WTF? Did Microsoft hold a series of internal meetings where they decided to use the *worst* possible new name for Windows Remote Desktop? I received an email this morning from a customer who had an issue with “Windows App,” and I was 99% sure I was being phished/attacked, and nearly tossed it in the trash (especially as it had an attached 1MB Word file).
But no, “Windows App” is really the new name for Microsoft Remote Desktop. I have no idea when that happened, but it’s horrible.
Captured within some of those meetings..
“We need a name that’s less web searchable than Books, Calculator, Numbers, Pages, etc. We’ll show Apple!”
‘Oooh oooh … I’ve got one! Let’s call it Windows App!’
@boxofsnoo @rgriff that strategy made sense back when they did it. We didn't have a public Internet. We didn't have search engines.
What we did have was a company whose name was not well known. People at the time tended to know the names of software products, but not the company behind them. Microsoft wanted to change that, so as to leverage one product to grow another.
The solution was to use product names that were so generic the company name had to be used as essentially an adjective to clarify that the speaker was referring to software, not a generic physical object.
That strategy worked perfectly.
Rob Griffiths
Mieszko Ślusarczyk
Coyote of Winter
BoxOfSnoo
Eric deRuiter
bogosity