I Guess We’re Talking About the Windows Phone Today
If you haven’t heard this yet (and given the barrage of iPad news, you probably haven’t), the Windows Phone 7 Series is now “simply” Windows Phone 7. (Must… resist… urge to use “series cancelled” pun…)
It’s a fairly obvious name change, but I think they could have gone farther. I’m not the only one:
They still didn’t go far enough, because we still need to call them “Windows Phone 7… phones”. Ideally, they’re just Windows Phones. Nobody’s excited about the iPhone Phone 4. We just know it as the iPhone.
Why not “Windows 7 Phone?” Sure, it implies that the phone is actually running Windows 7, but if you’re going to imply that the thing is running Windows at all, then you might as well go all the way, right? Otherwise, it should be called the Zune Phone, because that’s what it really is.
I think one of the comments at Ars makes a good point: why the 7? It’s really a 1.0 product. besides that all, maybe they should have gone with the Zune Phone route…
I think that Microsoft would have done so originally, but I suspect that “Windows Phone” looks a lot more professional to the business-types that Microsoft loves to sell to. Zunes probably look as professional as iPods or PSP’s to them, and that’s not the image Microsoft wants to portray to their most important customer base.
This is all very contradictory, however. They’re trying to maintain a brand that they’ve kept for nearly a decade, while casting away any semblance of the operating system that the brand represented. Whatever was going through the heads of Microsoft officials when this was conceived couldn’t possibly have been logic or reason.
