Dark times are still happening. Right now they're renaming everything Azure regardless of whether it's part of their cloud offerings.

Also, Live was another Microsoft naming phase.

For me, the canary in the coal mine of ms naming is their messenger. Msn messenger, live messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Teams... I assume the next iteration will be named Azure Teams.

Followed by Azure Teams for Office 365.

The messenger naming example is also apropos because each successive generation of bad naming is also a generation of product that is measurably worse in some way. It goes to demonstrate the durability of software canaries!

I give you msn and live messenger.

All the other ones are literally different products each. I expect different products to have different names.

Why there were so many messenger products is a different question. Anyone from Google wanna jump in and explain this one? ;)

My best guess is Skype was much more profitable than MSN. But Microsoft took the best features of Skype and removed them and the quality got diminished probably in order to monkeypatch Lync into Skype as well as MSN at the time.

After like 2013 I never used Skype again. Now everyone I know either uses Discord or Slack. Teams was at least the right direction for business focus but it seems they shoulda QAd it much more. I dont hear much positive about Teams.

Skype had its guts ripped out and replaced with MSN shortly after the purchase.

> Msn messenger, live messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Teams... I assume the next iteration will be named Azure Teams.

We have a similar issue in education. First it was MSDN-AA, then DreamSpark, then briefly Microsoft Imagine. Now it's called Microsoft Azure Dev Tools for Teaching.

That last names awful. I remember DreamSpark. I liked the name DreamSpark the most. Azure DreamSpark wouldnt sound as awful.

Microsoft's email services are still a naming mess. Live, Outlook and Hotmail all seem to be interconnected, and I don't really know what differentiates them anymore.

Hotmail is the spammy one.

Live is the one for gaming.

Outlook is the business one.

Except outlook is the app you install on android or iOS to access your Outlook.com personal email, which is really hotmail, but not to be confused with outlook web access, which is the web interface to exchange’s mail. There’s also the outlook that’s part of office 365 for windows, which is “the business one”, except it is also in the office 365 personal edition, which you are not allowed to use for business, and that outlook is a completely different app from the outlook in office 365 for mac.

But the mail client on windows is not outlook, that’s just windows mail.

The Windows mail client was called Windows Live Mail for a while, and the mail service was called Windows Live Hotmail. The gaming platform, video editor and photo viewer were also all inexplicably Windows Live.

It surprises me that they didn't release 'Windows Live Office' in that era.

I thought Hotmail and Live were dead, replaced by Outlook.com?

Here's the fun part: if I type in Hotmail.com into my browser, I'm redirected to a page titled 'Outlook' that's on a subdomain of Live.com (outlook.live.com)

But if I type in Live.com, I'm redirected to the same page that says 'Outlook' but is actually outlook.live.com

So Hotmail is Outlook but Outlook is Live.com but Live.com itself is Outlook

yeah, but I'm pretty sure that mess is all Outlook.com underneath. I use gmail but also have an outlook account under the new service.

The branding is Outlook.com, but I think it's still the old Hotmail/Live infrastructure underneath.

I mean that would make sense and I don't really care what's under it, the fact of the matter is it does have a unified brand these days.

Don't forget about everything being "visual".

I learned just recently that Microsoft Visual Studio is completely different from Visual Studio Code.

Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac, meanwhile is actually based on what used to be MonoDevelop.

Actually Skype for Business was called Lync and before that Office Communicator. And has nothing at all to do with Skype, or any of their other messaging products!

But yes, dark times indeed.

Like Azure DevOps, hostable on-premises.

That and Azure data studio were what I was thinking of.

> Up there with "Windows" everything and absurdities like ".net Passport"

.NET Passport went thru series of rebranding: Microsoft Passport, Windows Live ID and of course the current Microsoft Account. In some places they also tried to roll everything under MSN brand which later was replaced partially by Windows Live and then again, once they managed to combine their services, MSN applications were bundled with Windows 8 and 10 (News, Weather, Sports etc.). Not mention all GUI changes across the years...

Microsoft trying to figure out what's its brand identity it's like a kid who tries to combine a single image of various jigsaw puzzles sets, periodically smashing pieces together to fit

naming things definitely isn't there strong point

having to click the "start" button to shut down your computer is probably the most illogical one. and somehow it managed to stay that way for 15 years until someone got the bright idea to just but an icon there instead

"microsoft windows phone 7 series" was a mouth full compared to "apple iphone". luckily they changed that soon after but its crazy to think of the amount of people that were involved in that project and none of them spoke up about how stupid the name sounded

a recent one is the app "your phone". it just doesn't sound right. i imagine it would be even more awkward when someone has to search the term. "hey google, my your phone isnt working"

windows security centre changes its name every year. I could go on

As I like to point out, on macOS you click on an icon of literal fruit to shutdown the computer.

The first time Win95 was started, a giant arrow pointed to the start button. It was rather discoverable.

Now Win8, I had to look up how to shut it down, the rtm version was a UX disaster.

Don't forget Active Directory, the only Active-branded product that is still, er, active.

Or Watson

For sure, although whereas the Websphere-ing of the product line seemed like a plausible effort at consistent branding, Watson feels more like a cynical measure to appear relevant, but nobody's buying it.

On the "active" bandwagon, I forgot to mention Active Directory, which is kind of funny given that I spent the better part of a decade specializing in development and projects largely oriented around AD and ADFS, and which is maybe the only Active-branded thing still going strong.

I have a feeling business people eat up Watson. Nobody got fired for buying IBM as they say. I was at a telecoms conference and they did a demo and mentioned the systems could use Watson for speech to text functionality. Someone somewhere is buying into it whether directly or indirectly.

I don't think anyone refers to it as Active Server Pages .NET Core but the abbreviation still carries it.

are you saying websphere is not rational ?

Needs more Tivoli.