What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you It is no secret that we like to use the odd bit of shorthand at The Register when biting the hand that feeds IT. Now we need a fresh one for Microsoft. We know that Google has a deep and abiding love for our "Chocolate Factory" sobriquet. Everybody knows "Big Blue" = IBM and caring, sharing Larry Ellison's Oracle is known and …
So many things fly through my mind like the Blue Screen Brothers or Little Blue or the Windowcleaners or even The Quilt for its many patches. No more Citizen Gates or Big Balmer, perhaps Satyayoga or Little Cortana is listening on you. To me, they remain The Monopoly. But then the name is enough in itself: TinyDuctile (American English), NietigZacht (Dutch), WinzigSanft (German).
1. "The Blob" (absorbing everything in its path and growing bigger and bigger and bigger)
[and along with it, the theme song by Burt Bacharach]
2. "MesS" (ok that's lame)
3. "Redmond Overlords"
4. 'Megashaft' <-- an oldie but still valid
5. ok "Megabucks" but with a slightly altered Starbucks logo
6. Semprini [/me ducks]
7. "Cult of Redmond" <-- I've used this one before
8. "Umbrella Corporation"
9. "Maleficent Overlords/Overseers"
10. "Big Brother's Evil Cousin"
probably enough for now. hopefully spawns derivative names, one of which will be settled on as "the official one"
Ok - one more - 2D FLATTY FLATSO McFLATFACE (that was obligatory, heh)
I think The (Holey) Redmond Empire should be enough. Alternatives: the Patchworks, Mission Incompatible, the Feature Factory, the Industry Standard, Satanic Mill, MoneySpinners, Muggle Stuff, MicroSieve (for their holes), Magic Smoke or Mirrors & Smoke, Mister Satya.
"Bad Wolf" - https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Bad_Wolf_meme
When you read through some of those (including the futuristic 'Bad Wolf Corporation' being run by Daleks) it all makes sense...
[I had the pleasure of re-watching all of the Doctor #9 episodes recently]
OK Slightly shorter:
the Penguin feathered Beast of EEE.
This brings in the fact they are trying to appeal to penguinistas, but underneath they are more like the ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal and that their philosophy is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I'm trying to get my head around how flummoxed the Bronze Age Trojans would have been if they were faced with a large wooden model of a Southern Hemisphere only animal. It would have to be in swimming/tobogganing mode as standing would be too top heavy for wheels/sled.
It would have to be painted as well and there is nothing in Homer about the Horse being painted.
The start?
As a US company holding your code in a "private" directory, the US govt now has an admin backdoor to any code published on Github.
I'm sure it will only be used for "terrorism", but imagine the MPAA-type lawsuits once they can scan your code for patent violations.
Microlost?
Not so much.
I think MicroVir would be better.
Because of the registry, its ideological twin now foisted on Linux (systemd) and last but not least, the embrace, engulf and destroy action it has shown to be so proficient at for so many years.
O.
Why settle for yearly? Once we choose a base name our esteemed hacks can change it up every paragraph or two!
As an example (going with another commentard's example of Edge Lords because it got a chuckle out of me):
First mention plays it straight, simply say Edge Lords.
Next time you need to mention it in the article, Edge Lords for Business. Then Edge Lords 365. Then Visual Edge Lords. And so on.
Should work with most of the name suggestions here honestly. If there's a couple favourites can even rotate between them, win-win!
I represent Stewart Lee and hereby summons you, for use of his long running Boris nomenclature joke, to appear before your peers one quiet Sunday afternoon on the appropriate comments section of The Grauniad.
Bring a change of briefs, as there's a chance they might get shredded.
Sat Nad be setting his Sat Nav
checkin his net and makin a bet.
keeping on creeping up to Balmer da Baller
who's using his Fusion to break the illusion
the new kid is usin to think that he's movin
up on big B and his legacy.
Sat's shoes may rest neath the desk
BfG only sees a speck that recedes
Taycan the lead, and unless he proceeds
to take a long rest that is all that poor Sat Nad sees...
Cause he's stuck in a mirage, you'd think he'd cry in his Mirai,
no, and i'll tell you all why. Here's the facts, he's got stacks
piled up high as the sky and the stock price is high.
Last place is fine I'll be frank when there's bronze in the bank.
