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Google is taking naming cues from Microsoft now. Microsoft's naming conventions are maddening if you are trying to search for documentation. I have spent a lot

Google is taking naming cues from Microsoft now. Microsoft's naming conventions are maddening if you are trying to search for documentation. I have spent a lot of time developing for Access and Excel, and trying to search for VBA solutions is a madhouse. You could maybe chalk up the VBA|VB madness to decisions being made at a time when search engines were somewhat uncommon tools, but they have made this mistake so many times. For instance, try figuring out the difference between all the Active Directory solutions on Azure. The documentation describing the differences between them is spread out all over the place, and it's not clear which option is necessary to achieve a given result. Plus several of the Azure AD solutions have nothing to do with the Active Directory protocol. I would chalk it up to being unfamiliar with the Azure environment, but I'm working with a couple of Azure devs and even they were confused by the limitations of each version of AD and when you could use them. Honestly, if business units within a company could sue for copyright infringement resulting in market confusion I would highly recommend the Active Directory team send a cease-and-desist to the rest of the company.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> I would chalk it up to being unfamiliar with the Azure environment, but I'm working with a couple of Azure devs and even they were confused by the limitations of each version of AD and when you could use them. Honestly, if business units within a company could sue for copyright infringement resulting in market confusion I would highly recommend the Active Directory team send a cease-and-desist to the rest of the company. Sometimes what happens is that a certain brand name becomes popular, and other people (or departments) want to piggyback off the popular name. For example: Watson is literally a household name, thanks to Jeopardy, so IBM now uses the Watson brand pretty generously, even applying it to things that are only vaguely related to the project that created a computer which beat Ken Jennings. I could believe that that's what's happening with Microsoft - Active Directory is a known entity to corporate IT departments, so tacking "AD" onto something makes it seem less threatening and more familiar. But I don't think that's what's going on here with Google. Hangouts was never that popular a name with users[0]. And it doesn't even look like they're piggybacking, from the trail of names we see. It just looks like a chaotic mess. I'm really perplexed as to what's happening internally to cause this sort of confused word salad of branding. I can't figure it out. [0] Amusingly, people still refer to it colloquially as "GChat", which was never one of the official names of the product! It was always "Talk" not "Chat" - look at the logo if you don't believe it - even though the records were stored in the "Chats" section on GMail.
- ac29 9y ago
  Google certainly called it Google Chat: https://support.google.com/chat https://support.google.com/chat

chimeracoder 9y ago

> I would chalk it up to being unfamiliar with the Azure environment, but I'm working with a couple of Azure devs and even they were confused by the limitations of each version of AD and when you could use them. Honestly, if business units within a company could sue for copyright infringement resulting in market confusion I would highly recommend the Active Directory team send a cease-and-desist to the rest of the company. Sometimes what happens is that a certain brand name becomes popular, and other people (or departments) want to piggyback off the popular name. For example: Watson is literally a household name, thanks to Jeopardy, so IBM now uses the Watson brand pretty generously, even applying it to things that are only vaguely related to the project that created a computer which beat Ken Jennings. I could believe that that's what's happening with Microsoft - Active Directory is a known entity to corporate IT departments, so tacking "AD" onto something makes it seem less threatening and more familiar. But I don't think that's what's going on here with Google. Hangouts was never that popular a name with users[0]. And it doesn't even look like they're piggybacking, from the trail of names we see. It just looks like a chaotic mess. I'm really perplexed as to what's happening internally to cause this sort of confused word salad of branding. I can't figure it out. [0] Amusingly, people still refer to it colloquially as "GChat", which was never one of the official names of the product! It was always "Talk" not "Chat" - look at the logo if you don't believe it - even though the records were stored in the "Chats" section on GMail.

ac29 9y ago
Google certainly called it Google Chat: https://support.google.com/chat https://support.google.com/chat