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It feels like the Microsoft version of "IBM Watson", where they renamed seemingly unrelated projects to Watson.

MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.

Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.

I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.

I have long suspected that Microsoft product branding and naming has more to do with their intended sales and contract structure than actually being informative with respect to what the product does.

ActiveX

Nah. DotNet.

Next name: ThinksForSure. It worked for PlaysForSure [1] so why not for this next step towards the abyss?

[1] https://grokipedia.com/page/microsoft_playsforsure#discontin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure#Critici...

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