Given that Microsoft still has a boatload of money, market share, and deep-profit products, you have to really give them props for realizing that doesn't really mean that much to the future. Their product lineup has always been confusing, they've been pimping that awful "Windows Live" brand for years, and their branding has been a mess. Worse yet, for a long time their products were not up to standards.
You can love Microsoft products or hat em but it's hard to argue that they aren't taking on all of these issues head first. Xbox is probably the premier home entertainment product on the market, Windows Phone is actually really good now, and much of the problems with Windows from horrible security to poor performance have really been improved.
No one should underestimate how hard it is to admit your company kind of sucks, especially when you are still raking in billions. They deserve a lot of credit.
I'm kind of sad that everyone here seems to think overcomplicated names like "Windows Live Messenger" and "Microsoft Office Word" have been around forever, and we're now finally seeing Microsoft come to their senses.
As I understand it, Microsoft was the originator of simple product names. Remember Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft Mouse, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Mail? It all started to go crazy around the time the monopoly controls kicked in. Personally, I think the crazy-long names were created so that in case the government decided to split them up, the names would be the suggested guidelines. ie. "Microsoft Office xxx" is one company, "Windows xxx" is another company. Oh, "Windows xxx" is too big? Well then how about "Windows Live xxx" and "Windows not-Live yyy"? And so on.
Now that the DoJ has finally gotten off their back, they have not-so-shockingly started to go back to a sensible naming scheme.
"Microsoft" is an extremely well known brand name. Standing behind that name rather than diluting it with 10 other sub-brands makes a lot of sense.
But if Instagram called itself "Camera" or "Camera Filter" or "Social Camera" or something exceedingly simple, it would not likely have caught the same traction. The name Instragram has now come to mean something unique. The same way the word "Microsoft" is now loaded with all sorts of connotations.
I agree that forcing users into a new vocabulary doesn't make much sense, but startups need to differentiate themselves on branding. Throwing in a word like "tweet" to compliment "twitter" makes a lot of sense.
Choosing ONE brand name and making it stick = good.
Choosing seven words where one would do = bad.
For instance, I just found myself browsing through a list of new Microsoft products. I found a mouse there called the "Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 Limited Edition".
That's just hilarious. Anyone can see that that's hilarious, and not effective branding.
My first laugh-out-loud experience with this was the Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch. That's exactly how the TV adverts introduced it. I couldn't keep up.
It is refreshing to see this from Microsoft, but the comparison is inevitably going to be made with Apple.
And that's not a bad thing.
Mail, Contacts, Messages, iTunes, iPhoto, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. Yeah, there's a little bit of branding in there but the "spade is a spade" argument still stands.
The essence of trade mark law is that similar products should have different names, so that consumers can distinguish between them. Calling a photo gallery application "Photos" is great until the next trader wants to build a photo gallery application.
You buy Windows. They're not re-branding Windows "OS". Once you have Windows the features in the OS don't have to keep competing for your attention as furiously.
I very much agree with most of this post. Now, choosing names which are much less annoying than their old, tired, 1980s-esque names will not make their crappy products magically transform into good products.
But it's a start. Good choices beget good choices.
I used to unknowingly use the phrase communicated in the headline of this post until someone told me it originates from the era of black slavery and thus has a racial connotation.
> The phrase predates the use of the word "spade" as an ethnic slur against African Americans, which was not recorded until 1928; however, in contemporary U.S. society, the idiom is often avoided due to potential confusion with the slur.
The phrase predates the use of the word "spade" as an ethnic slur against African Americans, which was not recorded until 1928; however, in contemporary U.S. society, the idiom is often avoided due to potential confusion with the slur.
Stephen Downes emailed me personally about that. I'm mortified. I've changed the title and have left a note, and am in the process of editing the text.
The phrase predates the racist connotation, but nonetheless, I'm more than uncomfortable with the association.
Mortification is a bit of a hyper-correction. Let's not all freak out about a situation in which 1) no racism was intended; and 2) most people probably aren't even aware of the incorrect, racist meaning (you weren't and I wasn't, either).
Why would you be mortified? Anyone offended obviously hasn't/didn't read the article. The context is evidently about calling a thing what a thing is, not racism.
You go acting so scared about it you'll do yourself more harm.
Context is what defines these scenarios. The only other horror is to be scared of is to be perceived (by idiots) as potentially racist and there is no honour in fearing that.
As the great comedian Reginald D Hunter once said: when talking about British people coming up to him and asking him if they were accidentally racist in given situation: "... was there hatred in your heart?". In this case, evidently not.
if you really want to get serious, you probably have to change the page name that your blogging software generated for you as well - cos its pretty prominently being "racist slur"-y on the browser address bar!
See how this quickly gets out of hand? i guess you'll have to delete the post, repost it with a nice clean title and then submit it to the HN firehose all nice and sanitized.
It often seems to be the case that the people who are fighting for political correctness are not actually the ones that would be potentially offended by a given phrase. The "PC police" imagine that something might be taken poorly by someone else, and they seem to enjoy foisting their views on others, deriving some sense of superiority from their "heightened sensitivity."
Why can't we follow the simple policy that if you, personally, are offended by something, you speak up. Otherwise, you keep your mouth shut.
Let's call a spade a spade: some people just like to grant themselves the authority to tell people what to do.
Quite a fleshless piece, but surprisingly easy to pick at.
> Authentically digital interfaces.
The linked aside that was meant to qualify this blander than twilight statement really doesn't qualify anything. The linked article has plenty of quite tasteful screenshots of things that bear no resemblance to the gaudy morris dance that is the metro interface. And the brief and unsatisfying technicalities only serve to highlight the confusion and uncertainty over where Microsoft wants it's developers to be investing.
What does "authentically digital" suppose to mean anyway?
> Simplified Windows 8 branding
Well this is not really a simple problem. I think pretty much 90% of the online world assumed after a while the window's logo was a flag. The wavy pixelated contrails, the "flag" screensaver, the flag-like symbols across it's products for years. To claim that it was not a meant to be a flag is understandable and perhaps quite correct, but to then make the logo look more like a flag than ever before just screams mixed metaphors. I understand the Shetland Islands are both delighted and horrified.
And the colour? Mine eyes doth protest.
I think Microsoft have been making great strides to address the stagnation that was prevalent for so long in much of their product range, but their marketing & pr is letting them down. I would love to see the billing for that design: "It's not a flag, make it look like it's not a flag", "how about this flag design?", "OK, looks cool, can you make the blue a little brighter? My kids love bright colours".
You can love Microsoft products or hat em but it's hard to argue that they aren't taking on all of these issues head first. Xbox is probably the premier home entertainment product on the market, Windows Phone is actually really good now, and much of the problems with Windows from horrible security to poor performance have really been improved.
No one should underestimate how hard it is to admit your company kind of sucks, especially when you are still raking in billions. They deserve a lot of credit.