Microsoft’s Product Name Renaming Obsession

[Matt]

Microsoft has a long history of renaming their products. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where it’s almost a running joke.

Just in the past few years, we’ve seen Microsoft rename:

Microsoft Threat Protection to Microsoft 365 Defender
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection to Microsoft Defender for Office 365
Microsoft Cloud App Security to Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Azure Advanced Threat Protection to Microsoft Defender for Identity
Azure Security Center/Azure Defender to Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Azure Defender for IoT to Microsoft Defender for IoT
Azure Sentinel to Microsoft Sentinel
And now, the latest in a long line of product name changes: Azure Active Directory is now Microsoft Entra.

Why does Microsoft do this? Well, there are a few possible reasons.

Maybe they think that new names will make their products more appealing to customers.
Maybe they’re trying to simplify their product lineup.
Maybe they’re just bored and they like to change things up.
Whatever the reason, it’s getting a bit ridiculous. It’s hard to keep track of all the different names, and it’s even harder to know what each product actually does.

At this point, I’m half-expecting Microsoft to rename Windows to something else. Maybe they’ll call it “Microsoft Operating System” or “Microsoft OS”. Or maybe they’ll just give up on names altogether and start referring to their products by their product codes.

Who knows? But one thing is for sure: Microsoft’s product name renaming obsession is getting out of hand.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep referring to Azure Active Directory as Azure AD. It’s the only name that I can remember.

[Author]

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