Char said:
Not really anything new regarding Microsoft's penchant to badly name
their products or services.
Directories became folders supposedly to avoid confusion with domain
directories.
Internet Mail & News (IMN) was renamed to Outlook Express despite that
it was unrelated to the Outlook product. Tons of users thought they
were using a light version of Outlook. And, of course, Outlook can't be
named Outlook when used on a Mac but instead gets renamed to Entourage.
After a makeover, COM/OLE got rebranded to ActiveX.
Products include characters that are usually dropped or ignored by
online search engines, like .Net instead of MSNet. At least a search of
MSNet might find articles relevant to it but .Net searches on Net which
means you're all over the place regarding topics. "Net Framework" works
better but few actually discuss .Net with the Framework name added.
We have a file and desktop manager called [Windows] Explorer confused
with a web browser called Internet Explorer. You can web browse using
either and file browse using either by using the address bar in either.
Office went from version numbers to year number versioning with a
one-time excursion into letter versioning and then back to year number
versioning. Users often didn't know what version they had with Office
XP where each component was actually the 2002 year number version.
Windows, the NT (New Technology) product, starts with version numbers
3.5, and up, to show they follow after the Windows (9x/DOS line) of
3.11. Then the 9x/DOS line starts using year numbers for versions (95,
98) and changes to letters (ME = Millenium Edition). The NT line, while
still having underlying version numbers, also goes to year number
versioning but Microsoft decides to put names on major versions, like XP
and Vista, and then goes back to version numbers, like 7 and 8.
Microsoft also decides to slice up functionality with each version to
gives us editions of each version, like Home, Home Premium,
Professional, Ultimate, Business, Enterprise, Starter, Workstation, and
Server (Enterprise Edition to Advanced Server and back to Enterprise
Edition).
Microsoft introduces a boob's OS interface (desktop manager) with some
dumbed-down apps called Bob but no one knew what it was and those that
did had no want of it. They emulated IBM's advertising of OS/2 Warp
that never identified what the ad was selling (similar to some pretty
stupid jeans and parfume commercials).
VSS: Is it Virtual SourceSafe or Volume Shadow [Copy] Service?
Windows Genuine Advantage. Microsoft's means to track licensing in a
very slip-shod manner. A bad joke trying to emulate seat licensing.
Installs that are valid become invalid. An advantage to whom? Not to
the user, for sure.
PlaysForSure, a logo certification program for services and devices that
employed Windows Media DRM. PlaysForSure tracks often failed to play on
the certified devices, wouldn't play in other devices or players, and
didn't even play in Microsoft's own music player. A more accurate
product name would've been MusicCripple&FailDRM.
Messenger. Would that be Windows Messenger (an NT service for opening
popup messages to intranet hosts), the old MSN Messenger chat client, or
Live Messenger renamed to Windows Live Messenger?
SiteServer became OfficeServer and then SharePoint. Anyone even
remember Groove?