The term Microshaft is well known by quite a few in the curcles I frequent, is fairly obvious to whom it refers to and slips off the tongue well.
Shaft can refer to a deep entrance to, for example, a mine wherein the riches if the Earth lie or it could refer to being screwed either financially or interms of being able to continue in some way (BSOD?) etc.
Or The Defenesters, they sell you windows and the frequently throw you out of them.
The shaft of blaxploitation fame is a hero, of sorts. Redmond isn't, wasn't, and never will have that status. (Ever read the book? Shaft was originally white ... Surprised me, anyway. Now you know why I always read the book before watching the Hollywood hackjob.)
ANYway, the "shaft" in Microshaft is more of the she got the goldmine variety ...
Been playing with Has Been, Yesterday's Man, Once Mattered and suchlike. Not really getting anywhere however, my best shot being:
The-Once-And-Future-Borg
which is a tad long IMO.
Then got onto How the mighty have fallen which led to the more succinct
The Fallen
which has a nice Lucifer Morningstar ring to it.
Oh the joy of the challenge, to somehow encapsulate all the frustration, annoyance, anger that MS continues to deliver, into one phrase.
Shitflake sprinklers comes to mind, an unkind reference to the absurd and entirely juvenile re-modelling of Excel and Word, with thousands of choices of "sprinkles" - different styles each more ghastly and lurid - reminiscent of the cultural imposition of chemical flavouring "shots" and said shitflake adornments by the big-name coffee shops.
Perhaps their other superpowers ought to get a mention, "Processor heating engineers", "Renowned cycle stealers" - even as i speak, their "MS Teams" is busy consuming 50% of my 5000 MIPs - testing some poor register bit to beyond death - in order to find out whether I've offered call quality feedback yet, or not. How can starving children program that badly?
Oh, and the whole "you said you didn't want your room tidied, so I did it when you weren't looking, and all your stuff is in the garden" approach to updates - which combines all their previous skills, the fatuous functionality, hogging the processor till you submit to their will, and adds deliberately breaking autosave - which now only works if you store onto MS cloud, rather than disk - and deliberately deleting or hiding documents you were working on.
Maybe "productivity assassins", "teletype tinkerers" - given that most of it is tinkerage now, Excel 2003 was the high point, and the teletype is nearly as old - and it's what they started on.
I don't know, maybe they should also be lambasted for the cringing "world" adverts, making shit office software and pretending it's saving the world? - "Teletype visionaries" - any sort of mash-up of the above?
Have to agree with Reg though, it's best sorted out over a long lunch.
I fear I am lacking all couth. I cannot summon ire at Windows. I actually like Win 10 - for some reason, it behaves itself on my machine, runs fast even on 8 year old gear, doesn’t get in the way of my apps, definitely doesn’t throw any unwanted pop ups in my face. Unlike much of the web.
And is actually easier to use than Ubuntu. That may just be the learning curve. While in Windows I can browse to SMB shares, in Ubuntu I get an unhelpful “nope, auth failed”, and no offer to type in a user / password. CLI allows me to mount a share with my Ubuntu username/password, so I know I got the user created right on the other end. Yet, no share browsing.
Must be that lack of couth again. Why browse shares when you can mount them? I dunno, it seems convenient.
I can RDP to Windows no problem, from anywhere. VNC to Ubuntu - not out of the box, or only with encryption off, if coming from Windows. “That’s the fault of your VNC client, peasant”. “You need to replace the Ubuntu-side server with TigerVNC, you noob”. I get it. Lack of couth. It can all be solved, and - is it asking too much to expect this stuff to, well, “just work”?
To be fair, Ubuntu has many of the same problems that Redmond and Cupertino have, and for the same reason. That reason? Trying to be all things to all people ... a task that not even one of the many "Gods" invented by humans have managed to do, even in myth and fable.
Ubuntu what?
I got no issues with 18.04 / kubuntu. Win10 is ok as well, it's display handling is much better. KDE/plasma at least scales betwen 1 and 2 kn a high dpi display, But W10 is superior on the dynamic side.
