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Comment by DanielStraight | Hacker News Reader

Correction: They're going to keep doing exactly what they were doing before except instead of saying "Windows Phone" they're going to just say "Windows" and they aren't going to say "Nokia" anymore.

Not news.

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It reminds me a little of the time Microsoft marketing went crazy and stamped the ".Net" brand moniker on just about any product they could.

And a while before that, everything was "Active"...

As a counter point, Apple has a habit of labeling products with i- and labeling software libraries with -Kit.

Indeed, when I first heard of "Healthkit" I misread it as "Heathkit" even though Apple is pretty much the antithesis of Heathkit.

Apple have been fairly consistent; the 'i' prefix has been synonymous with Apple since the iPod in 2001.

Microsoft chop and change brands all the time, often in ways that are confusing to the consumer and damaging to the business.

iMac, 1998.

Noted, but the iPod (and iTunes, also 2001) is what made Apple (and the 'i' prefix) a household name, and paved the way for everything that followed.

The number of times products get rebranded is a sign of the fact that there's just not any forethought!

Apple doesn't just willy-nilly throw the i- designation of every product they have, though. i- is a special sub-brand that's used to express something that is small, easy, light, etc. Customers who are familiar with Apple's branding can immediately guess at how an iMac differs from a PowerMac (or, when they still existed, an iBook from a PowerBook) based only on knowing their names. That branding was carried forward, so that the same connotations helped offer consumers an immediate sense of familiarity with the basic idea behind new products such as the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Even now, you see a hint of the distinction alive in iOS vs OS X. They rest on the same technology base, but keeping the distinction alive means users still have an easy mnemonic to help them keep track of the distinction between the two and their relative capabilities.

So yes, Apple does reuse monikers in their branding. But they use them to create a branding language that helps them to better communicate with customers. This is starkly different from what Microsoft is trying to do with the Windows brand, which is to turn the word into a blaring, monotonous drone to be blasted at us until we enter some sort of alternate mental dimension where words lose all meaning and every single noun is replaced with the word Windows.

Curiously, the Watch is not an i product despite being among the smallest and lightest products.

Swatch owns it . . . . kinda.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-04/swatch-objects-to-a...

There are other reasons for not using i, e.g. iTouch, iWatch

Labeling things with -Kit dates back to early NeXTSTEP (1989). I believe it was originally intended as an indicator that a library included an object-oriented API.

Let's not forget the 'Live' phase.

Windows Live, Live Calendar, Live Contacts, Live Messenger, Live Photos, Live Mail...

Or "Visual", even though none of the products are actually any more visual than their competition.

To be fair, the original Visual Basic was indeed much more visual than the competition.

They messed it up with Visual C++ which wasn't visual at all (unless raw Win32/MFC code is someone's idea of beautiful scenery).

Also "Visual J++", or, as I called it, "Visual J Double-Plus Ungood".

Actually, to this day there are no (or at least few, we could debate about Qt Designer) C++ tools that will let you draw a UI, then double-click the button to enter the code of what should happen when you click that button. Is it pretty, or easy to learn how it works under the hood? No. Does it work, and work well? Yes.

Visual Studio has a very good and well integrated visual GUI builder.

Is it anymore "Visual" than, say, XCode, or any other GUI builder?

Visual Studio is called like that since 1995 and XCode is around since 2003.

By the time is came out, Visual Studio was actually very visual in comparison with their competition.

There was more to the Skylight rebrand than Live. The idea was to bind the services to the Windows brand, a strong brand in the US, instead of MSN, which is a stronger brand outside the US.

Also, the integration was tighter, so the experience was supposed to be seamless. YMMV. It wasn't like we grabbed a can of "Live" spraypaint and hit everything we could see.

> It wasn't like we grabbed a can of "Live" spraypaint and hit everything we could see.

To me, it sure seemed that way. Went from a perfectly usable, lightweight "MSN Messenger 4.0" client to some slow-as-molasses abomination "Live Messenger".

As I said the very sentence before, the goal was a smooth integration, but your mileage my vary. Restated, I know it ended up sucking, but that wasn't the goal.

I remember my time there from MSN to LIVE to BING to YA!BING

Yeah, you'd have to pretty damn high on marketing kool-aid to think that dropping the "Phone" from the brand name is somehow a Big Thing.

I think the Big Thing is not the naming itself, but what is being signaled by it.

If Microsoft can actually pull it off, I think a single OS that works well enough on all form factors could be awesome. I imagine writing native apps that are responsive like the web apps we have today.

(I'll never use or endorse it if I can't side-load apps though! There's no way I'm moving into any kind of walled-garden.)

TIL what sideloading means.

"Installation from arbitrary locations, like we've done for most of computing history".

I was similarly confused when people started talking about "AOT compilation". Turns out that just means "compiling things from source code, like we've done for most of computing history", as opposed to shipping bytecode and compiling it when you're ready to run it.

Calling 2 different things the same thing does not change that they are different things.

Unless you're not referring to the things at all - but a convergent platform.

Huge difference. The only issue is getting consumers to buy in on the idea.

"convergent platform" is just buzz-speak. What I said before is still true.

Where previously the Windows CE-derived OS shared little more than APIs with desktop Windows, since Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, there's actual sharing of core components.

See e.g., http://j4ni.com/blog/?p=107

This is what they attempted to do with Windows 7, unify the interface with the tiled approach, and people hated it. In fact they hated it so much MS had to revert the changes. Still, if you look at the most recent versions of Visual Studio (ie. "Visual Studio Express for Windows" is separate from "Visual Studio Express for Windows Desktop") and the .net framework, they are clearly aiming to get to a place with a single dev kit for both platforms.

edit: Windows 8, not 7

I think you mean Windows 8 or maybe I missed that phase of Windows 7 but I like it better than 8. I don't like it as much as OSX though.

Yes, sorry. Windows 8.

It is a big thing for the decision makers inside Microsoft. Windows phone had it's own executive, who are now no longer a threat to the remaining executives.

What I've noticed about commercials is that when it comes to non-founder companies (companies no longer controlled by their founders), is that the target of the commercials is not really customers. It's the management, and sometimes, their "bosses", investors. An example is the countless "we're no 1" commercials. Nobody goes and touts their products or services actual advantages, or even goes so far as simply saying they're the "best". Best would matter to customers. No 1 tells you something about sales figure (and is easy to fake), and why would customers care about sales figures (except in extreme cases) ?

The message here is simply that there's a management change, and this is big news and to be celebrated, political foes have been slain, new victors have been chosen and crowned, this is a victory to be shouted off of roofs everywhere, because that's what people who decided to push this message feel.

> and why would customers care about sales figures (except in extreme cases) ?

Because most people go with the crowd. Conformity isn't as popular in the tech crowd as it is in the main stream.

Yep. This is a studied psychological phenomenon. People tend to prefer options they believe other people are choosing. A.k.a social proof. (ref. Goldstein et. all: Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive)

Also people want to go where the developers are and developers want to be where the most people are.

I think you're spot on: be it marketing- or management-driven, this announcement was made for the sake of the announcers, not the readers.

I misread your comment, but do think "Bing Thing" would make an interesting brand.

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