around forever, and we're now finally seeing Microsoft come to their senses.

As I understand it, Microsoft was the originator of simple product names. Remember Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft Mouse, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Mail? It all started to go crazy around the time the monopoly controls kicked in. Personally, I think the crazy-long names were created so that in case the government decided to split them up, the names would be the suggested guidelines. ie. "Microsoft Office xxx" is one company, "Windows xxx" is another company. Oh, "Windows xxx" is too big? Well then how about "Windows Live xxx" and "Windows not-Live yyy"? And so on.

Now that the DoJ has finally gotten off their back, they have not-so-shockingly started to go back to a sensible naming scheme.

This strikes me as terrible advice for startups.

"Microsoft" is an extremely well known brand name. Standing behind that name rather than diluting it with 10 other sub-brands makes a lot of sense.

But if Instagram called itself "Camera" or "Camera Filter" or "Social Camera" or something exceedingly simple, it would not likely have caught the same traction. The name Instragram has now come to mean something unique. The same way the word "Microsoft" is now loaded with all sorts of connotations.

I agree that forcing users into a new vocabulary doesn't make much sense, but startups need to differentiate themselves on branding. Throwing in a word like "tweet" to compliment "twitter" makes a lot of sense.

I don't know.

I really like being able to Google for a product's name and get mostly-relevant results.

It is refreshing to see this from Microsoft, but the comparison is inevitably going to be made with Apple.

And that's not a bad thing.

Mail, Contacts, Messages, iTunes, iPhoto, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. Yeah, there's a little bit of branding in there but the "spade is a spade" argument still stands.

Microsoft is making the right call here.

I very much agree with most of this post. Now, choosing names which are much less annoying than their old, tired, 1980s-esque names will not make their crappy products magically transform into good products.

But it's a start. Good choices beget good choices.

The essence of trade mark law is that similar products should have different names, so that consumers can distinguish between them. Calling a photo gallery application "Photos" is great until the next trader wants to build a photo gallery application.

I used to unknowingly use the phrase communicated in the headline of this post until someone told me it originates from the era of black slavery and thus has a racial connotation.

Quite a fleshless piece, but surprisingly easy to pick at.

> Authentically digital interfaces.

The linked aside that was meant to qualify this blander than twilight statement really doesn't qualify anything. The linked article has plenty of quite tasteful screenshots of things that bear no resemblance to the gaudy morris dance that is the metro interface. And the brief and unsatisfying technicalities only serve to highlight the confusion and uncertainty over where Microsoft wants it's developers to be investing.

What does "authentically digital" suppose to mean anyway?

> Simplified Windows 8 branding

Well this is not really a simple problem. I think pretty much 90% of the online world assumed after a while the window's logo was a flag. The wavy pixelated contrails, the "flag" screensaver, the flag-like symbols across it's products for years. To claim that it was not a meant to be a flag is understandable and perhaps quite correct, but to then make the logo look more like a flag than ever before just screams mixed metaphors. I understand the Shetland Islands are both delighted and horrified.

And the colour? Mine eyes doth protest.

I think Microsoft have been making great strides to address the stagnation that was prevalent for so long in much of their product range, but their marketing & pr is letting them down. I would love to see the billing for that design: "It's not a flag, make it look like it's not a flag", "how about this flag design?", "OK, looks cool, can you make the blue a little brighter? My kids love bright colours".