At that time, it seemed like a big joke to me (because a lot of senior people seemed very excited about the changes - even though it just amounted to renaming MSN as Windows Live)

I suspect that a new crop of senior leaders at Microsoft are now talking abut how excited they at the latest change.

Unless something radically changed in the last 6 months, the two identity infrastructures are completely separate with one tenuous federation holding them together. And the two groups of products -- consumer and business -- will still be unnecessarily separate.

Seriously, their "Messenger" software was the most emblematic of this. If memory serves, the name of the program in chronological order is:

1. Windows Messenger

2. MSN Messenger

3. Live Messenger

4. Messenger

The constant needless iterations of the software - which was basically perfect around MSN Messenger - made it suck so much, because they wanted to cram social gunk into it, add toolbars, and revamp the interface for no goddamn reason that I would willfully give it up and shun digital contact with my friends, since I don't have a Facebook user.

This is why Windows users drink.

I think they since replaced the icons with some new eye sores, but it was fascinating how the smilies in some way revolutionized the way I and others communicated, because they really helped create a good mood and served the purpose of disambiguation.

Smilies and emoticons aren't a gimmick, which some erroneously believe; it's just that they have to be designed properly before they can serve a purpose. For one, people have to want them because of their design, and second, they have to convey the user's mood unambiguously. Interet forums (AKA bulletin boards) often live or die by them, because the worst-case scenario results in the must insufferable atmosphere of bitter curmudgeons.

Developers at everywhere from Facebook, Skype, Google, and Tapbots don't seem to get this and just include for them for reasons they probably don't know themselves.

The smilies were actually a huge part of what made the older version of Messenger great, and for more important reasons that people would think. It was the main litmus test when I compared to competitors; none of them got it. I believe it was also fairly novel in introducing the "X is typing a message" feature, but I could be wrong on that.

It wasn't perfect by any means; the X Messenger Plus extension became mandatory fairly early on: http://www.msgplus.net.

Someone has a different opinion to you. This is not rare, and should not be surprising. Turning off HTML e-mails, using vim... you are in a tiny, tiny minority. Nothing wrong with that, but don't go around thinking that people are being ironic because they don't agree with you.

Smilies are great for disambiguation, as people have some innate tendency to assume the most negative interpretation of a comment online; look at the culture of manufactured outrage in the U.S. over absurd interpretation of what people say in the public space. Of course, smilies like ":D" and such are rarely useful, and I prefer communicating in text to smilies when possible. (My Twitter feed barely has any smilies.)

I can see why you would usually turn them off, because they are often misused and superfluous, but text-based smilies usually serves the purpose perfectly well.

Go to a community like Quarter to Three[1] and behold the surliest community that has ever been suffered onto mankind. Emoticons do wonders in forum-based (BB-based) communities to lighten the mood.

Text is very poor for conveying tone, as your response and the ensuing conversation conveniently illustrate. Even if text weren't poor at the job, people would lack the time and skill to wield it convincingly.

Don't get me wrong, I hate smilies for the most part. I still see their purpose, when relevant, though.

[1]: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/index.php

Note that this disambiguation does not necessarily mean "making less ambiguous".

A smiley could also mean "make what I say more ambiguous, because I mean it in an ambiguous way (e.g half joking)".

So, it's only disambiguation in a meta-level: making what should be ambiguous more ambiguous, and what should be taken literally more literal.

>Smilies are great for disambiguation, as people have some innate tendency to assume the most negative interpretation of a comment online; look at the culture of manufactured outrage in the U.S. over absurd interpretation of what people say in the public space.

I think "manufactured" is the key word here (that and hypocrisy).

People used to be more vigilant about that kind of hypocrisy, but only if it's by people on the right (i.e a strict republican "man of god" that's caught red-handed with a prostitute, not on the "left", e.g a blog post in the lines of "Booth babes at a tech expo, that is so sexist" by someone who's idea of fun is Hooters).

What's happened now is that there's finally someone sensible with enough pull to get these back in line- Sinofsky. Core services for Microsoft are getting the Microsoft brand (Microsoft Account), and the unnecessary 'Windows' prefix is going away. It's just mail now. (Thank you very much Apple for initiating this trend).

1. Microsoft Passport

2. .NET Passport

3. Microsoft Passport Network

4. Windows Live Passport

5. Microsoft Account

It seems that whenever Microsoft releases a new strategy white paper, the Passport brand changes.

I loved using it but ribbon is horrible. Still, it is best on Windows and I hope they do not do anything stupid with it.

My relatives still use that. That was also the one that added advertising to the bottom of the window.

A brand is a promise - when you shed them, you are shedding responsibility to your customers. Microsoft has essentially been unaccountable to it's customers while milking them using it's monopoly cash cows for over a decade. Perhaps they're realizing this won't be the case anymore very soon.

Not really. Initial versions of OLE were built on DDE. COM was the next generation of OLE. ActiveX was just COM with a DispInterface (self-describing interface to allow dynamic scripting), so named solely because of a rebranding effort to put an X into everything. .Net was, in my opinion, a ridiculous branding of what was essentially analogous to Win32, and it was only named .Net to align with the Internet craze. MFC was just an app development architecture, so as I understand it it's related in intent to WinForms.

Why was COM with a DispInterface called ActiveX, to stand alongside DirectX, when the two had essentially nothing in common with regards to meaning or context, yet MFC and WinForms, which seem related in intent, share absolutely nothing in terms of branding or name?

Microsoft's rebranding efforts just confuse everyone: developers, users, and IT.

Some of the names you mention are indeed related, but branding and marketing are entirely different beasts, and from a marketing perspective, it may be perfectly logical to give disparate names to tangentially related technologies.

If you think that the step from a command line to GUI, multitasking OS is anything at all like cramming an 'X' or 'Live' into a bunch of disparate technologies, then I don't know what to tell you.

Edit:

from a marketing perspective, it may be perfectly logical to give disparate names to tangentially related technologies.

Please explain the logic of 'X' and 'Live'. From where I'm sitting, they're just aliases for '1997-2003' and '2005-2010' (numbers purely guessed). It added absolutely nothing of value for anyone, aside from the marketing team.

Quitting the devil's advocate role and in support of your position, if nerds had their way, the entirety of marketing and design would be annexed in favour of technically aesthetic solutions (functional product names, stable UIs, uniform web designs, ...), but sadly when speaking of the masses, buying choices are simply not driven by rationality. My ideal world will probably never come, at least in this lifetime.

The one that I recall was "Windows DNS" (no, not that DNS, it was distributed network services or something, aka COM+).

I do remember delivering an ATL-MFC COM component that had interop with .NET some time around 2000. It would have also had some additional OLE code too, but at the copy+paste feature was removed sometime mid-project. If your code needed access to a keyboard, the screen, the network AND wanted to be able to use it as a library this was the only "sane" way to do it.

The overlap and confusion was insane, and it hasn't stopped.

Don't expect that it just works with any XMPP client as it uses a proprietary authentication mechanism "very similar to Facebook" OAUTH2.[1] More popular clients have already integrated it.

That's why Windows devs drink.

[1] http://blog.process-one.net/details_on_msns_xmpp_server/

Microsoft you were "not live" anymore for me when you decided to bring a wall between your Internet services and your Windows XP.

So we've gone from Hotmail, to MSN Hotmail, to Windows Live Mail, to Windows Live Hotmail. Where now? Windows Hotmail?

I can bet this will happen.

I can just imagine the conversations trying to differentiate OS X mail.app and windows 8 Mail app now.