Except that "Surface" started out as a table, which is now called "PixelSense". Oh, except they've also now started to use "PixelSense" for their Surface Book displays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9767/microsoft-surface-book-20...

Oh, how I would have loved to have been in the meeting where it was decided that the ideal name for a new, thin, light tablet device was the name previously used for a giant, immovable table.

> Microsoft is the worst at naming things.

My favourite example has to be Groove.

Groove Music [1] (formerly known as Xbox Music, Zune Music and Microsoft Groove), Groove Music Maker [2] (an unreleased Windows 10 app), Office Groove [3] (a.k.a. SharePoint Workspace) or Groove (now known as OneDrive for Business - the service formerly known as SkyDrive Pro) [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Music

[2] https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/107963/creators-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SharePoint_Workspace

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneDrive#OneDrive_for_Business

I'll do you one better. Before all of that, Groove was a workgroup product, started by the famous Ray Ozzie, which was acqui-hired by Microsoft, and then spiked. It was brilliant. There's been nothing like it since. (Except maaaybe Slack.)

> Sometimes they do a good job: > * XBox

Oh, do you mean Xbox 1 or Xbox One?

That's a good point. They kinda did the same thing with One -- OneDrive, OneNote, and XBox One.

They bought the company that made OneNote, so I believe it was already a product called OneNote.

Not according to Microsoft:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/chris_pratley/2004/01/30/on...

To be fair the first Xbox was never called the "Xbox 1", it was just called the Xbox.

...walk away backwards? Why not 180 degrees?

That's the joke, and why it's still quoted.

On Reddit, maybe...

You moonwalk away

Don't turn your back on it, apparently

It's always watching....

Because the PS3 was coming out and they didn't want an Xbox 2 to compete with an PS3.

Always reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiCF1QdyxhM

you walk into it

Never gets old

It was old the day it was memed.

I get that his comment didn't include any reference to machine learning or industry disruption, but did it need to be flagged into oblivion? seems like overkill. Just delete the whole subtree if it's offending people, keeping the sub-comments doesn't make any sense.

Also the pervasive "Active" brand (late 90's) that was largely shelved with the exception of Active Directory which remains (and is now ascendant).

Examples:

* Active Server Pages

* ActiveScript

* ActiveX

Active Desktop! Didn't you just love that thing? ~

Kind of. KDE seems to be about the only place where that kind of functionality lives on.

Was an amazing demo, but a security nightmare. Shudder.

And ActiveMovie, which became DirectShow. (which I only remember since Apple lampooned it by internally naming a window used by QuickTime "InactiveMovie")

Also ActiveSync.

Program Files

Deleted Items

Sent Items

They are bad at naming EVERYTHING, not just products.

I still would like to meet the person that put the extraneous words "Files" and "Items" in these strings. It's so core and so, so dumb.

Well, it had one good effect. It forced developers like me to start thinking about spaces in path and file names.

«Edge» was a terrible name, because in Microsoft-world it already had a different technical meaning in the context of:

  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">

(which has now become unnecessarily misleading).

I think this is why it was chosen in the first place.

Microsoft hired that guy, Andrew Kim, the designer who did the rebrand (if you don't know what I'm talking about: http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-micro...), but he's only in the Xbox division.

My opinion: they need to make him branding dictator for a month.

I think the name Visual Studio for Mac is another bad decision like all the rest. They say it's using a lot of code from Visual Studio, but to me that seems like an implementation detail and I don't care. In fact, if it feels like Visual Studio, then they've failed. It should feel like a Mac application.

My first choice would have been to stick with Xamarin Studio. On the other hand, this sounds like a significantly new product, and so if it deserves a new name I would have seized the opportunity to launch something new that's going to get developers attention. Visual Studio for Mac does the opposite. It makes me feel like I know what it is and I'm not that intrigued.

I also would have called Visual Studio Code something else. It's almost like they don't want attention from developers.

I now refer to Visual Studio Code as "vsCode" since it seems to be obvious what it is if you know about it.

I have to say Metro was one of the coolest names they picked and Bing is by far the worst.

For being one syllable, Bing sure is a physically difficult word to pronounce. You have to do weird things with your mouth. Also it means nothing. It has no meaning

I like Bing. Simple, distinctive, not overloaded or misleading or overlapping. Very googleable (ironic I know).

I know it's completely subjective and silly on my part. Just can't get past it.

I don't know if it's true, but I was told once that bing means disease in Mandarin.

> I don't know if it's true, but I was told once that bing means disease in Mandarin.

Sort of but not really. It depends on the intonation and even with the right intonation (bing4 / bìng), the sound maps to several other possible words aside from "disease".

Bing means a pile of rubbish in Scotland.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bing

I'm pretty sad about this. Most companies let the product orgs own naming after a legal check, but we let Marketing. They're supposed to do market research on names? You would not believe the hurdle that naming causes and how many empty cycles get spent on just coming up with a name. It feels like a battle of attrition.

There's also Visual Studio Online, some sort of cloud CI thing.

Even their most successful products have generic and/or confusing names, like windows and word.