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September 14, 2005
A Shift in Microsoft's Code Names?
Microsoft's PDC has just begun. Today they demonstrated the upcoming version of Office. This version radically changes the user interface by making it task-oriented rather than command oriented. Menus and toolbars have been eliminated in favor of, well, a menutoollbar known as a ribbon. Add to this a vaguely iTunes-like brushed aluminum look and you have the makings of a major visual overhaul of the Office Suite. Yet, the powers that be at Microsoft have chosen to christen the project with the codename "12".
How lame!
The starry-eyed Microsoft, who chooses code names for projects before they have even begun, comes up with this?! What happened to the mystique of Chicago, the promise of Memphis and the Pacific Northwest's culturally relevant Whistler and Longhorn?
Recent delays in product cycles may have taught Microsoft to be less ostentatious with their code names. Much touted operating system releases such as Longhorn have been delayed for so long that their code names themselves started to command some brand equity. In the old Longhorn Developer Center pages, the code name has been used in several places completely idiomatically, not even including so much as a pair of quotes. The name "Longhorn" may not fit with the marketing vision that Windows seeks to portray to its customers. Yet, viewed purely as a product name, "Longhorn" isn't entirely bad for an operating system release. It is perhaps as whimsical as the seemingly unoriginal "Vista", which will be the official name of the Windows release formerly code named "Longhorn". Microsoft kept promising (and later cutting) so many features with Longhorn that it has come to be associated with failure to execute and deliver products on time. Even early betas of the operating system were so delayed that the code names became de facto release names. Yet, a plausible sounding name that had gained some brand equity of its own had to be buried and obliterated completely from public memory.
As if learning from this mistake, Microsoft has deliberately picked a lame code name for the next version of Office. A code name that's just a mundane number downplays the impression that much more effort is put into marketing a Microsoft product than into developing it. It would be a lot less painful to dispose of should delays in development cycles correspondingly delay the choosing of an official product name for Office. Code naming the next version of Office with a number puts considerably less cultural stock in the name and may be telling Microsoft's customers that they are doing away with such niceties in favor of focusing on getting the release out the door. Perhaps it may just be that because Office is to be released along with Windows Vista at the end of 2006, the code name wouldn't need to survive for as long as Longhorn did; the marketing department may have just taken the easy way out.
What are they going to call it eventually anyway? Office Vista?
Posted by Vishy at September 14, 2005 12:58 AM