Yes, our Web site branding sucks

March 25, 2006 By

It’s not nice to tell our branding folks that their work sucks, but sorry, it’s so obvious now that I just can’t pretend to like it. Dare Obasanjo’s post demonstrates what’s wrong very well.

We need names that are:

1) Consistent.
2) Simple.
3) Easy to tell a friend (Try saying Windows Live Local five times really fast, for instance).
4) One word that’s less than eight characters (Google wins!)
5) A domain that we own. Spend the money if we don’t have it.

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  • http://www.upi.com/Hi-Tech/view.php?StoryID=20060324-103519-5762r Ted Smith

    Wireless World: Wirelessly monitoring ECGs

    CHICAGO, March 24 (UPI) — An elderly woman has a heart attack. Paramedics arrive on the scene at her home a few minutes later and begin to revive her, and hook up an electrocardiogram transmitter to her chest, and send the signals, wirelessly, to a cardiologist at the hospital, who reads the vital signs on a handheld device. That technology advance is now saving lives, experts tell United Press International’s Wireless World. And it’s just one of the ways hospitals are today innovatively using wireless devices.

    A new study, conducted by cardiologists at Duke University Medical Center and the NorthEast Medical Center, located in North Carolina, found that doctors can find and remove clots from heart-attack patients in half the time that they previously took, because of wireless transmission of ECGs en route to the hospital. Reducing the amount of time before surgery begins is vital, for the faster the doctors open an artery, the higher the odds are that the patient’s heart muscle can be saved. By Gene Koprowski

  • http://www.upi.com/Hi-Tech/view.php?StoryID=20060324-103519-5762r Ted Smith

    Wireless World: Wirelessly monitoring ECGs

    CHICAGO, March 24 (UPI) — An elderly woman has a heart attack. Paramedics arrive on the scene at her home a few minutes later and begin to revive her, and hook up an electrocardiogram transmitter to her chest, and send the signals, wirelessly, to a cardiologist at the hospital, who reads the vital signs on a handheld device. That technology advance is now saving lives, experts tell United Press International’s Wireless World. And it’s just one of the ways hospitals are today innovatively using wireless devices.

    A new study, conducted by cardiologists at Duke University Medical Center and the NorthEast Medical Center, located in North Carolina, found that doctors can find and remove clots from heart-attack patients in half the time that they previously took, because of wireless transmission of ECGs en route to the hospital. Reducing the amount of time before surgery begins is vital, for the faster the doctors open an artery, the higher the odds are that the patient’s heart muscle can be saved. By Gene Koprowski

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  • Darcey

    Robert, could you please send these comments to the geniuses who come with these official names, because they really need to see what people think of them.

    Microsoft have some great product names like, windows, office, word, powerpoint, exel, visual studio, etc, but over the past couple of years they have been coming up with the best codenames but worst the official names you could of. Plus it drives me crazy everytime I hear ‘Of course apples product names are far superior’.

  • Darcey

    Robert, could you please send these comments to the geniuses who come with these official names, because they really need to see what people think of them.

    Microsoft have some great product names like, windows, office, word, powerpoint, exel, visual studio, etc, but over the past couple of years they have been coming up with the best codenames but worst the official names you could of. Plus it drives me crazy everytime I hear ‘Of course apples product names are far superior’.

  • http://spaces.msn.com/members/geekspeaker Jason B.

    Forgive me but I think Windows Live is actually one Microsoft got right. It ties in with another very successful and innovative Microsoft product and service, Xbox Live.

    To me it makes perfect sense.

    Windows Live will be the primary service platform from Microsoft when you are in your office.

    Xbox live is the online service which you will use in the living room.

    I have actually been working on some ideas that I am going to share with Microsoft on mashing the two services. Basically you could put certain gadgets and feeds and other services into xbox.live.com (doesn’t exist yet) and consume and share them on your 360 with your online friends there.

    At any rate, if you are using a modern software/hardware combo and browser (hopefully it will get faster) Windows Live search is 1000 better a front end and more useable to advanced users than Google search. (which doesn’t help much if you still must become more relevant)

    The one complaint I have with Live search is you can’t increase text size inside the kick ass scroll window because of the scroll window itself, and the code likes to kill iexplore.exe.

    MSN, IMHO hits it’s target audience pretty well too. I increasingly consider MSN as Microsoft’s product for baby boomers. Nothing too fancy, just oldschool research into what users like in a portal.

    Overall, I think Google’s branding is outdated, but done in a way which makes it more usable. Which is fine I guess, but I wish they would do more work on their interfaces.

  • http://spaces.msn.com/members/geekspeaker Jason B.