On the RDP front... why not just use . . . Well RDP, instead of VNC. Apt install xrdp. Viola, i can use msrdp from W10 to my ubu, or remmina from UBU to win. These days thats all pretty stable and seemless. Actually, for ubu server you can run LXDE skip the compositor, and use vanilla 16bit rdp, without beating up your client, or turn it up, use remoteFX, and have a pleasant experience if you've got the bandwdth. RDP on 2008+ is abysmal without a modern rdp client and good bandwidth.
W10/2012+ is decidedly more polished though, and even though I do run it, setting up openldap, and PAM, makes AD/fsmo roles, and cruft, look simple. At least until it breaks ;).
Most of the xrdp server stuff, fixed and got stable 3ish years ago. RDP accel is still hit or miss, on BOTH. Multi-display is cli invocation only.
Yep. You would have thought that after all these years that distros would have learned to make Samba "just work". Cupertino managed it seamlessly but every Linux distro needs tinkering with or magical incantations before Samba sort of does what it was supposed to do.
Ferkin' irritating. Apart from that I just love Linux.
But Samba :-o
Mac
"productivity assassins" has my vote. Oh, the number of days I've lost just trying to get their stuff to work. Even this week, having Win10 lock solid when I disconnect from VPN, requiring a forced power-down and losing all unsaved work (Word's autosave didn't!) - what OS is so bad as to allow a single user process to halt the whole machine? Oh, that's right, Windows...
"to somehow encapsulate all the frustration, annoyance, anger that MS continues to deliver"
Or, you could just stop using their bÖrkenware. Cleaner that way.
Yes, you can. I stopped all work on Redmond products over 10 years ago. My health, pocketbook and sanity are much better now.
Hey! bÖrkenware (with the lowercase 'b')! Covers the very clever "Bork! Bork! Bork!" from earlier in this forum without impinging on El Reg's not-quite-copyright. The lower-case b accurately references the quality of the average Microsoft product as, well...lower-case. The uppercase umlauted O is brand-worthy. And even the most innocent of Reg readers will immediately know of whom you are speaking!
Ship it!
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I'm afraid you need to follow that with "...and here's lots and lots of money" if you want them to pretend to like you.
Aaaand...back to the point.
Azure cloud would suggest "Sky Blue", but Coventry City FC might have some objections.
I always think of them as 'Pernicious Purveyors of PowerHell' myself...
Right, so I've not been a fan since I first tried Linux but I don't get this.
How did we get from complaining that the 'mundanes' never kept their PCs up to date (and so threatened everyone's security) to complaining that doing it for them makes us update too? One or the other, please.
Besides, they've done much worse. Such as the data slurping.
It's more the "I'm applying this update right now whether you want me to or not, and it'll break things you've been using for years, and it'll require a reboot? You say you're busy? Not near as busy as in half an hour when you're trying to get your computer to actually boot again..." kind of update.
Updates that FIX things are good. Updates that BREAK things are really, really bad. Updates you can't stop that break things are like being tied to the railroad tracks and watching the oncoming train.
So few Windows breakages down to updates over the last few years. Last problem was down to a colleague pushing out stuff via sccm in the wrong order for our soon to be decommissioned Svr2008 machines recently. My (big name) droid phone has more problems (but no crapware like many) and the manufacturer will give up on my 6 month old hardware in 28 months. At least MS somehow keep supporting the majority of old kit for 10+ years.
Oh don't get me started with the unwelcome reboots... It drives me nuts when I go to the PC in the morning to discover that it has been rebooted overnight, without a care for my unsaved documents.
Perhaps I am a little foolish for not saving my documents, but they are just random notes in Notepad. I would have no problem with losing the data if it were entirely my fault, but this is completely avoidable. How about you just present me with a message saying it was unable to reboot last night due to to unsaved documents, and let me decide when the thing restarts? Grr
Updates that break userspace are one of the deadly sins of computing. Microsoft has been guilty of breaking userspace at least once a month for over thirty years ... and yet STILL people insist on using it? What the fuck?
As Anthony Weldon wrote in the 1651 tome The Court and Character of King James "The Italians having a Proverb, ‘He that deceives me once, its his fault; but if twice, its my fault.'.
How about something along the lines of “Office Hipsters”? “Corporate Hipsters”? “Enterprise Hipsters”? They got all this wannabe-Apple stuff going on, Surface devices, ear pods now, and it’s all decent enough gear and at the same eye-watering prices.
