6 ms·

“while the Xbox Series S won't run the Xbox One X Enhanced versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, it will still be a step above the Xbox One S“

corytheboyd 6y ago
It’s truly insane. Sony: PS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5 Microsoft: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X There just _has_ to be some monetary reason for this, it’s too insane and has gone on too long for there to not be money involved somehow. Or maybe it truly is just insanity?!
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  I assume someone gets paid a lot of money to make these decisions, and they don't want people to think they're a drain on resources. That seems to happen a lot when large organizations overthink decisions too trivial for the CEO but too important for the intern.
- majormajor 6y ago
  The naming conversations I've been close to for a couple of decently-high-profile consumer products really were just on the "insanity" side. Like, everyone's argument made sense from a certain perspective, and the "common sense" ideas weren't perfect, but the compromise solutions that resulted had bigger problems. Problems which the media or public noticed more quickly than the people who had finally signed off on them internally... My speculation for the early Xbox names would be that part of it was someone insisting that you don't want to be trying to sell Xbox 2 against PS3 - you're one behind! - and then 360 is a fun way to get a "3" in there... but then what next, you have the same problem again, 460 is nonsensical (Xbox 420 would've been fun...!), etc...
  - adverbly 6y ago
    I don't know why more products dont follow the software pattern of cycling the alphabet. Pick a unique new name each time, and just run it down the alphabet for the first letter of the name. So easy.
    - IggleSniggle 6y ago
      I do really enjoy this approach and have used it affectionately for every computer I’ve owned. It becomes its own entertaining challenge to pick a new name that fits with the theme that began with my first computer, “Ambrosia.” Anyway, definitely seems like an actually useful thing for software versions. Android nailed it.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    That’s exactly what happened with Xbox being a number behind when coming up with 360. The later versions could've been handled much better though, or at least just stick with increasing numbers (like 720) instead of reverting back to "One" and now "Series X".
    - IggleSniggle 6y ago
      Why do I have the feeling that “Series X” will have only one entry in the series?
      - yroc92 6y ago
        There’s two now- the Series S is the entry-level model.
        manigandham 6y ago
        But that's a different "series".
  - helmholtz 6y ago
    Why companies won't name their products after the launch years I will never understand. Car companies seem to do just fine with it. Xbox 2001, Xbox 2005 etc.
    - pkulak 6y ago
      Who wants to buy a brand new xbox 2013 in 2020?
  - pkulak 6y ago
    Just jump right to 10 like everyone (even MSFT!) does.
- jkaplowitz 6y ago
  The odd naming is consistent with MS's history of Windows naming, too. Here's the consumer Windows product line since 1992, ignoring high-end options like NT and Chinese-only releases like Windows 3.2: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 I mean that sort of goes up as a general pattern, but only generally.
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
    In the case of Windows there were two (maybe three) different product lines all called Windows. The naming makes slightly more sense in that context. * Windows 1/2/3.0/3.1/3.11/WFW3.11 - 16-bit (with 32-bit extensions as win32s), ran on DOS * Concurrently, NT 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51 were marketed for servers instead of home users. They were fully 32 bit and separate from DOS. * Windows 95/97/98 started naming after the year. This line eliminated DOS (from the user's perspective) and was 32-bit without the need for installing extensions. * Concurrent with Windows 95 was NT4 which had 95's new interface based on Cairo * At this point it was clear NT was the future for the desktop, so keeping with the year naming came Windows 2000 (which was really NT 5.0, but desktop users were by now used to year naming). But there was one more release of "old" Windows, as Millennium Edition (ME) * The two names that dont fit are XP and Vista; these are NT 5.1 and 6.0, respectively. And now Windows 7 and 8 make more sense; we are back to the versioning we had starting with NT 3.1 * To make things more confusing, the server versions now started getting named after the year when previously that was the desktops. So we've got Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2011, and so on. * Windows 10 is the oddball, skipping 9. I like to think someone at MS was poking fun at Apple, which skipped OS 9 to go straight to OS X, which two years later got the version 10.0. Mac OS 9 came after OS X but before OS X 10.0. I recall reading that 8.5 was originally supposed to be end of the line for classic mac os, but I don't have a source. So now there's 8.5, X 1.0, 9.0, and X 10.0, and everyone seems to think the X is a 10.
    - wombatpm 6y ago
      There was also Windows CE fir the ipaq handhelds. This led to the joke that MS was going to combine mobile, server, and desktop into Windows CEMENT
- thebosz 6y ago
  The most recent version of Nintendo's 3DS is "New 3DS". As in, the brand-new New 3DS! New! Buy it today!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    Well, there also was New iPad
- echelon 6y ago
  Wii. Wii U. Consumers were confused. It doesn't always work. I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft "loses" this generation, with their confusing name losing sales from parents and non-hardcore gamers that don't know this is a new console.
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    Yeah I left Nintendo out because I just wanted to poke one insane naming scheme at a time :p Nintendo is just as bad at naming things as Microsoft. And they are very anti-gamer with all of their ludicrous attacks against fan content (most recently, their attack against the competitive melee scene)
    - echelon 6y ago
      I understand not wanting to cannibalize the flagship Smash game, but they could easily sell a remastered Melee and make so much money. They re-release everything else... Their attacks on fans are so nonsensical. It goes beyond copyright protection. Look at how Sega treats Sonic fans. It's night and day.
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  Car manufacturers have a similar problem. I think naming is just hard.
  - jfoster 6y ago
    Or it's easy and gets made hard unnecessarily.
- tech234a 6y ago
  I recently saw a funny YouTube video about this by CircleToonsHD [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/z1em05goyYU https://youtu.be/z1em05goyYU
- petre 6y ago
  It's interesting how Sony, being a Japanese company, did not skip over PS4, 4 being an unlucky number in some Asian cultures. They even skip the 4th floor in some buildings.

corytheboyd 6y ago

It’s truly insane. Sony: PS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5 Microsoft: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X There just _has_ to be some monetary reason for this, it’s too insane and has gone on too long for there to not be money involved somehow. Or maybe it truly is just insanity?!

