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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

How is Microsoft so consistently terrible at naming things? Is there an internal group who's sole job is to ensure names have conflicting meaning?

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> Is there an internal group who's sole job is to ensure names have conflicting meaning?

They must have been responsible for Skype / Skype for business, which must have been responsible for $1B of lost productivity all on its own. So many hours of “why can’t Larry join the conference call?” wasted in 15 minute increments.

I find that Microsoft has the most beautiful/poetic names for some of their products (admittedly the older ones):

Windows

Word

Paint

Excel

How do you feel about some of their more recent product names? Such as

Entra

Azure

Dynamics AX

365

… and don’t even get me started on the version names they give their OS products :D

> and don’t even get me started on the version names they give their OS products :D

Yeah, when I was growing up, Windows hit version 2000, but we've somehow regressed all the way back to 11. (The hilarity of Windows 11 being an actual regression, not only numerical, is unintentional.) Let's not forget the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Limited Numbered Signature Edition.

https://www.neowin.net/news/longest-product-name-ever-mwvuul...

I don’t feel much, honestly. Although “Office” was still one of the beautiful ones, but they decided to ditch it for 365?

I am not sure I like "Windows" as a name for an OS. :D

It makes perfect sense since the operating system is literally Window-centric. (as opposed to e.g. Mac OS which is application-centric).

I mean, sure, it is all windows, it does make sense, it just seems a bit odd. I cannot imagine an OS named "Ablakok" which is the Hungarian equivalent of "Windows". I do not think anyone would name any products as such. If your native language is not English, how does it look like in your language?

On the flip side, there are loads of names/trademarks which would sound very strange when you hear them for the first time when translated from non-English to English. Consider "Volkswagen" as "People's cart".

For example I have some sort of "anchoring" effect on some names such as Mac Pro, I still cannot accept it as a good name compared to the previous name: PowerMac. The older name is much more natural and better in my mind. Are you perhaps experiencing a similar effect with an the English trademark which has been a natural part of your vocabulary for a long time.

As for "Windows" in my native tongue, we have the same name for the digital rectangular representation on screen, so it would work. But then again, trademarks and marketing names are seldom localised.

> we have the same name for the digital rectangular representation on screen

We do use the same term as well, but it still seems odd as a name for an OS, at least to me, because it is so generic and uninteresting, but we are really in a heavily subjective territory here.

As for the rest, yeah, you may be right.

Well, it wasn't an OS from the beginning. It was a DOS application that provided ... windows. Someone just forgot to rename it to "Processes" or "Files".

Myself I found it amusing that servers had Windows (NT).

Now that you mention it those are good names

Maybe when they introduce their version of Claude’s Computer Use [1] they’ll call it “Microsoft Windows Copilot”

Not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot, which is not to be confused with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is not to be confused with Github Copilot…

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use

[2] https://copilot.microsoft.com

[3] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-micr...

[4] https://github.com/features/copilot

Yea, I wrote about this Copilot confusion here: https://tongwing.woon.sg/blog/copilot-which-one/

I'm glad we've moved from Intel Core Duo 2. It's like BMW introducing "The BMW Engine", with its next generation engine!

I think you mean the Intel® Core™2 Duo.

Even 20 years ago, Microsoft knew they had problem with its naming and marketing[0], but I guess it didn't matter.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

Not just Microsoft. I remember iPlanet directory server... which got renamed to Sun Directory Server, SUN Java System Directory Server, Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition, Java One Directory Server, Oracle Java Directory Server...

I believe Oracle called everything back to iPlanet because customers never used the new names.

What's wrong with the names? Personally, I love Microsoft 365. It just rolls off the tongue and is clearly more meaningful than a silly name like "Office." Who ever heard of an office? Why mess around with a single, familiar name when it can be long, ill-fitting, AND irrelevant all at once? I'm excited to try their next product Microsoft Copilot Professional 365 Enterprise For Workgroups (which I presume will be the name for notepad.exe in future releases).

I mean, some people say One Note is a silly name, but I like that you can look it up in the dictionary and it will tell you exactly what it is: Monotonous.

Personally I’m looking forward to the Xbox Series 365 One XS

It all goes back to Microsoft not naming the 360 "Xbox 3" with some lame excuse for why it did so. Yes, everyone would have laughed, but no one would remember or care today that the "Xbox 5" isn't actually the fifth Xbox.

Makes sense, they didn't want to have the Xbox 2 going against Playstation 3. But in the long term, yeah. Would've been better if they just came out and said "we're in the same console generation as the Playstation 3 and skipped 2 to make that clear in the name."

I thought it would go

XboX (1)

XboX 360

XboX One

XboX Three Sixty

A guess:

They want to piggybank on existing branch of X so a feature tangentially related with it gets called X or X_y. Then X or X/X_y gets canned and you don't know what's what.

Yes. Internally you’d be amazed how many names are clobbered and how hard it is to find anything.

The number of different uses of “subscription” or “container” is something that stood out to me.

marketing >> engineering

'I didnt make the laws of nature, I just follow them' - Thucydides paraphrased

We all know which company/companies are the 'best'(aka worst for society) at marketing. Microsoft is just following their lead.

If they didn't adjust, they would go extinct... (Maybe not given their walled prison)

This isn't a sufficient explanation, because a good marketing team cares about naming things well and most engineering teams are terrible at it. Letting engineering name things is how OpenAI ended up stuck with ChatGPT as a name for their flagship product.

It’s all binaries. Who cares about names?

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