And at the same time, it all feels ever so slightly stuffy, with Word and Excel and productivity tools.
Similar story with Teams, and now Github - look the cool kids are doing Slack, let’s make one, call it Teams, and make sure it feels just as fresh and fun as a motivational speaker during a sales conference.
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I used to see then called - Micro$oft
This had the dual features of showing money being a nearly central interest and that they are specifically USian.
There used to be a website www.microsith.com but it seems to have turned into a gambling site, or so my filters tell me. That explored the link between them and a secretive sociopathic and dangerous group and some people from Star Wars...
Following The Register Standard Naming Convention, 'Borgzilla' seems an appropriate choice.
Veering into gaming territory, you could go for 'All Your Boxen Belong To Us'.
Keeping it topical, there's always 'Beyond Bill' or 'EaaS' (Everything as a Service).
Finally, going old-school and providing a link to the glory days, why not coin the term ' The Beige Factory'.
...in honor of the unfortunates immortalized on the cover of The Mythical Man-Month, who either wandered of their own free will or were driven by forces beyond their control into the nigh-inescapable embrace of doom. Refuge, sustenance, or simply safe passage to the sunlit uplands beyond... who can say what they sought? All shared the common fate: first a lack of progress, an inability to move forward... imperceptibly but inexorably, they sink; the more they struggle, the more they are trapped... perhaps at the end they roar, knowing they cannot save themselves but hoping still to warn their kin... then they are gone.
And yet they still come.
Something along the line of “House of Co-Dependance” for how the tech industry and customers are in a co-dependant relationship with them, or “RandomSoft” for their ever-shifting program features and overall roadmaps.
Although I did always love the Pinky & The Brain parody moniker of “MicroSloth”.
Thunderstorm
Because they used to create software for microcomputers (hence Microsoft), but have gone all cloud lately. And when you move everything and more into the clouds, you'll eventually end up with a thunderstorm.
Plus using Microsoft products often gives you that dark grumbly feeling when they keep changing/renaming everything every 5 seconds.
Belgians!
I don't remember this Python reference but it would certainly get Douglas Adams a bit animated...
A couple of years ago I had a shocking experience in the international terminal of Brussels airport: After paying something like €5 for a cup of tea I discovered that there was no milk! They don't put it in tea! Shock! Horror!
Recently, amidst a list of proper questions, I jokingly asked a tech support guy from Belgium:
Why don't you guys put milk in your tea? It's delicious!
His response was classic:
It's an island thing don't you know - it only tastes good in England - a bit like how beer only tastes good here.
Well, touché! He got me there.
Perhaps Microsoft stuff is only Amazing in Redmond?
MS has announced that W10 is the last Windows. No clue as to the name of the next OS they put out.
They are hampered by the tiny remains of dos in their so called kernel.
They have a MS Linux kernel in use.
They are moving as much as they can to the 'cloud' for greater control.
They - in my view - have to be working to create an OS based on that Linux kernel of theirs. Much more usable for cloud deployment - is actually a multi user system and all that implies. Also much better platform for actually spying on your users. Think about the possibilities and - again to me - this is the obvious route to take for them.
So this brings me back to the 'slurp' zone for
MacroSlurp
MS has announced that W10 is the last "Windows" version. Has an EOL of 2025.
They have their own Linux kernel version now.
They want to shift everything possible - including the OS itself to the cloud.
Linux is a multi user system - obviously a better fit for that cloud deployment as it is much more flexible and easier to secure.
Also - in the hands of the wrong sort of developers - Linux offers much greater functionality for slurping up everything done on the system.
All this has me convinced that MS is actively developing the next OS (name has not been hinted at yet) to run on a Linux base. This brings me back to the use of Slurp.
MacroSlurp
Shitzilla, Mankysoft, Microshite, Microbork, Microslurp, Microbroke, Weinersoft, Microspent Force, MicrOSSoft Extinguishers, MicrOSSoftware Killers, Trojansoft, Redmond Workflow Discontinuers, Microlast Chance Saloon...
Products:
Microsoft Turd, Microsoft Feckswell, Microsoft Taxess / Taccess, Microsoft Reams, Windoesn't, Winblows, Windozey, Edge of the Abyss, Towering Winferno, Clitty says would you like a subscription with that...
The thinking here is the three themes.
