Embarrassing product names averted: Windows Embedded POS and Windows 10 for Advanced PCs
Raymond Chen
Windows Embedded for point of sale systems is not called Windows Embedded POS, even though POS is the the industry standard acronym for the term point of sale. Because in the English language, POS is also a slang acronym for something much less complimentary.
To their credit, the Windows Embedded team realized this and named the product Windows Embedded POSReady.
The version of Windows 10 designed for high-end systems is called Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. But that wasn’t its original name. The original name was Windows 10 for Advanced PCs.
That name was used for some time, until someone in a meeting pointed out that this resulted in an unfortunate acronym. He had to explain what fap meant to the other people in the meeting.
I guess this is not entirely unexpected, since the team that produced Windows 10 for Advanced PCs was originally going to call themselves the Windows Technology Foundation group, until somebody pointed out what that acronym stood for.
Related reading: Why every advertising agency needs to have a review panel of twelve-year-old boys. The importance of having a review panel of twelve-year-old boys, episode 2.
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However Windows CE did slip through. It’s generally shortened to WinCE. Not even an acronym, just a word. At least not rude but not exactly complimentary.
I imagine the free software fundamentalists would have latched onto a name that got abbreviated WTF.
It also reminds me of the Ancillary Function Driver, which I think Raymond has covered in one of his posts.
I can’t help but giggle a bit at AssVapour. And ASS itself is pretty funny, especially if someone writes a GNOME application and puts the ASS in a GString.
Another function driver!?
Reminds me of this https://skepchick.org/2012/07/women-thinking-free-is-no-more/
They could have called themselves Free-Thinking Women (FTW)!
Free-thinking women for the win!
Um, no.
There was a thing called Windows Embedded for Point of Service, which was still known in the retail industry as WEPOS.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3740
“This download is a Service Pack 3 (SP3) update for Windows Embedded for Point of Service (WEPOS). This SP3 update includes all previously released Windows XP security updates, hotfixes, and select out-of-band releases that are applicable to systems running the WEPOS operating systems.”
Yes, someone did change the name later on (to PosReady 2009, and then PosReady 7), but WEPOS was already a shipping, GA product by then.
That someone must be Microsoft Renaming and Rebranding Group, lol!
I wonder how difficult it would be to come up with an acronym free of embarrassing collisions.
When MS bought Sendit back in ’99, the original name was to be Microsoft Mobile Internet, but someone thought that MSMI could be read out as “A mess, am I” so they changed it to MS MIBU – Mobile Internet Business Unit.
And you may want to check with people speaking other languages as well, as with Honda Fitta in Sweden.
When the Zune was about to come out, an email circulated amongst French Canadians asking whether we found it offensive. It does sound like a word we use to refer to a male organ. But the consensus was that it wasn’t particularly offensive. And it was probably too late to change it.
You just can’t win: some words start off being utterly benign, but develop their bad karma later. A fine example of this is ‘vista’.
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One of our product is named “Braiding-/Spiral-Monitoring” …so BDSM.exe it is.
Also I love POSReady 2009, that it only recently stopped getting updates. Still have it in a VM for testing because yes, customers have tons of them deployed, often with no near future plan to upgrade or replace.
Speaking of funny acronyms, I like the one for Command/Query Responsibility Segregation. I pronounce it as “secure ass”.
My current favourite is everytime someone at work mentions CBT for our product. What they mean is “Computer Based Training”; unfortunately it also has a couple of other meanings…both of which seem appropriate at times.
While that topic is unfortunate enough to only warrant a redirect to “Educational technology”, at least it has secured a top spot on the Wikipedia disambiguation page among other computing terms such as “closed beta-testing” and “complete binary tree”.
Don’t forget Win 98’s “Critical Update Notification Tool”
As I understand it, Chromium is old enough that there wasn’t (or possibly still isn’t; I’m unfamiliar with the actual code, only its name) enough standard library support for the things they wanted to do in C++, so in 2006 they rolled their own Webkit Template Framework.
There’s a commercial truck company called Western Truck Fabricators that brands their work with WTF mudflaps.
Reminds me of when I used to work for a company called Real Time Financial Management.
I had cause to call a third party help desk.
The girl who answered my call thought it was hilarious that I was calling for help from a company called RTFM.