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Comment by relaxatorium | Hacker News Reader

It's a very Microsoft move to drop the word which is what the product is and keep the word which is a UX element the product does not have.

I get it as a pure branding exercise if you just think about what Microsoft brands have equity and history, but it still strikes me as funny in terms of what the words actually mean.

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It also reflects a key problem in Microsoft's culture. They see themselves as a Windows company, not a software/services company, even still, despite Nadella's proclamation (which wasn't sufficiently different from Ballmer's when he took over). They have fallen into the trap where they see everything only as an opportunity to push the Windows brand, instead of products. They fail to see that the primary purpose for a company is to make money, NOT to simply chain the company to a specific product or brand. They're always looking for ways to shoehorn "Windows" (where the definition of that varies from the OS product to just the brand name) into new products, which leads them to make bad products the market doesn't want. Even Nadella demonstrates this by insisting everything must run on the same Windows kernel. XBox consumer don't care, even the slightest, about the OS kernel in the unit. Nor do smartphone purchasers. Nor, fundamentally, do most computer users. All they care about is what can they DO with the product. Will it play my games/run my apps/run my programs? will there be a constant stream of fresh new content and experiences for it? If the answer is no, there is no amount of "Windows" they can add to save it. The XBox brand grew from nothing, with no visible link to Windows in its first form (although yes, it was based on Win2k) and the 360 was a completely unique OS, and was a huge success (aside from the hardware failure issues). This alone should have been proof that Microsoft doesn't need everything to be Windows, but no, they simply planned on how to make the XBox One into a Windows box.

Windows (and DOS) built Microsoft, but Windows will also kill Microsoft if they don't start looking at products instead of "Windows" of opportunity.

I'm not sure I follow where this fits in here: "Windows" replaced "Windows Phone" in this example, and "Lumia" replaced "Nokia Lumia".

I don't see this as representing a continued use of the "Windows" brand in other contexts. We're not talking about Windows Live, Windows x, etc. In fact they seem to be moving away from Windows in non-OS stuff. There's Bing/MSN/Xbox for Search/Info/Entertainment, (they recently announced a relaunch of the MSN brand for instnace).

Well, first off, I never claimed they named everything Windows.

Second, As I clearly stated, I was using "Windows" in everything from the product itself to just the brand. Windows Phone is not a window oriented OS, so there we have MS tying their flagship brand to something that has nothing to do with windows. Then, as I mentioned, is the need to shove the Windows kernel into the XBox one, when the 360 demonstrated a small, lightweight, custom built OS is far superior for a gaming platform.

Then we have the concept "We're going to unify PC Windows, Windows Phone, and XBox to the same kernel" which is not smart, because while the OS X BSD-based kernel is portable and extensible (and widely used in low memory devices world wide for ages), the Windows kernel was PC oriented from the go, and became less portable over time (killed Alpha support, killed MIPS support, was originally written for the N-Ten platform, the i860, another RISC architecture). They have done this for ages, with Windows CE and Windows Embedded. They ignore the question of "what is right for this niche" and just shove Windows in there somehow. Windows CE was mostly the Windows UI, regardless of the use case, and Windows Embedded is a range from a slimmed down Windows to what used to be Windows CE (meaning once again, calling it Windows has little real value, since you then need to determine what type of Windows you're dealing with).

The Bing rebranding was because Windows Live Search was always a horrible name, and they wanted something short and memorable that could be verbed, like Google or Xerox. Windows Live for Games is dead because no one wanted to use it. Windows Live Mail never caught on, it was always less memorable than Hotmail or Outlook. Windows Live Essentials is now Windows Essentials.

Then there's Windows Azure. Rather than coming up with a product brand for their cloud computing, they called it Windows and added a color. Granted, they've recently officially dropped Windows from the name, but it's still deeply entrenched, and commonly used even by MS still.

My point stands quite well. They have too strong a focus on "Windows" as a thing that needs to be everywhere, and fail to see the value in their company brand, and in unique products.

As a pure branding exercise it seems like an insane, sycophantic, shortsighted move.

Having all your products share exactly the same brand accomplishes two things: Customers get confused, and any one of your products has the ability to do serious harm to the reputation of all of your products.

> Having all your products share exactly the same brand accomplishes two things

Except they're not. "Windows" is the OS, "Lumia" is the phone.

I see it as unifying it under a common name. Windows from phone to PC to server, it's familiar. Hence why no more "Windows RT". It's all Windows. The only difference is in the server line, it's "Windows Server 2012", but that's a different market.

Or you can benefit from confused consumers' perceived value by identifying with the established product.

ie: Outlook, Pentium, Godzilla

So, now it'll be even easier to confuse Windows (the desktop OS) with Windows (the touch-based OS) even though, in theory, they have nothing to do with one another?

Apple has two different names (OS X and iOS) despite similar APIs and no one seems to have any trouble differentiating those. Maybe Microsoft could at least steal that idea.

The vast majority of users will not have to worry about the distinction between versions. They will be using what they perceive as Windows. When they pick up a tablet running Windows it will be Windows and when they sit at their desktop or laptop they will be using Windows and when they pick up their phone it will be Windows. Add in the universal apps and you have even less confusions when a user can move from Desktop/Laptop to Tablet to Phone to XBOX and use the same app.

So, basically, the theory that they have nothing to do with one another is not looking at the entire ecosystem.

Well - apart from the fact that Windows 9 is rumored to have the old UI for desktop PCs and the new tiled UI and app store for devices.

Users will never be able to move from trad PC to tablet to phone to Xbox. The hardware ecosystems, UI models and user requirements are just too different. IMO it's nonsensical to pretend otherwise.

The Apple approach of creating fundamentally different operating systems with significant convergence and overlap while also simplifying interaction and data exchange looks like a much more intelligent solution.

I hate to tell you this, but desktop Windows has been looking pretty Metro recently and MS is pushing touch screens into laptops. And Windows Phone shares code with Windows.

I love (some) MS products, but Microsoft marketing is the worst I've seen.

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