Microsoft cuts 'Series' lump from Windows Phone 7
Can't, stop, self, from, fiddling
Posted in Mobile, 2nd April 2010 20:47 GMT
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It's just two months old, but Microsoft has already renamed its next operating system for Windows phones.
Microsoft's dropped the "Series" from the Windows Phone 7 Series - now the software will simply be called Windows Phone 7, according to a Microsoft team Tweet, below.
The Tweet gave no explanation why Microsoft is dumping the clumsy appendage, but David Webster, chief strategy officer in the company's central marketing group, did try to explain to TechFlash the thinking for inserting "Series" into an otherwise perfectly acceptable name in the first place.
Windows Phone is an OS, it's not a phone. The idea was that we needed a handle to refer to the devices that ran Windows Phone 7 - the family, in essence. Now, in a lot of the coverage and a lot of the usage cases, that context, I think, got lost. People got to thinking that the software was Windows Phone 7 Series, when really that was just an effort to refer to the devices that would be running Windows Phone 7.
No doubt the word "Series" made sense in some meeting of marketing drones who justify their existence on the value attached to the position of a comma in a sentence, or how people "connect" with a brand.
That's the kind of thinking at Microsoft that has, over the years, given us MSN versus Windows Live, and .NET on everything then .NET on just some things.
Here's to you Microsoft: keep sweating the message. ®
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