Whether you like Microsoft and its products or not, the one thing we can all agree on is that the company is absolutely terrible at naming things. Sometimes I feel like managers at Microsoft get their bonuses based on how many times they can rename products, because I find it hard to accept that they’re really that inept at product naming in Redmond. I mean, just look at my recent article about the most Microsoft support document of all time. Bonkers.
While the list of examples of confusing, weird, unclear, and strange Microsoft product names is long, let’s go back to that weird moment in time where Windows updates were suddenly given names like the “Fall Creators Update”. As with every naming scheme Microsoft introduces, this one was short-lived, but for once, we have an explanation. Raymond Chen explains:
It was during an all-hands meeting that a senior executive asked if the organization had any unconscious biases. One of my colleagues raised his hand. He grew up in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite from those in the Northern Hemisphere. He pointed out that naming the updates Spring and Fall shows a Northern Hemisphere bias and is not inclusive of our customers in the Southern Hemisphere.
The names of the semiannual releases were changed the next day to be hemisphere-neutral.
↫ Raymond Chen
If you live in the northern hemisphere – and you can’t live much more north than I do – you don’t often have to think about how the seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed. We all know it – I assume, at least – but it’s not something that we’re confronted with very often, as our media, movies, books, and so on, all tend to be made in and for consumers in the northern hemisphere. I’m assuming that people in the southern hemisphere are much more acutely aware of this issue, because their media is probably dominated by stories set in the northern hemisphere, too.
It’s wild that Microsoft ever went with a seasonal naming scheme to begin with, and that it somehow slipped through the cracks for a while before anyone spoke up.
And the word “Fall” is pretty meaningless in some countries where the season is called Autumn.
Yep. UK uses Autumn as does most of the English speaking world outside the Northern Hemisphere
In various parts of the world we don’t have opposite seasons like you suggest Thom.
Where i live we have rainy season and dry season and thats it.
And yet, I was easily able to understand what Fall referred to.
Then again, sometimes a name using a broadly understood standard is perfectly fine…. otherwise it becomes a never ending cycle where we need to remove the Year from product names because it doesn’t take into account the Ethiopian Calendar.
I live in Vancouver in Canada. This is what we have. Some dry season with a very long wet season.
Microsoft used to be awesome at naming things. The old Microsoft would have head Microsoft Search at search.com instead of… Bing.
It was just Microsoft .
Now, it’s insanity. What the hell is a Copilot PC+? Or was it Copilot+ PC? Or maybe Copilot + PC, as in two-in-one?
Microsoft has never been awesome at doing literally anything.
They’ve been pretty good at achieving world domination actually.
I was going to bring up Excel and FoxPro as counterexamples, but Microsoft bought both of those from companies that had already named them.
I thought Fall and Spring related to the quality of the patch, one dragged you down, the other helped you recover!
Talking to my friends in Sumatra about the shortest day of the year always leaves them puzzled. One of them wrote a fiction novel about a place where the sun never sets, I suppose we could argue about the poles but technically it still sets.
hi
Perhaps it was named Fall Creators Update because it was fall in the country it was released from (United States) when it was released?
Call me old-fashioned, but I liked it back when products had some flair of their country of origin and not everything was homogeneous and bland. But I guess flair is considered “unconscious bias” now.
I do often complain about this. Using seasons as a calendar event, is a thing that mostly exists only in northen hemisphere and makes no sense at all. Sadly it is still widly used by events such as Formula-1, for example, and their reasoning is always “but we are mostly hosted in UK” or such. Well, so stop making races in the south then, if you do not care enought to use use semester/trimester/bimester (half/thirth/quarter), thank you.
It just shows the prejudice against south that exists from Europeans since ever. Never forget, they told everybody that southerns are lazy because of the heat – thing that people like Helmut Marko still say – a thing 100% racist, use to promote slavery of black and indigenous people.