McBloaty, McSurface and McSub, incorporating Microsoft 360 Subscriptions.
McBloatMcSurfaceMcSub.
McSurfaceMcSub.
McSubMcSurface
But the best is long version / short version:
BloatyMcSurface.Sub
Pronounced 'BloatyMcSurface<dot>Sub.
shortened to 'BloatyMcSurface'
They're a order of magnitude or three bigger since they pinched DR-DOS but you still need a magnifying glass to see their contribution to general purpose computing, unless it's the interminable wait for "Windows Updates" (Evergreen needs to die in a fire) and then the downtime in man-hours can probably be seen from space. Most of their "innovations," including that of the current business model of "data data everywhere" have been begged, borrowed or outright stolen from other innovators. There's a thought: The Borg. Your stuff will be assimilated.
It is often quipped that should Microsoft ever make a vacuum cleaner it would be the only thing that didn't suck. This is probably a bit unfair; their hardware is generally, excluding the RROD X Boxen, quite good quality, especially their input peripherals. Not a patch on a decent Cherry brown or Model M, of course...
I think the name should point out more that they heavily rely on being installed on every PC by default:
the default one
the lazy choice
creeper factory
bluescreen maker
preinstalled SAAS maker
your choice chooser
the preinstalled one
Just some thoughts...
Oh "Home of Bob" also comes to mind.
BADmond, Lords of The Bings, BotNet Framework, Bucksingham Palace, Big Glue, Racket Science, EEE-PissSee, MorphoSoft, VaccineSoft, Build Gates, Billy the Bid, BidOne (see the italian translation...),...
I had many other ideas but were already written by other people. :-)
But you dont't really need to call Microsoft. Your Windows PC has been doing it on regular basis.
The supposed "640K limit" was an IBM hardware limit, not an MS software limit. The IBM hardware spec was already firmly in place before Gates even heard about the project, so even if he had made the comment (which is extremely doubtful), he would have just been agreeing with IBM. And it wasn't really 640K, it was more like 704K, if you knew what you were doing. I find it absolutely amazing that this piece of incorrect trivia is still being parroted as fact after all these years ...
OTOH, I personally remember Steve Jobs saying that "128K ought to be more than enough for home users", at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in late 1983, as he was demonstrating the original Macintosh, just before the public unveiling. At the time, he had a point ... people were running flight simulators in 64K ...
On the gripping hand, none of this matters any more. It's all just an accident of history.
The supposed "640K limit" was an IBM hardware limit, not an MS software limit. The IBM hardware spec was already firmly in place before Gates even heard about the project, so even if he had made the comment (which is extremely doubtful), he would have just been agreeing with IBM. And it wasn't really 640K, it was more like 704K, if you knew what you were doing. I find it absolutely amazing that this piece of incorrect trivia is still being parroted as fact after all these years ...
I think the words attributed to Bill Gates refer to the fact that the IBM PC's design placed the video memory at A0000H, leaving only the address space below that (640k) for RAM accessible to the OS (or to an OS that required its address space to be continuous). The 8086 could address 1MB, and some MS-DOS computers (I'm looking at you, Apricot) were designed to allow RAM to use as much as 896k of that (at the cost of reduced compatibility with IBM), but IBM's design limited the RAM to 640k.
The original IBM PC was available with 64k and a cassette deck. IBM didn't foresee that PCs would be used for applications that required more.
It was 640k, on the original unexpanded PC. The hardware/firmware didn't support anything more.
"The hardware/firmware didn't support anything more."
Or so said IBM. My original 5150 runs 704K, with the "extra" memory coming from space allocated for my non-existant EGA card. I know a couple people who added another 64K to that, but I had no real need. Hacking around with memory & hardware was a normal part of the personal computing world back the day. Modifying and/or fooling the BIOS was/is trivial. Remember, IBM published the extremely detailed " IBM PC Technical Reference Manual " (36 bucks), making these kinds of hacks fairly easy. Having access to the brains at The Homebrew Computer Club probably colo(u)rs my memories of how easy this stuff actually was ... or wasn't.
Note that games often barfed on the various mods, but most of the important business software of the day ran just fine with the extra memory. Also note that DOS would happily use as much contiguous conventional memory (the RAM between the LMA and the first populated portion of the UMA) as the system reported. DOS itself had no 640K limit baked into it.
