Submitted by Eh. Microsoft has instructed its employees to drop the name ‘Metro’, due to a trademark conflict with an ‘an important European partner’. The Verge has learned that Microsoft plans to unveil a new name next week. Considering Microsoft has been beating the Metro drum for quite a few years now, this all seems a bit silly. The European partner in question is believed to be Metro AG, a huge collection of electronic retail stores covering several different chains (I’ve got a few within a few kilometres of my middle-of-nowhere hick hometown). Depending on what they come up with, I will continue to use the Metro name. I like it, and I don’t give a rat’s bum about trademark disputes.
It’s interesting to see the tables turned; I remember back when Microsoft was all too eager to sue a home improvement company for having a website name with the word “windows” despite the company owning the trademark long before Bill Gates bought and re-released DOS.
But really, “Windows” 8 isn’t an apt name anymore (not that “Metro” ever was). I think they should call it “Tiles” instead. That way it’s more relevant to the product, and still gives them the opportunity to sue home improvement companies.
Edited 2012-08-04 03:31 UTC
In Russia MS tried to grab http://windows.ru without a success.
Edited 2012-08-04 12:51 UTC
They’ve decided to simply call it “Me”.
Would be hilarious, especially considering the still well remembered and “beloved” Windows Me 😀
I think most people worked out his joke without the additional narration from yourself :p
I think most people worked out we didn’t need the addition narration without your additional narration (oh, now I’ve added one)…
🙂
My deepest apologies for burdening your eyes with an additional dozen or so words to read today.
Me is a great name, because then they could call their tablet version Mobile Me. That name became recently available.
Or given the less than glowing reviews so far, maybe “Windows Meh”? 😉
Me(h) grabs coat…
Nah, “Windows Steve!” complete with exclamation point, since it is Steve’s baby after all.
BTW anybody caught any of Sinofsky’s talks on WinWhatever? Man they are soooo funny! Count how many times the man says “touchscreens” in his presentations, hell you could make it into a drinking game and get snookered!
I just thinks its hilarious that in a global recession, when MSFT has never had less pull, that Sinofsky has actually convinced himself that “Yeah AMD and Intel may be reporting doom because they can’t sell what they have, and the OEMs are having sales up the ying yang just to move what they’ve got, but you know what will fix that? why raising prices another 45%+ to add touchscreens on systems where they don’t make sense! Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
I swear the whole Win 8 mess is like a bad SNL sketch. Nobody even stops to think “Hey holding out your arm for hours to poke a vertical screen is painful!” or “Why would anybody with a nice widescreen monitor and perfectly functional keyboard and mouse gonna want to give that up for a lower quality screen with a 40% markup for touch?” nope its touch all the way down at team Redmond.
If anybody has seen that SNL sketch of two American kids badly aping Japanese culture that pretty well sums up Ballmer’s MSFT, just replace Japan with Cupertino and you’d have it in one.
The primary way Windows gets distributed is via inclusion with new machines …most of them laptops nowadays (proportions ever increasing in their favour) – and it just so happens that touching the screen on those might be not so bad, with the elbow supported on a ~table right before the laptop body (seriously, try it – that’s clearly not “holding out”, certainly not “for hours” with the usual UI interactions, not even “a vertical screen”)
And in a few short years, the price premium of adding touch might be considered negligible, or even less expensive thanks to standardisation and economies of scale… (once, not a long time ago, it was also unthinkable to many that LCDs might be really cheap and rapidly replace CRTs, same with DAPs/walkmens, laptops/desktops, or touchscreen mobile phones)
Too bad Microsoft is dropping the “Windows Live” branding. “Windows Live Tiles” would work in this case pretty well.
Why not just call it what it really is instead of fooling the less intelligent with all this marketing.
Windows 6.2
You’re wrong on all counts:
Windows 8 is definitely version NT 8 for the following reasons:
Windows 7 is actually Windows 7 (the internal version number of 6.1 was purely for compatibility reasons: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/archive/b/windowsvista/archive/2… ). Win 8 is a much more significant break from Win7 and 7 was from Vista so it seems fair that Win 8 would be a major version number up as well (thus Windows 8).
Furthermore, Metro is just a shell and not an OS. So calling it “Windows n” would just be ignorant anyway. It would be like calling Explorer.exe “Windows 95” or progman.exe “Windows 3.x“.
I really do with that the peers who feel compelled to negative vote would at least have the balls to provide a technical explanation why.
Careful, commenting about another poster’s balls might land you jail time in Italy, in the near future.
Um… it’s running on Windows NT 6.2 At least the release preview.
I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant.
I know that’s what he meant and I was stating that it’s not NT 6.2. If you read the link I posted you’d see that the version number is only stored as 6.2 for compatibility reasons but it’s still regarded as v8.
I agree it’s a completely retarded approach to version numbering, but that’s MS for you :p
Edited 2012-08-06 20:48 UTC
Eh.
I’d say that’s marketing vs technical. It doesn’t really matter either way.
Not really. Versions numbers are just arbitrary and you can make an app return whatever version number you want – even incorrect version numbers if you choose to.
So there’s no reason why MS can’t get ver to report 6.x while the revision / versioning system they use inside Redmond has the Win7 and Win8 NT branches archived under 7 and 8 respectively.
I don’t know… Win7 is, for practical purposes, not far from Vista SE ‘let’s use a PR trick of “lucky 7″‘ – there’s hardly any reason to upgrade to 7 from service-packed Vista (and IIRC the 64bit versions even basically share the kernel now)
PS.
Give them some slack, their versioning is not so bad. Not when compared to the recent inflation of browser numbers, or of ~early Linux distros ( http://slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0 ), or the change from long-standing Linux 2.6.x to 3.x.
Edited 2012-08-11 22:50 UTC
So, you seem to think it’s sensible to go down with version number – that’s so “intelligent” of you…
I like Retro myself, remembering all the bad old days of Windows!
Rastro-talk!
(Astro, from the Jetsons? Nevermind, not funny).