I disagree.
We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product.
If a reference to a product is intended, we should clarify that association some other way; i.e. MS Teams.
We shouldn't assume a basic sentence capitalised word refers to a product.
If a reference to a product is intended, we should clarify that association some other way; i.e. MS Teams.
What's happening is that lowercase "sentence case" titles have become more popular and normalized so repeated exposure to that style can cause a subconscious heuristic of "Capitalized letter signifies a Brand Name or Proper Noun". You can try to advise people not to assume that but it doesn't change the type of "sentence case" titles people are now repeatedly exposed to.
The New York Times still uses "Title Case" but a lot of other newspapers switched to lowercase sentence case. Washington Post switched in 2009. And Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, etc all followed.
Other popular websites with lowercase titles include Vox, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, etc.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m the only one.
Normally it would be ok to capitallize words to match what many other US publications use, but this capitalization introduces confusion. I can only speak for myself, but I made the assumption that this was an integration with MS Teams. This would have been avoided if the original title was kept.
"ChatGPT for Microsoft Teams", marketed under the name Copilot, has been a Microsoft Teams feature for a while. What new thing did you expect when you read this?
Title case was invented when there were much limited typographical options than now, to emphasize, well, titles. On a web page, there are so many better ways to do it, there is no reason to preserve the archaic convention.
To my eye it does not even look that nice...
I do agree that editors should read their topics critically and add disambiguating text (if possible and permitted).
When I read the headline, I was not thinking of MS Teams. Because I only use MS Teams a few rare times a year. Mainly I use Zoom.
But even if OpenAI had an article that with the rules of headline capitalization of HN ended up reading “Dall-E adds Zoom Feature” I would have imagined that it was about being able to zoom into pictures. Not automatically assumed that it had anything to do with Zoom. Even though I use Zoom almost every day.
Quite the contrary, Microsoft earns free advertisement from this. The problem is for the people that misunderstand the heading, not for Microsoft
Ok, you would understand it correctly even the Zoom example. So?
Heading should be optimized for the most possible amount of people, there is a clear possibility that a lot of people misunderstand the title, so why not simply edit it? In that case neither you nor anyone else would understand something wrong
I think people are vastly over estimating Microsoft’s ownership over ‘Teams’. Even within a tech context.
Plus, everything we’ve seen from Microsoft in their partnership with OpenAI has been Co-Pilot. Which is why I use MS Teams daily and did not make the connection.
I showed the title to five colleagues and all of them assumed it referred to Teams the product. Not to mention the overwhelming majority of people in these threads.
I for one also thought it was Microsoft Teams in the heading.
If a heading misleads even a fraction of readership, for no apparent reason (what is the benefit of having a title in Title Case?), maybe it's better that the heading is changed, no?
We shouldn’t but many of us do. As a title word, there’s ambiguity if it’s a proper noun or not given title styling. Given the context in this case (HN, OpenAI, ChatGPT) it was pretty difficult for my brain to not assume it was referring to Microsoft Teams so it baited me in, perhaps unintentionally. I’m not too upset about it because I knew that going in but none the less, a quick read of the title should make it obvious to call it “ChatGPT for Collaboration” or something of that nature.
Anything else is just wasting time.
Claiming it is a title wouldn’t win the argument either. As it is not a rule that titles must have title casing. Both (title case vs first letter capital only) are valid typography of a title in English.