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Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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Hey Microsoft: No more long product names!

From Robert Cialdini's Influence at Work newsletter:

"Gone are the days when the color names were simple. Anyone who opens a new box of crayons will quickly notice that the old common names (e.g., green, yellow, brown) have been replaced by names such as Tropical Rain Forest , Laser Lemon, and Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown. These name changes may seem like child’s play to some, but there is an important lesson to be learned here. How can a color name like Cornflower or Razzmatazz help you keep your company’s chips blue and keep your business out of the red?"

The conclusion is interesting:

"The implications for your business are clear: don’t be afraid to use less-than-straightforward names for certain aspects of your products. Names that fall into the unexpected descriptive category or the ambiguous category create a sense of mystery and intrigue that lead potential consumers to consider the positive aspects of your goods and services."

Let's do a quick check, Apple has products like iPod, iTunes, iLife, Garage Band, and Microsoft has names like "Windows Presentation Foundation" and "Microsoft IntelliSense XML Files for Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System Solution Developers!"

Just say NO to long boring descriptive product names!



Comments

Milan Negovan said:

At about the same time last year I went to MSDN to read up about Indigo. Here's the intro they had up there:

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"Indigo" is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture. Advanced Web services support in Indigo provides secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. Indigo's service-oriented programming model is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and simplifies development of connected systems. Indigo unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable and extensible architecture, spanning transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies and hosting models. Indigo will be an integral capability of Windows "Longhorn" and will also be supported on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003."
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It was a true WTF moment. :S
# October 19, 2005 11:28 PM

Paul Watson said:

Windows Vista 3rd World Advanced Premium 64 Bit Edition Service Pack 1.
# October 20, 2005 1:52 AM

Steven said:

Here's one I found today: Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC, Premium Edition, or as my wife put it, the "MWMwtf5PPbbqPE" for short.

The other one was Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC, Second Edition. Yeah, real simple.
# October 20, 2005 4:24 AM

aqCommunity said:

# October 23, 2005 3:16 AM
Check out Devlicio.us!