And of course there were cards like Tall Tree JRAM that could take the PC up to 2 megs ... but that didn't come out until the PC had been on the market for 8 or 9 months. I rode my bike over to Elwell Court in Palo Alto to get mine direct from Tall Tree ... which I only remember because the "shortcut" alongside Adobe Creek under Hwy 101 flooded out due to high tide and I had to take the long way home, over San Antonio Road.
The desktop patch slinger
The 365 trouser pocket partner
The penguin-clad wolf of Redmond (variation on another contributor)
The cloud-veined wallet stabber
The ginger-haired corp at the cloud party, Microsoft.
The beast in the cloud
The King that lost its crown
The open-source lube applicator, Microsoft
Something to do with their fucking indecisiveness, always changing course, fucking up the stuff people love (Windows Phone), and then prematurely ejaculating and cancelling the stuff people love.
Something like Doubt Corp, Doubt Factory, WhatMart (though this sounds more like Stack Exchange), but better.
Come on people think, group effort.
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I tend to just call them MS, because I know that, if they ever heard me say, it would be the one thing that would probably enrage the MS marketing department.
However, I offer up Mubuntu, for hopefully obvious reasons. Although, now I think about it, it's also slightly reminiscent of Mugatu, another brand known for its dubious fashion statements.
Microflaccid - it starts with an identifier but ends with a word that describes the company perfectly.
Their products were always middle of the road, weak, insipid and never advanced computing or the world in general.
When they did try to be bleeding edge, it was always the customer who bled (win95, windows fista and of course generations of subsurface slabs and windows phones). They abandon products faster than bojo forgets children and only have two real skills, hyperbole and paying lawyers.
Perhaps their greatest failure has been the inability to even remain as the evil tech giant of choice.
My favourite irony in all this is that Billy boy spent decades profiting from making virus friendly pc’s and then spent much of those profits fighting viruses in the human world. Go figure.
Win 95 and 98 days to be exact, in our household it became MicroSmurf, mostly because of the BSOD, but also smurfs are blue and we deemed the cartoon to be a kind of creeping evil, it was not outright banned like the purple dinosaur or bloody whining Carebears, but attempts were made to divert to something more in keeping with our views like Ivor the Engine or Bagpuss, lol
Got the itch but not the cojones to sneak into the backdoor, speakeasy pub in the corner to steal someone else's inspired suggestion for ElReg's Microsoft alias?
Look at yourself in the mirror instead, pick your booger...
BOOGERSOFT, direct translation of Mocosoft in geekspeak Spanish.
As perhaps one of the most Dadaistic platform companies I think the Microsoft Corporation deserves a poetic moniker. Here are some suggestions:
Forests of Azure
(Smelly) Trolls of Nootka Sound
Soft and Small
Here's a good one for the Chinese data giant you vultures may feast upon:
Terradata Army
We used to call them Kleinstweich at the university, which is german for "smallest soft one", sort of... this one is about 30 years old, if I remember correctly, from the times of everybody from my family going for DOS boxes against my advice and then nagging me for help...
One with some possibility of in-article extension - The Redmond Penguin <verb/noun>(s)
... colony
... thieves
... chokers
... frotterers
... feckers
... huggers
... consumers
I had wanted something ridiculing that they can't get platform dominance on their own cloud service but all snow/eskimo variants are too cumbersome
"The Artful Dodger".
You know, from the character in 'Oliver Twist'.
Here are some of Artful's more endearing characteristics--all of which fit--from Wikipedia:
"...The Dodger is a pickpocket, so called for his skill and cunning in that occupation. He is the leader of the gang of child criminals...The Artful Dodger is characterized as a child who acts like an adult...was of a rather saturnine disposition...seldom gave way to merriment when it interfered with business...as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see..."
Works for me...
I have always typed them as Micro$soft but I guess that is too well known and not very catchy.
PatchMond - play on the large number of patches coming form Redmond.
The First Order - They have reborn and emerged from the Evil Empire they were before
Big Brother - no explanation needed.
'Micropoly'
"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities," Gates wrote in a memo to Microsoft in 1998.
And nothing's changed.
There's too many comments for me to read them all so there's a chance someone's already said this:
Why do we need a new name for them?