    Forgive me but I think Windows Live is actually one Microsoft got right. It ties in with another very successful and innovative Microsoft product and service, Xbox Live.

    To me it makes perfect sense.

    Windows Live will be the primary service platform from Microsoft when you are in your office.

    Xbox live is the online service which you will use in the living room.

    I have actually been working on some ideas that I am going to share with Microsoft on mashing the two services. Basically you could put certain gadgets and feeds and other services into xbox.live.com (doesn’t exist yet) and consume and share them on your 360 with your online friends there.

    At any rate, if you are using a modern software/hardware combo and browser (hopefully it will get faster) Windows Live search is 1000 better a front end and more useable to advanced users than Google search. (which doesn’t help much if you still must become more relevant)

    The one complaint I have with Live search is you can’t increase text size inside the kick ass scroll window because of the scroll window itself, and the code likes to kill iexplore.exe.

    MSN, IMHO hits it’s target audience pretty well too. I increasingly consider MSN as Microsoft’s product for baby boomers. Nothing too fancy, just oldschool research into what users like in a portal.

    Overall, I think Google’s branding is outdated, but done in a way which makes it more usable. Which is fine I guess, but I wish they would do more work on their interfaces.

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  • http://www.gridviewgirl.com/ Marcie

    The one that particularly bugs me is “Windows Live Mail”. Everyone knew what Hotmail was, and by replacing that with 3 extremely generic words, you’re not doing yourselves any branding favors. Besides, why have the word “Windows” in there at all? As far as I know, you don’t have to be running Windows to use “Windows Live Mail.”

    I’ve noticed from talking to many Microsoft employees that most of them use the code names instead of the ultimate product (marketing names): “Kahuna”, “Whidbey”, “Avalon”, “Yukon”, “Shilow”, etc, etc. Since y’all are so into “dog-fooding”, maybe you should have to use the product names too, just so you can see how cumbersome they are. A lot of us out in the community use the code names too — not so that we can be “cool” but because THEY ARE BETTER NAMES. When your internal “code names” become better than your “marketing” names, you have a definite branding problem.

  • http://www.gridviewgirl.com Marcie

    The one that particularly bugs me is “Windows Live Mail”. Everyone knew what Hotmail was, and by replacing that with 3 extremely generic words, you’re not doing yourselves any branding favors. Besides, why have the word “Windows” in there at all? As far as I know, you don’t have to be running Windows to use “Windows Live Mail.”

    I’ve noticed from talking to many Microsoft employees that most of them use the code names instead of the ultimate product (marketing names): “Kahuna”, “Whidbey”, “Avalon”, “Yukon”, “Shilow”, etc, etc. Since y’all are so into “dog-fooding”, maybe you should have to use the product names too, just so you can see how cumbersome they are. A lot of us out in the community use the code names too — not so that we can be “cool” but because THEY ARE BETTER NAMES. When your internal “code names” become better than your “marketing” names, you have a definite branding problem.

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  • Pauld

    ‘Live’ is a great name. Microsoft should drop the ‘Windows’ preceding it.

    Other Microsoft products with unnecessarily long names include the Microsoft Management Console (the ‘Microsoft’ bit is kind of unnecessary) and Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS – again, the ‘Microsoft’ word is unnecessary). This will probably be renamed to ‘Windows Cluster Services’ before it gets renamed to ‘Cluster Services’.

    Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)? WSUS updates more than Windows Server.

    ‘Enterprise Manager’ (SQL) and ‘Systems Manager’ (Exchange) are vague names for management consoles.

    Gyah, I have to make a blog so that I too can rant about the inconsistency of Microsoft product names and the different syntaxes used by ntdsutil.exe and diskpart.exe.

  • Pauld

    ‘Live’ is a great name. Microsoft should drop the ‘Windows’ preceding it.

    Other Microsoft products with unnecessarily long names include the Microsoft Management Console (the ‘Microsoft’ bit is kind of unnecessary) and Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS – again, the ‘Microsoft’ word is unnecessary). This will probably be renamed to ‘Windows Cluster Services’ before it gets renamed to ‘Cluster Services’.

    Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)? WSUS updates more than Windows Server.

    ‘Enterprise Manager’ (SQL) and ‘Systems Manager’ (Exchange) are vague names for management consoles.

    Gyah, I have to make a blog so that I too can rant about the inconsistency of Microsoft product names and the different syntaxes used by ntdsutil.exe and diskpart.exe.

  • Christopher Coulter

    Always a marvel, but I am gonna ever-so slightly depart from conventional wisdom here.

    You guys need to get someone with style. Fast.

