Nothing internal about those incentives (though, happily, at least some people at Microsoft still find that sort of thing in poor taste). "The purpose of a syst

Nothing internal about those incentives (though, happily, at least some people at Microsoft still find that sort of thing in poor taste). "The purpose of a system is what it does", as famously observed by a man named Beer. Microsoft is no stranger to what's very transparently a bastardized form of nominative determinism, meant to sabotage the playing field by confusing generic and branded nomenclature. It's the opposite process to genericizing a trademark: you take as many random words as you can get away with, and turn them into brand names while nobody is looking. And then... you are suddenly everywhere they look. So, a clear totalizing influence; its purpose: to tombstone a consumer product into the early termination of any attempt at independent thought - until thinking remains purely the domain of machines (that everyone is forced to trust) and illiterates (that nobody believes). Never succeeds for reason of some natural law or other, but it's a pain in the ass, a.k.a. a great motivator of economic growth, especially in epochs where imagination is frowned upon, like our present one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark Far from limited to Microsoft, either. Though theirs are particularly crude - someone else mentioned COM and .NET. Well, why would you even name a proprietary runtime platform something as plainly idiotic as "dot net" - except to mount an attack against the networked commons? Take "Windows", for fuck's sake - at least they didn't name a statistics package that. What about "Meta", and their "Messenger" - remember when all chat apps were called messengers? Privatize the entire "Alphabet" - then nationalize it, then repeat a buncha times! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness These kinds of organized attacks against language are nothing new. They just take a lot of entrenched mindshare to pull off in the first place, so are usually the domain of actors of nation-state and transnational caliber. One of their side effects is that people become technically unable (not just unwilling) to learn from immediate history: while the spectrum of observable reality remains covered by a network of interlocking notions, the boundaries between notions shift. So, the most important nuances become impracticable to translate between those established mental models that precede the attack, and any newly elucidated ones. So a lot of wheels end up having to be reinvented. Sometimes entire bicycles. Like I say, great driver of economic growth - just like many other more obviously horrible things.