alt Hacker News> Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.
They really won't, though; Microsoft just does this kind of thing, over and over and over. Before everything was named "365", it was all "One", before that it was "Live"... 20 years ago, everything was called ".NET" whether it had anything to do with the Internet or not. Back in the '90s they went crazy for a while calling everything "Active".
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Some musings from someone who has not worked in microsoft but has in big tech.
This often happens because the people inside are incentivized to build their own empire.
If someone comes and wants to get promoted/become an exec, there's a ceiling if they work under the an existing umberlla + dealing the politics of introducing a feature which requires dealing with an existing org.
So they build something new. And the next person does the same. And so you have 365, One, Live, .Net, etc
The Dev Tools division had Quick- prefix for some tools before settling on Visual- once VB took off.
Then there's DirectX and its subs - though Direct3D had more room for expanded feature set compared to DXSound or DXInput so now they're up to D3D v12.
NT..? Good comment made me laugh.
There’s got to be solid reasons why they do this and have done so for so damn long. At the very least institutional reasons. At best, actual research that suggests they make more money this way. But as a consumer, I hate it.
To further your argument, look at the XBOX. It is impossible to tell which is the latest model by name alone. Where the playstation is simple, the latest is the 5, the previous was the 4, and the one before that was the 3.