[basch]

It's a marketing and ux problem. Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products. Groups, teams, etc. why is it Office Groups but Microsoft Teams. Is Microsoft ToDo part of Office? Why is Teams basically Skype/Lynx+Sharepoint but not Office?

Enterprise Architecture teams have their work cut out trying to describe the choices they make.

[m_mueller]

I'm thinking Microsoft is just terrible at saying NO. Especially NO to certain naming, feature and product requests coming from marketing. It needs more architects with decision power for each product line that curate and focus their efforts.

[Terr_]

> Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products.

I wonder if there's a sort of internal fighting for each team to squat on the "best" names for their product or service. Basically a Dilbertian confusopoly [0] where the goal is to make your project sound like "the obvious choice" regardless of its merits, with "Microsoft" on the front as the only way it stops being impossible to trademark.

I imagine other large companies struggle with this as well, although Amazon seems to have taken to the other extreme [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly [1] https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english

[basch]

thats exactly whats going on. http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2011.06.27_or...

Branding teams and divisions are getting in the way of coherence and usability. I think ONE of the worst right now is the OneDrive vs SharePoint back and forth. First they were kind of hiding the SharePoint name, and renaming everything onedrive. SharePoint Workspace, formerly Microsoft Office Groove, became OneDrive for Business (because it was the client sync tool, not a server.) Now its making a comeback and certain things are "not" OneDrive, such as 'Office 365' Groups '''SharePoint 'Team Site'' 'Document Libraries''

At least in the Mail world the divide MOSTLY makes sense. Outlook is the Client, Exchange is the server. Yes, the OWA web/javascript client streams from the server and renders in your browser, but otherwise the divide is mostly intact. You NEVER see an Exchange app, and you rarely see the word outside the content of "connect to this server." The SharePoint branding team on the other hand cant handle being the server only and has now forced a SharePoint app that is like some bastardized fork of the OneDrive app. They mostly do the same thing, but not quite. Microsoft needs to draw a line and say "OneDrive = Client, SharePoint = Server" and try and not cross it. The OneDrive web client should be an interface that streams from the SharePoint server to your browser.

I wish they would have left 'Lync' as the "server" to the various clients.