Monad gets renamed to PowerShell

Monad is a very nice piece of software. Powerful, extensible, bringing the Unix world to the Windows people. “Monad” as a word alludes to the powerful Leibnizian philosopical approach of monadology, which influenced scores of important philosophers and mathematicians.

But “PowerShell”????

Could you pick a name more 1990s shareware-esque?

It sounds cheap. Bourne-Again Shell (born again), C-Shell (seashell), these are clever names that also indicate their origins.

PowerShell sounds like a 1980s Hanna-Barbera cartoon about command line interfaces.

And, of course, it’s also used by a bunch of other people…

A quick Google turns up:

http://powershell.sourceforge.net/, a (good) terminal emulator for X11

http://www.majorgeeks.com/PowerShell_XP_d4149.html, a shell extension for Windows XP

Yeah, kudos, marketing department! Pick a (lame) name that is already in use by two other packages.

I wonder how long it will take good ol’s MSFT to sue the X11 terminal emulator people for use of their trademarked name PowerShell (TM). The capital S in the middle is a special MSFT invention, I guess…

I think the new name is horrible. “Power” sounds incredibly cheese, certainly not like a product geard towards tech professionals. Why the added “Windows”?!?

The new abbrevation “PS” is terrible for searches. It is used already by Postscript. “MSH” was great, as it always narrowed down searches very well.

“Monad” and “MSH” was a GREAT combination. Short, everyone liked it, and none of that nonse “Microsoft” or “Windows” attached.

Not happy.

Oh, and Robert: Do you like the new name?!? You write kudos to the marketing people that the name is short, which indicates that that is the only thing you like about it

David: it’s OK. It’s better than many of our names, not as good as our best, but it lost the soul that Monad had.

Can’t stop right now. Didn’t you say just a couple of days ago that marketers should explain their product naming? Why not start right away: Please try to track down the person that was in charge of this one and make him/her explain it.

I’m working on it. Actually the guy in charge of naming just wrote me a very nice email so we’re gonna get together soon.

Cool – so finally you can start administering complex windows software architectures from the command line.

*cough*. Like Linux, AIX, Solaris, AS/400, zOs and I’m guessing OS/x (lineage, etc).

I’m really glad that *someone* in MS actually listened to a customer, and actually managed to push it past all the dead whales in MS middle management. Reading your blog and Mini-MSFT’s blog, the latter operation sounds *really* difficult.

But one has to ask. *Yet* another different MS interface, in *yet* another release. Another 3-5 years before it beds in, is reliable and is supported by third party vendors. And the usual question – will it be around for good, or is this just another MS-Must-Have-Now-But-Forgotten-About release ?

Wasnt SMS supposed to do this ? Or did I made the mistake of believing *that* product marketing when it first came out 10+ years ago ?

Kudos on actually delivering something that might help. Which might offset the “why wasnt it in Windows 2000″ thought that keeps popping up in *my* head.

—* Bill
http://www.billbuchan.com

Welcome back, Robert.

Yep — never liked the name of Monad for the whole ‘G’ reason.

Well we’d like to watch the video – but as long as you insist on making them in .wmv, you’re going to be only preaching to the choir (and I’m not in it).

From the blog link: “When Marketing saw what the technology actually did and the incredibly positive reaction that customers and partners, they decided that we warrented a “Marquee” name (I’m not making this up). Marquee names are given to those features that are going to be emphasized during the Marketing push.”

Just an interesting tidbit of insight into why this product gets a short name.

i agree – monad was much better than powershell. so was longhorn.

Excellent! Will be interesting to hear why he came up with that… I think it also is important to keep in mind that MSH could have been kept if the thing would have been called Microsoft Command Shell, or something like that. The more I think about, the more I see the non searchability of “PS” as a problem. Tech pros so rely on being able to quickly search for things on their technology…

Excellent! Will be interesting to hear why he came up with that… I think it also is important to keep in mind that MSH could have been kept if the thing would have been called Microsoft Command Shell, or something like that. The more I think about, the more I see the non searchability of “PS” as a problem. Tech pros so rely on being able to quickly search for things on their technology…

Monad is too geeky, sounds like a Lord of the Rings or Star Trekkian race, something dipped from the SciFi channel. But PowerShell, won’t work with the core audience, too Energy Drinkish, too pop-cultural sharewarey cheese-whiz on high. Good in the sense of the wider CIO buying audience, that won’t use, but will be impressed over the “power” nomage. I guess it depends, looks bad to me, but then anything is an improvement over say something like, Microsoft Windows Command Line Shell Core Edition or Microsoft Windows Data Prompt Shell. I guess it really depends on the buying market…if “Power” works.

But the legal dept. sure didn’t do their homework, enough similarity to make a case on a few fronts.

Leaving out the spaces makes PowerShell one word?