    Consumer market’s aren’t the main lunch, too cutesy and iFruit feeling. Enterprise needs something that sounds heavy military and legal jargoned. The Exec’s look at the demographics, and name it accordingly. The Apple perfect marketing branding, wins consumers by storm, but outside of certain creative niche’s, remains isolated. But I think dual titles would work, consumer nomage, with a subtitle. But the Vista multiple versions kick is going to be a headache serious.

  • Christopher Coulter

    Always a marvel, but I am gonna ever-so slightly depart from conventional wisdom here.

    You guys need to get someone with style. Fast.

    Consumer market’s aren’t the main lunch, too cutesy and iFruit feeling. Enterprise needs something that sounds heavy military and legal jargoned. The Exec’s look at the demographics, and name it accordingly. The Apple perfect marketing branding, wins consumers by storm, but outside of certain creative niche’s, remains isolated. But I think dual titles would work, consumer nomage, with a subtitle. But the Vista multiple versions kick is going to be a headache serious.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Not really Christopher. The Xserve RAID is hardly a consumer product, and is doing quite well out of the creative niche too, as is the Xserve.

    I can tell you that *I* was the guy who had to explain Vista to my 90% windows company. And the SKUs.

    When the Unix guy has to do that, the branding and marketing is crap.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Not really Christopher. The Xserve RAID is hardly a consumer product, and is doing quite well out of the creative niche too, as is the Xserve.

    I can tell you that *I* was the guy who had to explain Vista to my 90% windows company. And the SKUs.

    When the Unix guy has to do that, the branding and marketing is crap.

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  • http://bybitsandbytes.wordpress.com/ bybitsandbytes

    I’ve always thought that Microsoft’s code names for projects have been better than the official product names they’ve been actually released by. The names are catchy and simple.

    Contrast Whidbey vs. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition.

  • http://bybitsandbytes.wordpress.com/ bybitsandbytes

    I’ve always thought that Microsoft’s code names for projects have been better than the official product names they’ve been actually released by. The names are catchy and simple.

    Contrast Whidbey vs. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition.

  • Christopher Coulter

    When the Unix guy has to do that, the branding and marketing is crap.

    Yeah, I am still in agreement mostly, just I know the CIO style in things procurement, the more consumerish the image, the less actionable it becomes. But Microsoft has a huge task ahead of them per Vista, but why they will kick out $500 million plus. With Microsoft it usually takes that much. They are the greatest success story failure; OS and Office fund an Empire of Rot.

  • Christopher Coulter

    When the Unix guy has to do that, the branding and marketing is crap.

    Yeah, I am still in agreement mostly, just I know the CIO style in things procurement, the more consumerish the image, the less actionable it becomes. But Microsoft has a huge task ahead of them per Vista, but why they will kick out $500 million plus. With Microsoft it usually takes that much. They are the greatest success story failure; OS and Office fund an Empire of Rot.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    I still love how people are justifying the plethora of SKUs for Vista as “Choice”. I guess it sounds better than “Lets MS charge you multiple times for the same thing”.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    I still love how people are justifying the plethora of SKUs for Vista as “Choice”. I guess it sounds better than “Lets MS charge you multiple times for the same thing”.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    John: now who is being unaccurate? For someone who says he’s so concerned about my accuracy, you sure seem to play lose and fast with your opinions.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    John: now who is being unaccurate? For someone who says he’s so concerned about my accuracy, you sure seem to play lose and fast with your opinions.

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  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Robert,

    There have been multiple people in this blog and others saying that Microsoft is providing choice via multiple SKUs.

    I’ve yet to see anything that shows any kind of reason other than “Charge multiple times for the same thing” for six skus. Some aren’t even able to be bought outside of enterprise agreements, and Microsoft has spent time making it easier to change your version of Windows to a ‘better’ one on the fly, in case you need a feature that wasn’t in the one you bought.

    There’s no hard technical reason for six SKUs, and we both know it. Detecting hardware types and creating an appropriate installation for that hardware is well-solved problem, so it’s not like Microsoft cannot do this. Unless they are truly unable to do what every other OS vendor has been doing for a while now.

    That leaves us with a non-technical reason.

    It’s not to make things easier, as six SKUs make things more complex, especially since some of them are not available outside of enterprise licensing agreements, which are hideously complex as is.

    So technical is out, barring incompetence/utter lack of skills.

    It’s not to increase simplicity, that’s obvious.

    The choice reasoning is a fallacy on the face of it.

    It’s not to save consumers money, as it actually costs Microsoft more to have six SKUs, six lines of packaging, etc. One SKU would drastically decrease Microsoft’s costs here, and allow them to charge less.

