Comment by marssaxman 8 hours ago
> 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".
Oh no I just realized the next generation will be called Microsoft 365 Xbox 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.
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.
It will come with 6 GB of RAM, unless you get the Microsoft 365 Xbox X Copilot Dynamics Pro with 13 GB RAM.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
>> 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.
It's marketing but I think they want everything to seem like an integrated platform so they can sell you on creeping into bundles.
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.
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.