I agree with the PowerShell blog – they expected it to be Microsoft shell or Management shell. Those (at least the first) aren’t taken and identify the product immediately in the “marketplace”. The only better option would be to identify it with .Net, which is the backbone and the key selling feature: exposure to .Net classes and object oriented structure via the command line. Then, again, .Net has had a problem of it’s own as a brand.

shell.net? Command.net? Microsoft .Net Shell?

But no, it’s not a terrible “Windows Live .Net Command Shell 2006″ style name.

Finally, about the product itself: if you really want to go after hobbyists again (as with your Live initiative), this needs to be part of Windows Vista Economy Basic (or whatever it’s called). Ship it with everything, and you may get some traction against Linux mindshare and a get a toehold in various Linux shops and small businesses that would like easier, more powerful scripting features in their desktop. VBA helps Office, after all. Having an XML-literate command shell might just win some developers over. And one of LAMP’s strongest features is just the Bash shell.

“Powerful, extensible, bringing the Unix world to the Windows people.”

I hate comments like this. Monad (or whatever) is waaaaay more powerful than any shell you can get on Unix. If *nix had a shell that allowed you to write pseudo-Java that called into compiled Java classes andprovided the ability to modify or monitor every part of the OS locally or remotely, with automatic authentication and easy piping of .Net objects between processes, then we could talk. Monad is way more than just a shell, and I think it’s one of the best things Microsoft has done for its powerusers and IT shops in a long time.

BTW, the name change stinks and represents how Microsoft marketing kills whatever it touches. How about the “PowerShell 2006 SP1 Express Edition for Administrators”? Wouldn’t that be a more informative name?

I like the name. I’m not saying it’s perfect but it’s a lot better than I expected: “Windows Integrated Shell 2007 Enhanced Edition”

What can be done in this that can’t be done in the Bash shell? From the blog:

First, this shell does not use text as the basis for interaction with the system, but uses an object model based on the .NET platform.

Huh? Everything on there looked like text to me, and if they’re trying to be “admin friendly” it has to be text. I’m not sure if they’re planning on drag and dropping something into a command line interface (it wouldn’t surprise me if they did).

Those that don’t understand the bash shell are bound to reimplement it, poorly. Or worse they could come up with PHP.

Second, the list of built-in commands is much larger; this is done to ensure that the interaction with the object model is accomplished with the highest regard to integrity with respect to interacting with the system.

Oh I see that they have reimplemented PHP with its 1500 “core” methods.

Alex, while I am happy to admit that Monad brings a lot of news things to the shell game (so to speak), it is being introduced about 10 years after Bash 2.0. How much shell systems administration has anyone done in Windows, not counting Cygwin (a port of Unix utilities). Batch files for COMMAND.COM or CMD.EXE, maybe on of the third-party shareware shells? Pretty lame. But only because MSFT took so long to catch on that a lot of sysadmins don’t like pointy clicky things for administrative systems.

I’ve thought about the lack of a Java analogue to Monad, for the Unix world, and wondered why no one had done it. I reckon a big part of the reason is that it really wasn’t particularly necessary. Almost everything in Unix is manipulation of text files of one sort or another, so text-based shells work quite well. When you get into the wacky-object world of Windows, then it seems like an object-passing shell is fairly useful.

When O’Reilly or someone puts out a book like “Monad Cookbook” or something to that effect, it’ll have real traction. Until then, it’s just something else MSFT is trying, it may last or it may get killed, who knows?

PowerShell??? I agree, it’s all very 1980s. I’m surprised they didn’t go with Turbo… “TurboShell – now 50% faster!”

What’s wrong with Monad? I liked that name. Marketing was worried about it being called Gonad? Reminds me of The Simpsons episode where Homer and Marge are trying to pick a name for Bart. While choosing names Homer is coming up with alternatives which kids would use to make fun of him at school. The joke being that he ended up with Bart.

I’m begining to think that the people picking Microsoft’s product names are sitting in a room somewhere with a magic 8 ball. “What about PowerShell?” *MS Marketing dude shakes magic 8 ball* “Yes!” OK, the magic 8 ball has spoken, PowerShell it is!

Microsoft powers hell?

Okay…

I’ve gotta agree with some of the other comments. msh is *far* more searchable, keeps with the tradition of command shell naming, and PowerShell reeks of cheesy shareware. Monad shell, msft shell, management shell…. not PowerShell.

-Kelly

“If *nix had a shell that allowed you to write pseudo-Java that called into compiled Java classes andprovided the ability to modify or monitor every part of the OS locally or remotely, with automatic authentication and easy piping of .Net objects between processes, then we could talk. ”

OK, so its more like a Smalltalk workspace. Nifty. And the language is something like C# script? That’s really unfortunate but I guess the users will be “familiar” with it.

I agree that “PowerShell” is UltraLame.