    So what is left is based on marketing and sales, and making it easier to turn what should be a one time purchase, an OS, into a set of multiple revenue streams. Face it, going from Vista (whatever) to Vista (whatever) is free money for Microsoft. It’s a coldly brilliant idea.

    Contrary to popular belief, I do give things a bit of a think here and there. Now, if you have real evidence for six SKUs that falls outside of my reasoning, by all means, provide better facts, and I’ll alter that opinion to take them into account. But based on the facts that I’ve been able to find, and quite a bit of experience at more levels of this biz than you may realize, I’m comfortable with my opinion and the reasoning behind it.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Robert,

    There have been multiple people in this blog and others saying that Microsoft is providing choice via multiple SKUs.

    I’ve yet to see anything that shows any kind of reason other than “Charge multiple times for the same thing” for six skus. Some aren’t even able to be bought outside of enterprise agreements, and Microsoft has spent time making it easier to change your version of Windows to a ‘better’ one on the fly, in case you need a feature that wasn’t in the one you bought.

    There’s no hard technical reason for six SKUs, and we both know it. Detecting hardware types and creating an appropriate installation for that hardware is well-solved problem, so it’s not like Microsoft cannot do this. Unless they are truly unable to do what every other OS vendor has been doing for a while now.

    That leaves us with a non-technical reason.

    It’s not to make things easier, as six SKUs make things more complex, especially since some of them are not available outside of enterprise licensing agreements, which are hideously complex as is.

    So technical is out, barring incompetence/utter lack of skills.

    It’s not to increase simplicity, that’s obvious.

    The choice reasoning is a fallacy on the face of it.

    It’s not to save consumers money, as it actually costs Microsoft more to have six SKUs, six lines of packaging, etc. One SKU would drastically decrease Microsoft’s costs here, and allow them to charge less.

    So what is left is based on marketing and sales, and making it easier to turn what should be a one time purchase, an OS, into a set of multiple revenue streams. Face it, going from Vista (whatever) to Vista (whatever) is free money for Microsoft. It’s a coldly brilliant idea.

    Contrary to popular belief, I do give things a bit of a think here and there. Now, if you have real evidence for six SKUs that falls outside of my reasoning, by all means, provide better facts, and I’ll alter that opinion to take them into account. But based on the facts that I’ve been able to find, and quite a bit of experience at more levels of this biz than you may realize, I’m comfortable with my opinion and the reasoning behind it.

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  • Miles Anderson

    Look at the Channel 9 video with Bill Gates from Mix. EVEN BILL GATES snickers when he mentions Windows Presentation Format Embeded. So if your names are not liked by developers, not by users, not by evangelists like your self, not by the laywers, and not by Bill Gates – who is liking these names? Who comes up with them? You ought to do an interview with that person.

  • Miles Anderson

    Look at the Channel 9 video with Bill Gates from Mix. EVEN BILL GATES snickers when he mentions Windows Presentation Format Embeded. So if your names are not liked by developers, not by users, not by evangelists like your self, not by the laywers, and not by Bill Gates – who is liking these names? Who comes up with them? You ought to do an interview with that person.

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  • solomonrex

    But Live and start.com works, you just didn’t clean out MSN to begin with. Once again, your legacy applications and business relationships are holding you back.

    MSN Video
    Windows Live Local

    1. remove Windows
    Live mail
    Live Spaces
    2. Don’t advertise your other software in the names itself – Keep MSN or kill it.
    Live Money, Money.com or Live Finance
    Groups.live.com or Live Sharing or Our Lives
    Live talk or Live Messenger
    Live Video
    Live Local or Live Neighborhood or Live Guide
    Live Spaces

    To be honest, I don’t think it matters. ESPN.com has technically been espn.go.com or something for years, but no one even knows what go.com is, right? I’ve never gone there, but espn.com is literally visted 365 days a year by me. And it’s one of the most popular websites. Having said that, the branding on the website itself isn’t actually labeled “espn presented by go.com” or anything. Considering the disparity in audience, it SHOULD be “go.com presented by espn.com”.

    But this also points out how useless your MSN branding might be. If IE went to live.com by default, who would care? Some folks might be confused for a little while, but chances are they went to msn.com because they didn’t know any better. So, have a transition, change msn.com to start.com, and start renaming things like you’re doing with msn spaces, but DON’T stop. Or live/start/msn/windows/passport/.net will cease to be useful to consumers.

