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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active".

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To further your argument, look at the XBOX. It is impossible to tell which is the latest model by name alone. Where the playstation is simple, the latest is the 5, the previous was the 4, and the one before that was the 3.

Oh no I just realized the next generation will be called Microsoft 365 Xbox Copilot

There will be an integrated voice LLM that hallucinates advice and "useful" tips as you play and cannot be turned off

You jest.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/gaming-copilot

Sigh… Irony truly is dead.

"All you have to do is follow the damn train, user"

Microsoft 365 Xbox X Copilot S

It will come with 6 GB of RAM, unless you get the Microsoft 365 Xbox X Copilot Dynamics Pro with 13 GB RAM.

It's over 19 years old, but this video is a brutal but hilarious commentary on Microsoft's inherent dysfunction when it comes to product naming and packaging. Still on point decades later.

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

They'll make cheating bots a first party feature just to sell Copilot.

ROG Ally X vs. ROG Xbox Ally X.

Also, it is possibly the worst console name of all time.

I don't even know what Xbox is now, is it a service, is it a console, I'm not even joking really.

Also visual studio code Vs full fat visual studio. Thanks Microsoft you just made it more difficult to web search both products.

Full fat .Net Vs dotnet core Vs standard or is that .net.

There was also Visual Studio, the Mac app that got renamed and wasn’t the same as Visual Studio, the windows app

To be fair, only Sony follows a consistent naming convention. Nintendo's console names also defy any logic, as did Sega back in the day.

In terms of naming, no other entity in computing will ever be able to surpass IBM solipsistic naming habits:

System 360 OS/2 DB 2 MQ series. PC

It is like IBM just refused to entertain the idea of having competitors, why should it them name a database by any other name than DB?

That is exactly what IBM thought too when they allowed Bill Gates to license the new OS they were supposed to be making for IBM. They had no competition, who are these kids going to sell their OS to?

Nintendo's strategy isn't the absolute worst. They mostly just give new names to new console designs, with modifiers to specify next-gen-without-major-changes. So the SNES was a next-gen NES, the N64 was its own thing, the GameCube was its own thing, the Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advanced were iterations on the same thing, DS, DSi, 3DS were all generation steps. WiiU was a next-gen Wii, Switch 2 is a next-gen Switch.

They probably should have called the WiiU the Super Wii or Wii 2 or something, but on the whole they've got a mostly coherent naming convention.

I would put the would put the wii firmly in the gamecube family line. it's a uprated gamecube with a weird controller.

    nes:snes = 6502
    n64 = mips
    gamecube:wii:wiiu = powerpc
    switch:switch2 = arm

Yes, the Wii is essentially an overclocked GameCube with a bit more RAM and as you mentioned, a weird controller.

As a regular human who plays games and doesn't know about chip architectures, one woud probably lump the wii and the switch closer together than the game cube based on the modes in which one can interact with the systems.

Wii is a game cube with a funny controller. Or, wii is a tv-only olde switch.

I appreciate that it has its own name due to being a transitional experience.

I don’t think Nintendo’s scheme was ever that great as it blurred the difference between variant form factors (Game Boy Pocket vs Game Boy, Game Boy Micro/SP vs Game Boy Advance, DS Lite, 2/3DS XL, Wii Mini), pro models with limited exclusives (Game Boy Color, DSi, New 2/3DS), and full on new generations (Game Boy Advance, 3DS, Wii U).

Sony's naming style for its mobile phone series is also terrible.

You are forgetting Valve!

We got the Steam Controller and the new... Steam Controller.

We also got the Steam machine, as well as the new Steam machine.

Lol

The Xbox One.

"Oh you mean the original one?"

No the one that came after the 360.

"The third one?"

No that was the second one, the One was the third.

"OK what are they on now?"

The Series series.

"The Series series?"

Yeah the X and S. Don't confuse that with the Xbox One X or S, or the 360 S.

"Right but what's the difference?"

The X is better than the S because X is a bigger letter. But they run the same games, but they're different. They're the same though.

Nailed the "Who's on first?" vibe.

Oh and your Xbox Controller S won't work with your Xbox One S but it will work with your original Xbox.

Some musings from someone who has not worked in microsoft but has in big tech.

This often happens because the people inside are incentivized to build their own empire.

If someone comes and wants to get promoted/become an exec, there's a ceiling if they work under the an existing umberlla + dealing the politics of introducing a feature which requires dealing with an existing org.

So they build something new. And the next person does the same. And so you have 365, One, Live, .Net, etc

Google Plus was the same. Lots of unrelated google products were temporarily branded as part of google plus for some reason, including your google account and google hangouts (meet).

That was a very intentional strategy. In hindsight, not a good one, of course, but Plus and its integration across the whole company was blessed by Page and Brin, who were quietly panicking that Facebook could eat Google's lunch by becoming the "start page of the Internet" the moment they integrated search. Which they never did and never appear to have wanted.

The Dev Tools division had Quick- prefix for some tools before settling on Visual- once VB took off.

Then there's DirectX and its subs - though Direct3D had more room for expanded feature set compared to DXSound or DXInput so now they're up to D3D v12.

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." -Steve Jobs

Do your teams use the teams feature in Teams?

There’s got to be solid reasons why they do this and have done so for so damn long. At the very least institutional reasons. At best, actual research that suggests they make more money this way. But as a consumer, I hate it.

Marketing has too much power. They get some hairbrained scheme to goose the numbers and just slam a mandate all the way down the org. Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion.

It's marketing but I think they want everything to seem like an integrated platform so they can sell you on creeping into bundles.

>> Is "Copilot" not getting enough clicks? Make every button say "copilot", problem solved. Marketing doesn't know or care what was there before, someone needs numbers up to get their promotion.

So Microsoft isn't bringing copilot to all these applications? It's just bringing a copilot label to them? So glad I don't use this garbage at home.

Yes and no, because "Copilot" isn't any single thing, but can mean whatever they want it to mean in different contexts.

Perhaps the "consistent" naming helps them shove more through the Enterprise door.

If a large company has bought into "Co-Pilot", they want it all right? Or not, but let's not make carving anything out easy.

Just a thought.

This is actually one of their smart decisions. "Copilot" is currently going through the corporate regulators, who know nothing about technology, but I can't buy it until they say everything is Legal.

So once we have signoff then my counterpart in Sharepoint/M365 land gets his "Copilot" for Office, while my reporting and analytics group gets "Copilot" for Power BI, while my coding team gets "Copilot" for llm assisted development in GitHub.

In the meantime everybody just plugs everything into ChatGPT and everybody pretends it isn't happening. It's not unlawful if they lawyers can't see it!

Thanks for validating my intuition!

> In the meantime everybody just plugs everything into ChatGPT

I believe you meant "everyone plugs everything into ChatGPT for Co-Pilot"! A statement with its own useful ambiguities.

It is comical, but I can now make a serious addition to Sun Tzu's maxims.

“All warfare is based on deception.”

“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

"Approval is best co-opted with a polysemous brand envelope."

It's because Microsoft isn't a software company. They're a marketing company that happens to make software and a few other bits.

We're now on the back end of that, where Microsoft must again make products with independent substance, but are instead drowning in their own infrastructural muck.

NT..? Good comment made me laugh.

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