Ok, so you have this cool sounding technology called SPOT. People are impressed that you, Microsoft, have come up with a cool way to send information to your watch. So what do you do? Hide the technology under a crappy name like MSN Direct. So does that mean I have to have MSN? What if I already have AOL? Every part of Microsoft that I have come into contact with has impressed me, except for marketing… marketing causes Microsoft more headaches that any other department. (Just think about .NET) [.Avery Blog]
As someone who has spent most of the past three years explaining .NET to customers, I’ve given up on the marketing department. I tell customers point blank: “Microsoft is the company with the great technology and bad names”.
MSN Direct and .NET aren’t even the worst cases of this:
- Argue/flame if you like, but MTS was the first of the modern application servers. (The original version of EJB was essentially a clone of MTS.) But did we make a big deal about it? No, we shipped it as an “additional technology” included in the NT 4 Option Pack. As if it was optional.
- Windows 2000? Is that the new version of Windows 98? 😦
- MTS at least stood for something. What the heck does COM+ stand for?