SuoDuanDao 6y ago
I assume someone gets paid a lot of money to make these decisions, and they don't want people to think they're a drain on resources. That seems to happen a lot when large organizations overthink decisions too trivial for the CEO but too important for the intern.
majormajor 6y ago
The naming conversations I've been close to for a couple of decently-high-profile consumer products really were just on the "insanity" side. Like, everyone's argument made sense from a certain perspective, and the "common sense" ideas weren't perfect, but the compromise solutions that resulted had bigger problems. Problems which the media or public noticed more quickly than the people who had finally signed off on them internally... My speculation for the early Xbox names would be that part of it was someone insisting that you don't want to be trying to sell Xbox 2 against PS3 - you're one behind! - and then 360 is a fun way to get a "3" in there... but then what next, you have the same problem again, 460 is nonsensical (Xbox 420 would've been fun...!), etc...
- adverbly 6y ago
  I don't know why more products dont follow the software pattern of cycling the alphabet. Pick a unique new name each time, and just run it down the alphabet for the first letter of the name. So easy.
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    I do really enjoy this approach and have used it affectionately for every computer I’ve owned. It becomes its own entertaining challenge to pick a new name that fits with the theme that began with my first computer, “Ambrosia.” Anyway, definitely seems like an actually useful thing for software versions. Android nailed it.
- manigandham 6y ago
  That’s exactly what happened with Xbox being a number behind when coming up with 360. The later versions could've been handled much better though, or at least just stick with increasing numbers (like 720) instead of reverting back to "One" and now "Series X".
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Why do I have the feeling that “Series X” will have only one entry in the series?
    - yroc92 6y ago
      There’s two now- the Series S is the entry-level model.
      - manigandham 6y ago
        But that's a different "series".
- helmholtz 6y ago
  Why companies won't name their products after the launch years I will never understand. Car companies seem to do just fine with it. Xbox 2001, Xbox 2005 etc.
  - pkulak 6y ago
    Who wants to buy a brand new xbox 2013 in 2020?
- pkulak 6y ago
  Just jump right to 10 like everyone (even MSFT!) does.
jkaplowitz 6y ago
The odd naming is consistent with MS's history of Windows naming, too. Here's the consumer Windows product line since 1992, ignoring high-end options like NT and Chinese-only releases like Windows 3.2: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 I mean that sort of goes up as a general pattern, but only generally.
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  In the case of Windows there were two (maybe three) different product lines all called Windows. The naming makes slightly more sense in that context. * Windows 1/2/3.0/3.1/3.11/WFW3.11 - 16-bit (with 32-bit extensions as win32s), ran on DOS * Concurrently, NT 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51 were marketed for servers instead of home users. They were fully 32 bit and separate from DOS. * Windows 95/97/98 started naming after the year. This line eliminated DOS (from the user's perspective) and was 32-bit without the need for installing extensions. * Concurrent with Windows 95 was NT4 which had 95's new interface based on Cairo * At this point it was clear NT was the future for the desktop, so keeping with the year naming came Windows 2000 (which was really NT 5.0, but desktop users were by now used to year naming). But there was one more release of "old" Windows, as Millennium Edition (ME) * The two names that dont fit are XP and Vista; these are NT 5.1 and 6.0, respectively. And now Windows 7 and 8 make more sense; we are back to the versioning we had starting with NT 3.1 * To make things more confusing, the server versions now started getting named after the year when previously that was the desktops. So we've got Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2011, and so on. * Windows 10 is the oddball, skipping 9. I like to think someone at MS was poking fun at Apple, which skipped OS 9 to go straight to OS X, which two years later got the version 10.0. Mac OS 9 came after OS X but before OS X 10.0. I recall reading that 8.5 was originally supposed to be end of the line for classic mac os, but I don't have a source. So now there's 8.5, X 1.0, 9.0, and X 10.0, and everyone seems to think the X is a 10.
  - wombatpm 6y ago
    There was also Windows CE fir the ipaq handhelds. This led to the joke that MS was going to combine mobile, server, and desktop into Windows CEMENT
thebosz 6y ago
The most recent version of Nintendo's 3DS is "New 3DS". As in, the brand-new New 3DS! New! Buy it today!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Well, there also was New iPad
echelon 6y ago
Wii. Wii U. Consumers were confused. It doesn't always work. I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft "loses" this generation, with their confusing name losing sales from parents and non-hardcore gamers that don't know this is a new console.
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  Yeah I left Nintendo out because I just wanted to poke one insane naming scheme at a time :p Nintendo is just as bad at naming things as Microsoft. And they are very anti-gamer with all of their ludicrous attacks against fan content (most recently, their attack against the competitive melee scene)
  - echelon 6y ago
    I understand not wanting to cannibalize the flagship Smash game, but they could easily sell a remastered Melee and make so much money. They re-release everything else... Their attacks on fans are so nonsensical. It goes beyond copyright protection. Look at how Sega treats Sonic fans. It's night and day.
curlypaul924 6y ago
Car manufacturers have a similar problem. I think naming is just hard.
- jfoster 6y ago
  Or it's easy and gets made hard unnecessarily.
tech234a 6y ago
I recently saw a funny YouTube video about this by CircleToonsHD [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/z1em05goyYU https://youtu.be/z1em05goyYU
petre 6y ago
It's interesting how Sony, being a Japanese company, did not skip over PS4, 4 being an unlucky number in some Asian cultures. They even skip the 4th floor in some buildings.