I must admit that until this article cropped up, I'd never realised that their full, honourable title is, "The beast of Redmond". Must articles and comments just refer to Redmond and that's plenty... The term has become somewhat ubiquitous - I sometimes hear it used by folks at work and, for example, in the Linux MATE (formerly GNOME 2) desktop, the Windows-esque layout is called 'Redmond' and the Mac style layout is "Cupertino".
So I just don't know how successful El Reg will be at coining a new name and gaining wide scale adoption of it's use.
.........which is related to a gem so they consider it precious and they seem open to running anything on it these days
Surely there has to be a Lord of the Rings reference.
Lord of the clouds?
One cloud to rule them all, one Bing to try and find them, one cloud to host them all and in the time consuming hassle of cloud data transfer bind them
My current experience with a Windows 10 laptop (oy vey) leads me to believe that Microsoft's MO seems to be: cross a bunch of idea/concept streams at various stages of viability/usefulness and hope something coheres. Perhaps someone more clever than I can work 'Microsoft' into 'Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man' ('Sta-Cruft Bloatwallow Man'? sorry) better than I can.
Work is a big M$ only shop and we cubicle dwellers tend to use M$ and Seattle Cowboys as terms for the company. Recently given their woes with security vulnerabilities they have become "GIF-prone". Although that's more descriptive than a name, as in "Yes we would use their products but not for secure work because they have been rather gif-prone of late."
Something so diametrically opposite of what the Cash Factory is.
For those of you under 40 or over the pond, Chigley was one of the three imaginary hamlets - Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley used to make a stop go animation childrens series in the late 60s and was just delightful and enchanting. Everything that the Cash Factory isn't.
how about 'SmeagolSoft' or 'GollumWorks' ? it seems Microsoft is getting a bit two-faced about open source versus guarding its family jewels like Windows, Office etc. ("yessssss the people wants it but the people can't have it. They've tricksed us, oh yes they have")
Also, 'RedmondTwoFace' would apply then, I guess
Talking about azure, Not Amazon.
About bing. Not Google
Surface, Not apple
Xbox, Not Sony
Windows, Not Linux
Edge, Not Netscape (for the oldies)
Mssql, Not Oracle
Phone, Not Blackberry
Microsoft these days is all about aping their competitors, despiratley trying to out pace them to be the leader in that sector.
Of course office suite might be more difficult, maybe just calling them Microsoft in relation to those products is deserved.
1. Oliver? As in "can I have some more" money Mr customer!
2. "Maybe late but dominate" (excluding phones obvs)
3. The double glazing salesman (Play on Windows) - not above similar tactics.
3. (b) Bill's conservatories and double glazing.
4. Narcosoft - get you hooked and then make you pay. V difficult to go cold turkey on MS.
5. Mañanasoft - the bugs will be fixed tomorrow - honestly.
6. At Least We Are Not As Nasty as Amazon, Facebook and Google (Alwananaafag)
7. Didn't you read the contract?
(Bored in Lock down!)
BABB Bashing Android Big Brother
BABS Boasting All Blue Screens
WILT Windows Intimidating Linux Traders
BUY Ballsed Up Yanks
A slightly more convoluted one from the huge infrastructure of support firms and individuals needed to keep MS products working roughly as hoped for
MEM Massive Ecosystem Manglers.
Perhaps a description of what usually happens in an IT monoculture.
NWD New World Disorder
I would suggest a cultural reference like a Borg derivative but it is inappropriate. Borg stuff usually works better than Federation hardware to the point the Feds copy or steal Borg technology. How about a few suggestions from the viewpoint of the Borg, referring the MS habit of being just close enough to common standards to confuse the gullible, but different enough to break the existing standards ?
NIHSI Not Invented Here, Steal It.
TMC Tomorrow Never Comes or is that a movie title already, referring the the Next Big Thing, which inevitably disappoints. Or is that IBM ?
Back to the fencing. A much more visible and useful post. Those broken wires can be seen at least. Mines the one with mud stains
It must inspire fear - in support I refer you to...
"he wanders the Earth, seemingly gathering legions of followers, the narrator of the story among them, through his demonstrations of strange and seemingly magical instruments. These followers lose awareness of the world around them, and through the narrator's increasingly unreliable accounts, the reader gets an impression of the world's collapse." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyarlathotep
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