    Brands should be pointers, right? If they’re confusing or mis-matched they don’t actually contribute as advertising, they therefore should be redone. In the auto world, Land Rover isn’t Ford Land Rover, because that would dilute the luxury brand. And the Neon certainly isn’t labeled, “Dodge Neon presented by Mercedes Benz” Currently, MSN is diluting your cred with geeks, and Windows is diluting your name with webanistas. So I think Live is newest, and start.com makes sense for a new MSN home page.

    But I don’t know where your legacy MSN network is going (are you still dialup only?) or what’s behind tacking ‘Windows’ onto every web property? If you want to cut your web properties in two, then just do it. Geeky stuff is live, and more mainstream stuff is msn. But currently, I don’t think you have a plan.

  • solomonrex

    But Live and start.com works, you just didn’t clean out MSN to begin with. Once again, your legacy applications and business relationships are holding you back.

    MSN Video
    Windows Live Local

    1. remove Windows
    Live mail
    Live Spaces
    2. Don’t advertise your other software in the names itself – Keep MSN or kill it.
    Live Money, Money.com or Live Finance
    Groups.live.com or Live Sharing or Our Lives
    Live talk or Live Messenger
    Live Video
    Live Local or Live Neighborhood or Live Guide
    Live Spaces

    To be honest, I don’t think it matters. ESPN.com has technically been espn.go.com or something for years, but no one even knows what go.com is, right? I’ve never gone there, but espn.com is literally visted 365 days a year by me. And it’s one of the most popular websites. Having said that, the branding on the website itself isn’t actually labeled “espn presented by go.com” or anything. Considering the disparity in audience, it SHOULD be “go.com presented by espn.com”.

    But this also points out how useless your MSN branding might be. If IE went to live.com by default, who would care? Some folks might be confused for a little while, but chances are they went to msn.com because they didn’t know any better. So, have a transition, change msn.com to start.com, and start renaming things like you’re doing with msn spaces, but DON’T stop. Or live/start/msn/windows/passport/.net will cease to be useful to consumers.

    Brands should be pointers, right? If they’re confusing or mis-matched they don’t actually contribute as advertising, they therefore should be redone. In the auto world, Land Rover isn’t Ford Land Rover, because that would dilute the luxury brand. And the Neon certainly isn’t labeled, “Dodge Neon presented by Mercedes Benz” Currently, MSN is diluting your cred with geeks, and Windows is diluting your name with webanistas. So I think Live is newest, and start.com makes sense for a new MSN home page.

    But I don’t know where your legacy MSN network is going (are you still dialup only?) or what’s behind tacking ‘Windows’ onto every web property? If you want to cut your web properties in two, then just do it. Geeky stuff is live, and more mainstream stuff is msn. But currently, I don’t think you have a plan.

  • met

    My speculation:

    Adding the name “Windows” to a product makes it feel like its integrated with Windows (OS). That way the anti-trust cases can be thwarted.
    And MS can also argue that Windows exists only as a package of the OS, Live and other apps, thus they can’t split them up.

    I can’t see any other reason, other than the management not feeling confident about a new product that they have to use the “Microsoft” or “Windows” leverage to make it popular.

  • met

    My speculation:

    Adding the name “Windows” to a product makes it feel like its integrated with Windows (OS). That way the anti-trust cases can be thwarted.
    And MS can also argue that Windows exists only as a package of the OS, Live and other apps, thus they can’t split them up.

    I can’t see any other reason, other than the management not feeling confident about a new product that they have to use the “Microsoft” or “Windows” leverage to make it popular.

  • http://www.nozio.com/ chris faron

    I live in Italy, at least “Vista” is an easy name for Italians to remember. Hey guys what do you think of our name “nozio” http://www.nozio.com easy to remember or not?

  • http://www.nozio.com chris faron

    I live in Italy, at least “Vista” is an easy name for Italians to remember. Hey guys what do you think of our name “nozio” http://www.nozio.com easy to remember or not?

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  • http://www.marielulingerie.it/catalog/index.php MarieLu

    i agree MS branding is not the best but their products are still funtional and easy to use. :-)

  • http://www.marielulingerie.it/catalog/index.php MarieLu

    i agree MS branding is not the best but their products are still funtional and easy to use. :-)

  • kayode

    i read your comments dare obasanjo and i feel i want to say naming according to microsoft brand maybe aimed at particular group like the italian nozio said.
    what do you think of names like koverseas, bilvent and baft all around here in africa and making a strong brand.

  • http://stilldeveloping kayode

    i read your comments dare obasanjo and i feel i want to say naming according to microsoft brand maybe aimed at particular group like the italian nozio said.
    what do you think of names like koverseas, bilvent and baft all around here in africa and making a strong brand.

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